VI
That a beautiful object commonly stimulates a motor response is beyond question. Even when it does not appeal to any definite emotion it is generally stimulating, through its affording to the natural powers at some point an unusual harmony with their environment. And when there is a definite emotional appeal, there is a tendency to act. For, as we have seen, originally the fundamental emotions were all co-ordinated reactions to the environment, enlisting the whole organism to cope with some practical emergency. That the emotions should become mere emotions is due to the modification of instinct by habit. Whatever, then, arouses the emotions does in some degree stir to action. So that one of the most important moral uses of art is its alliance with other interests in order to intensify their appeal, in order to make them more instantly moving. Art is a means of enlivening dormant impulses; as music is a means of rekindling the love of country or the love of God, so that men may be brought to take up arms with enthusiasm or endure reverses without complaint.
But this motor excitement which art stimulates may be morally indeterminate; that is, it may be capable of being discharged in any way that accident or bias may select. In other words, {202} art may communicate power without controlling its use, thus merely increasing the disorder and instability of life. Or it may serve to exaggerate the appeal of the present interest, until it becomes ungovernable and obscures ulterior interests. This tendency to promote dissoluteness is the most serious charge which Plato brings against the arts. After referring to the unseemly hilarity to which men are incited by the comic stage, he adds:
And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be inseparable from every action—in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the happiness and virtue of mankind.[15]
In an earlier passage Plato discusses types of music in relation to action, the Lydian which is sorrowful, and the Ionian which is indolent; showing that selection must be made if men are not to be at the mercy of random influences. It is not necessary, as Plato would have it, to banish Lydian and Ionian harmonies from society; but within one's personal economy, within the republic of one's own soul, one must prefer with Plato those stirrings of the emotions which support and re-enforce one's moral purpose:
Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, which will sound the word or note {203} which a brave man utters in the hour of danger and stem resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when there is no pressure of necessity, and he is seeking to persuade God by prayer, or man by instruction and advice. . . . These two harmonies I ask you to leave: the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.[16]