Aesthetic culture

“ Yet these interesting speculations have to do rather with the earlier stages of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty than with its functions in the higher stages.Aesthetics and ethics. An idea of a social utility in aesthetic experience which does demand the attention of the theorist is that the culture of beauty and art has a socializing influence, helping to give to our emotional experience new forms of expression whereby our sympathies are deepened and enlarged. ”

“ One of the most important tasks of culture, then, is to submit man to form, even in a purely physical life, and to render it aesthetic as far as the domain of the beautiful can be extended, for it is alone in the aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that the moral state can be developed. ”

“ The festal or social view of art will help us here. Suppose a tribe or a nation has won a great victory; “they are feeling big, and they want to make something big,” as I have heard an expert say. That, I take it, is the rough account of the beginning of the aesthetic attitude. And according to their capacity and their stage of culture they may make a pile of their enemies’ skulls, or they may build the Parthenon. The point of the aesthetic attitude lies in the adequate fusion of body and soul, where the soul is a feeling, and the body its expression, without residue on either side. ”

“ Hence it is that language and culture in all of their forms go hand in hand so closely that a high degree of culture is not attained without a dignified and expressive language.
Art as a Language of Aesthetic Ideas.—The development of aesthetic ideas and aesthetic representations has kept pace with progress in other phases of civilization. The notion of beauty as entertained by the savage is crude, and its representation is grotesque. Its first expression is observed in the adornment of the body, either by paint, tattooing, or by ornaments. ”

“ Fortunately, we have solid historical records of the mid-19th century art movement which overtly championed the creation of beauty as the noblest human endeavour, and as the highest human ideal: the Aesthetic Movement. ”

“ In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. ”

“ But on the other hand, if we have resigned ourselves to the enjoyment of genuine beauty, we are at such a moment of our passive and active powers in the same degree master, and we shall turn with ease from grave to gay, from rest to movement, from submission to resistance, to abstract thinking and intuition.
This high indifference and freedom of mind, united with power and elasticity, is the disposition in which a true work of art ought to dismiss us, and there is no better test of true aesthetic excellence. ”

“ The theory finds support in the industrial arts, where beauty often seems to be only a luxurious charm supervening upon utility; but also in painting and sculpture when appreciated in their decorative capacity as "things of beauty." There is a partial truth in this theory; for, as we have seen, the sensuous media of all the arts tend to be developed in the direction of pleasure; and no man who lacks feeling for purely sensuous values can enter into the fullness of the aesthetic experience. But the theory fails in not recognizing the expressive function of sensation in art. ”

“ They summoned their best artists to illustrate it, and illuminate it in pen-and-ink, half-tones, startling colors, and photographic reproductions, sketches theatrical, humorous, and poetic, caricatures, pictures of tropical luxury and aristocratic pretension; in short, all the bewildering affluence of modern art which is brought to bear upon the aesthetic cultivation of the lowest popular taste. ”

“ And even when the objects represented have a value in themselves, the superiority of their representation over the mere perception of them in nature comes from this source. Why, for example, does the painting of flowers by a real master afford a richer aesthetic experience than real flowers? Painted flowers have no perfume, rightly called the soul of flowers. ”

“ Moreover, we shall not concern ourselves with the origin or history of the arts further than is needful for an understanding of their general character. We are investigating the theory, not the history, of taste, and are more interested in the present developed aesthetic consciousness than in its rudimentary forms. ”

“ First, the theory, often called "hedonistic," that the value of art consists in the satisfactions of sense which the media of aesthetic expression afford—the delight in color and sound and rhythmical movement of line and form. ”

“ Hence, in spite of the rather general title which this paper bears, it proposes to treat of æsthetic evolution in man under one such aspect only—that of its gradual decentralization, its increase in disinterestedness from the simple and narrow feelings of the savage or the child to the full and expansive æsthetic catholicity of the cultivated adult. We have to trace the progress of the sense of beauty from its first starting-point in the primitive sensibilities of the race or the individual to its highest development in the most refined and advanced of European artists. ”

“ From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. ”

“ But these occasional, even frequent, lapses must not diminish our belief either in the power of art or in the deeply organised and inevitable nature of aesthetic preference as a whole. What the knowledge of such fluctuations ought to bring home is that beauty of shape is most spontaneously and completely appreciated when the attention, instead of being called upon, as in galleries and concerts, for the mere purpose of aesthetic enjoyment, is on the contrary, directed to the artistic or "natural" beauty of shapes, in consequence of some other already existing interest. ”

“ Pictures and statues are also expressions; for they are embodiments in color and space-forms of the artists' ideas of visible nature and man. Works of architecture and the other industrial arts are embodiments of purpose and the well-being that comes from purpose fulfilled.
This definition, good so far as it goes, is, however, too inclusive; for plainly, although every work of art is an expression, not every expression is a work of art. Automatic expressions, instinctive overflowings of emotion into motor channels, like the cry of pain or the shout of joy, are not aesthetic. ”

“ The inspiring lesson of beauty, expressed so simply and intelligently, will sink deep into the minds of the great masses, to be reborn in an endless stream of aesthetic expression in the spiritual and physical improvement of the people. ”

“ CHAPTER XI THE DOMINION OF ART OVER NATURE: PAINTING In literature, as we observed in our last two chapters, nature does not find aesthetic expression on its own account. In the lyric, nature appears only as the reflection of personal moods and thoughts, in the drama and novel and epic only as the theater of human action or the determiner of human fate. In painting and sculpture, on the other hand, the expression of nature is the primary aim. ”

“ And, secondly, it explains how art can fulfil the behests of our changing and discursive interest in things while satisfying the imperious unchanging demands of the contemplated preference for beautiful aspects. And thus we return to my starting-point in dealing with art: that art is conditioned by the desire for beauty while pursuing entirely different aims, and executing any one of a variety of wholly independent non-aesthetic tasks. ”

“ In the balance of true taste one cannot weigh more than the other, considering that both here and there is wanting that which forms the aesthetic value of a work of art, the intimate union of spirit with matter, and the twofold relation of the work with the faculty of perception as well as with the faculty of the ideal. ”

“ A vast material presents itself for study of this kind: the artistic attempts of children and primitive men; the well-developed art of civilized nations, past and present, as creative process and as completed work; and finally, the everyday aesthetic appreciations of nature and human life, both by ourselves and by the people whom we seek out for study. ”

“ What is the center from which the widening circle of æsthetic sensibility takes its departure? In other words, what is the primitive source of the appreciation of beauty? Putting the question into a concrete form, what objects did man, as a whole, and does each man in particular, first find beautiful? If we look at a cultivated European, we see that he derives great æsthetic enjoyment from contemplating the sunset clouds, the green trees, the lakes, rivers, and waterfalls, the flowers, birds, and insects around him. ”

“ Now and again a new sensation is made by some eccentric genius, as it were, dragging a weird aesthetic red herring across the fashionable artistic scent, and diverting attention to side tracks in artistic development, often mixed with morbidity, or, as a change from the pursuit of superficial and ephemeral types of beauty, debased and revolting types and loathly subjects are drawn under the pictorial limelight and analysed. ”

“ This is the central problem of the aesthetic attitude; and, as we have seen, the best material for solving it for us who are not great artists comes from any minor experience we may have at command in which we have been aware of the outgoing of feeling into expression. We must think not merely of the picture in the gallery or the statue in the museum, but of the song and the dance, the dramatic reading, the entering into music, or the feel of the material in the minor arts, or simply, of the creative discovery of the right word. ”

“ These men could not rest until they had put into communicable and persuasive form the aesthetic values which they felt in creation. And we, too, who are not artists but only lovers of beauty, find in theory a satisfaction for a similar need with reference to our preferences. ”

“ Even in his early writings, he objected to use the word 'æsthetic' because it suggested the effeminate taste which 'ministers to morbid sensibilities.' Like William Morris, on the same grounds, he held that art as a social product could only be renewed by regenerating society itself. ”

“ Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others ”

“ In the next place we should come to see that we cannot want incompatible things; that, for example, we cannot want art to hold the mirror up to life and, at the same time, to represent life as conforming to our private prejudices; or want a picture to have expressive and harmonious colors and look exactly like a real landscape; or long for a poetry that would be music or a sculpture that would be pictorial. Finally, we must make sure that our interpretation of the aesthetic purpose is representative of the actual fullness and manysidedness of it ”

“ Doubtless the purest æsthetic sentiment was gratified in the productions of the plastic arts and of design in general when civilization was at its highest perfection, among people peculiarly alive to this sentiment. ”

“ This emotion is called the aesthetic emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all other classes of objects. ”

“ All art therefore, except that of children, savages, ignoramuses and extreme innovators, invariably avoids ugly shapes and seeks for beautiful ones; but art does this while pursuing all manner of different aims. These non-aesthetic aims of art may be roughly divided into (A) the making of useful objects ranging from clothes to weapons and from a pitcher to a temple ”

“ But the æsthetic faculty was thus stimulated into activity with results which tended to develop art in all its forms of carving, modelling, sculpture, and painting. An appreciation of colour, not merely for personal adornment, but in its artistic application—alike as a decorative art, and as the means whereby natural objects can be presented with vivid truthfulness to the eye,—is widely diffused; though the mastery of form by the modeller or sculptor long precedes that of chiaroscuro, or aerial perspective. ”

“ Now this possibility of storing for later use, of increasing by combination, the impressions of beautiful things, makes art—and by art I mean all æsthetic activity, whether in the professed artist who creates or the unconscious artist who assimilates—the type of such pleasures as are within our own keeping, and makes the æsthetic life typical also of that life of the spirit in which alone we can realise any kind of human freedom. ”

“ Beauty, as already observed, is the object of taste. The primitive source, and, in a great measure, the ultimate and only criterion, of this beauty, is nature. For, in the arts over which taste presides, natural beauty receives new modifications, and is subjected to new laws. Yet, in their general tendency and design, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and even music, all contemplate one end,—to awaken associated emotion; while each employs the same means of direct or less obvious imitation of nature. ”