II.
Let us now, starting from its source, see how the æsthetic sentiment has, in the course of ages, come to specialise and differentiate itself. Its evolution presents two aspects—one sociological, the other anthropomorphic—which in the nature of things are inseparable, but which, for the sake of clearness in exposition, we shall study separately.
1. The æsthetic feeling, of a strictly social character in its origin, tends progressively towards individualism. A division of labour takes place in it, rendering its manifestations more numerous and more complex.
2. The æsthetic sentiment, of a strictly human character at its origin, gradually loses this in order to embrace the whole of nature. It passes from human beauty in its organic form to abstract beauty, loved for its own sake.
Let us consider its developmental progress under this double aspect:
I. In recent times, especially in France, many writers have occupied themselves with the relations between the æsthetic feeling and social conditions. It is sufficient to mention the names of Taine, Hennequin, Guyau,[[210]] but all are studying the question under its contemporary, or at least its civilised form; they place themselves at an epoch when art has already to a great extent lost its social value. For Hennequin, a form of art expresses a nation, because, having adopted it, the nation recognises itself therein as in a mirror. The famous theory (Taine’s) of the work of art as the necessary product of race, time, and environment is much contested and very vague. Still more vague is Guyau’s view: “Art is, through the medium of feeling, an extension of society to all natural beings and even to beings conceived as transcending the limits of nature, or, in fact, to fictitious beings, created by human imagination.” It is an abuse to words to apply the name of society in this way: a society implies solidarity; every other use of the word is merely arbitrary. The question is, therefore, Has art been a co-operative factor in the establishment of solidarity among men? It is in this sense only that it has or has had a social character. Now, to find in it this characteristic in a clear, positive, incontestable form, we must go back to the beginning, to an epoch when æsthetic needs collaborated in social unity and served a social end. This characteristic is, as we have already said, so evident—at least as far as the arts resulting in movement are concerned—that it seems preferable briefly to recapitulate how differentiation and individualism gradually came about.
We have seen that, in the beginning, dancing is everywhere and always a collective manifestation, regulated and safeguarded by tradition, later on by laws, as in the Greek republics, and later still subject to the influence of fancy and individual caprice—to the great scandal of the conservatives. But the evolution of this art has been poor enough when compared with its two acolytes, poetry and music. Poetry, even when separated from dancing, long remains inseparable from music; it is sung and accompanied by the playing of an instrument. It is at first anonymous; whoever the author may be, it is common property; it belongs to the clan, the group, as if it were the work of all. Later,—the first social differentiation,—there are found corporations of poet-singers: the ἀοιδοὶ, rhapsodists, jongleurs, minstrels, bards; among the higher Negro races of the Upper Nile these corporations are held inviolable, even in time of war.[[211]] Afterwards the poet’s individualism, freed from its association with music, accentuates and asserts itself, and becomes the definitive form among civilised nations. It would not be rash to say that, in our day, poetry is tending more and more in the direction of pure subjectivity and absolute individualism. Stuart Mill even ventured to say, “All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy”; and according to him, “the peculiarity of poetry appears to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener”;[[212]] which proves how little he understood of its true origin. I do not inquire whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilisation advances; the complete antithesis to its collective character in the earliest ages.
Indissolubly associated at first with dancing and poetry, music shares the common destiny; it is subject to inflexible rules, it is a State function, an instrument of education and order. Its function among the Greeks, especially the Dorians, is well known, as also its importance to philosophers who, like Plato, wished to reform or reconstruct society. In two other widely separated parts of the world, among absolutely different people, we find, in China, 2000 years before our era, a Minister of Music, whose importance is continually insisted on by the philosophers; and in Mexico, before the conquest, an official academy of music, regulating both that art and poetry. It is therefore regarded as being, in the first place, of social utility. It thus passes through a process of evolution similar to that already described in the case of poetry, slowly separates from it, and still more slowly takes its great flight to become the least imperfect mode of expressing the most refined and intimate feelings, and to admit of no rule outside itself. The separation which took place at the Renaissance between religious music, which is in its essence collective, and secular music, which tends towards individualism, would, if need were, supply other proofs in support of the regular march of æsthetic evolution.
In the group of plastic arts, the relation between æsthetic activity and individual or social utility shows itself less clearly, and rather under the form of a parasitical superfetation. Here the evolution has started from two quite distinct sources: the one, leading to no great results, is the ornamentation of the human body, which, however, has, as we have seen, a certain social value as a sign. The other, architecture, is for this group the equivalent of dancing, i.e., the primordial and synthetic form whence differentiation started. As soon as man had passed the period of caverns and such shelters, and had learnt to construct durable buildings, he worked at first for gods and kings, who embodied the social order and were alone worthy of so great an effort, or for the assemblies and deliberations of the clan, as is seen even at the present day in the case of many savages, whose rudimentary architecture is only shown in the construction of the communal house. The work is at once architecture, sculpture, and painting, forming an inseparable whole, as do dancing, poetry, and music. Then the association was gradually dissolved, the independence of each art asserted itself, and each of these arts, at first exclusively reserved for kings or the community at large, afterwards entered the service of the rich and great, and, in time, of every one, thus becoming more and more individualised.
In short, the relation between disinterested æsthetic feeling, and practical, utilitarian ways of thinking, would be scarcely intelligible if we confined our attention to civilised ages. It has varied greatly, and in these variations we can distinguish three principal stages.
The first stage is that of close relation. Æsthetic pleasure, in its rudimentary form, co-exists with the useful, or rather, is involved with it in a common state of consciousness—the agreeable. To be felt, it must possess some individual or social utility. This mental state is still, at this very hour, that of many human beings, probably of the majority.[[213]]
The second stage is that of loose relation. Emerson’s saying, that what Nature at one time provides for use she afterwards turns to ornament, is the formula which sums up this period. The æsthetic feeling has no fixed connection with the conservation of the individual; it is called up by occurrences which give its distant, disinterested echo, serving the purpose of pleasure only. The legends, the genii, fairies, mythological beings who have become mere material for poems, pictures, operas, were once a belief, a reality, a terror, of which we retain only the similitude in the shape of a game.[[214]] There are many reasons why the serf of the Middle Ages was not inspired with any sort of poetry by the Gothic castles or the donjons built on high rocks whose ruins we admire. It is possible that one day, under some entirely different civilisation, our factories, with their tall chimneys, may become material for art by calling up memories of a vanished past.
The third stage is that of complete liberation, which has its expression in the thesis of art for art’s sake. My object is neither to defend it, nor to attack it, nor to pronounce judgment on it, but simply to ascertain its existence in theory and practice, and that it only makes its appearance at a late age and in mature civilisation.
To sum up: there is no more an innate and infused notion of the beautiful than there is an innate and infused notion of the good, but a system of æsthetics which comes into being just as morality does; and the history of the æsthetic feeling is that of its fluctuations during the process of coming into being.
II. The second aspect of its evolution consists in the progressive movement which sets it free from strict anthropomorphism, gradually withdrawing it from the purely human and extending it so as to embrace everything. The best way to follow this movement of extension is to put the question in a concrete form, as Grant Allen has done.[[215]] What objects did man at first consider beautiful, and in what order did he extend this judgment? In so doing we avoid the disadvantages of an a priori proceeding and the risk of confusion.
Human beings began by thinking that beautiful which resembled themselves; the Australian woman admired the Australian man, and the Fuegian man the Fuegian woman. Primitive æsthetics have a strictly specific character, and their relations with the sexual instinct are evident. At this stage they can scarcely be distinguished from animal æsthetics, if—which is a disputed point—animals are susceptible to the æsthetic sentiment. In any case their dances, their music, their tournaments, their ornaments, are only addressed to individuals of their own species, and have generation as their object. There is no fact to indicate that, for any species whatever, there has been any change or progress in this direction.
Man, on the other hand, rose out of this state, in the first instance, by ornaments added to his person. This addition may seem futile enough, but in reality it was the first step outside nature. It has been attempted to define man as a rational, or a religious animal; he might just as well be defined as an æsthetic animal.[[216]] In the colours and designs applied directly on the body, and at a later period fixed by the operation of tattooing, we already note a choice, a symmetry, a certain artistic arrangement.
From the human body the artistic instinct then extends to whatever comes in contact with it; it externalises itself, and is applied to weapons, shields, garments, vases, utensils. From the polished stone age onward we find a whole arsenal of ornament. In caverns and tumuli of a date anterior to the use of metals we find necklaces, bracelets, pins, and rings of pleasing shapes. There exist numerous and correct representations of various animals drawn or carved at a time when the reindeer was still living in Central Europe.
We may pass over architecture, an art which was useful from the first, and of which I have already spoken. It might, if necessary, be classed as an extension of clothing. Let us only note that, as far back as the epoch of the lake-dwellings, we observe the taste for symmetry; it is natural and innate, and probably derived from an organic source in the arrangement of the human body, the two halves of which exactly resemble one another.
The poetry of the earliest ages is as yet undifferentiated; being at once epic, dramatic, and lyric. The generic division was established later on, but all are characterised by the common trait of being exclusively human, being concerned with man, with human actions and human feelings only. Nature is absent, or nearly so, from the Iliad, the Nibelungenlied, the Song of Roland, etc. The poet is moved only by those whom Nietzsche calls Uebermenschen, gods or deified men, kings, heroes; and it is only gradually that art descends to the middle classes or the populace, to the humblest representatives of humanity.
We need not discuss the origin of music, which has given rise to various hypotheses; but we find it associated with dancing, at first in vocal form, i.e., translating human emotions by means of the human organ. Very soon it objectivises itself in instruments of percussion, extremely rough, but sufficient to mark time or rhythm accurately, and also to produce a certain physical exaltation of the senses. Then comes the imitation of the human voice by means of the flute, and other wind or stringed instruments; and the ever-growing desire to give utterance by means of music to the most delicate shades of emotion has brought into existence instruments of increasing flexibility, number, and complexity, from the invention of the organ (in the Alexandrian age) up to our own day when instrumentation plays the preponderant part.
At an early stage the æsthetic activity was exerted to bring animals into its domain, especially the domestic animals, companions or servants of man, as is proved by the paintings or sculptures of India, Egypt, Assyria. The horses of warriors became characters in heroic poems; so do the dog of Ulysses and that of the Pandavas in the Hindu epic. They take their place in art by reason of their moral virtues—bravery, fidelity, etc.
At last we come to the stage where the æsthetic feeling is quite dehumanised; it is no longer attached to men or animals, but to the vegetable and inorganic world: it is the appearance of the “feeling for nature.” Its late appearance is a recognised fact, and I think it needless to accumulate citations in proof. In primitive poetry, as we have just said, man occupies the foreground; nature is only an accessory. Very little description suffices in the beginning—a few lines, or a few epithets merely. Even at a later date, the Greeks, says Schiller, “artistic as they were, and blessed with so genial a climate, have some accuracy in the description of a landscape, but only as they might describe a weapon, a shield, or a garment. Nature appears to have interested their understanding rather than their feelings.” The Greco-Roman period became conscious of some artistic communion with nature only in the so-called decadent epoch—i.e., that of advanced civilisation (Euripides, the Alexandrians, the Augustan age, and especially the age of Hadrian). Landscape painting seems to have been almost unknown among the ancients. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, points out that, in the long catalogue left to us by Philostratus of the pictures of his time, we find, quite by way of exception, the description of a volcano. In the time of the Roman Empire mural paintings became a fashion, but they depicted only a tame and cultivated nature.
Without insisting on well-known facts, we may say that the æsthetic conquest of nature has passed through two very definite stages. During the first, art reproduces a smiling, cultivated, fertile nature, close to man, fashioned by him, bent to his needs, humanised. Such are the Pompeian paintings, and those found in the villas of the Roman Campagna or the shore of Pozzuoli. During the second, the taste for primitive, wild, untamed nature is developed, for the stormy sea, the boundless deserts, glaciers, inaccessible peaks. The taste for scenery of an abrupt or violent character only dates, it is said, from the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau;[[217]] certainly, in the eyes of the ancients, and for centuries afterwards, such scenery consisted merely of horrible spectacles, to be avoided if possible. The Romans, who so often passed through Switzerland, found no beauty there; and it will be remembered that Cæsar, when crossing the Alps, composed a treatise on grammar to beguile the tedium of the journey. Even in modern times the revelation of tropical countries and their terrible grandeur has had but a tardy effect on poetry and art. In the present age, an immense majority of people feel only repelled by the wildness of nature. It is, therefore, only for the pleasure of the minority and within the last century that the relative positions have been inverted; the human dramatis personæ becoming accessories, and nature furnishing the main subject of the picture.
This lateness in the appearance of the feeling for nature has been accounted for in a variety of contradictory ways. Some consider that this feeling is awakened by contrast; the satiety of civilisation and disgust at its refinements drive man from it, at least in imagination, and lead him to seek another ideal elsewhere. Others (Schneider, Sergi) appeal to ancestral influences; primitive man feared nature more than he enjoyed her charms (as is still the case with peasants and children), wild nature, especially, inspiring him with a superstitious terror, and being, as he believed, full of maleficent spirits. This terror lasted for a long time, even after the conception of the world had been changed by the increased knowledge of physical phenomena, like an echo from ancient times. Grant Allen points out that facility of communication implies an advanced state of civilisation; however practical the explanation may appear, it is not without value; the traveller who has to make his way across unexplored glaciers, or through virgin forest, is engaged in unceasing effort and struggle for mere life, which is incompatible with the disinterested character of æsthetic contemplation. One needs a certain security to be able to admire.
These explanations seem to me only partial. The true psychological reason lies in the natural extension of sympathy. We have elsewhere seen that it implies two principal conditions: an emotional temperament and a comprehensive power of representation. These conditions are most likely to be met with in a highly civilised generation, whose sensibilities are exceedingly acute and subtle, and their faculty of comprehension greatly extended.
The conquest of nature by intellect and emotion takes place through a process identical in both cases. There is an ascending movement of the intellect, which, by way of abstraction and generalisation, goes on to seek resemblances less and less obvious, and increasingly difficult to grasp. Certain races stop at the lowest stages: some ages never pass beyond a certain average of knowledge—e.g., the first centuries of the Middle Ages. In the same way, there is a progressive movement of feeling towards analogies in nature of ever greater tenuity, and the same remark applies to races and epochs.
It has been said that the pantheistic tendencies peculiar to certain peoples, such as those of India, are favourable to a more rapid development of the feeling for nature. This is, in fact, the thesis of sympathy under another form, since the assumed community of nature among all beings involves a community of feeling.
Let us note, in conclusion, that this extension of the æsthetic feeling to inanimate nature is produced by a process analogous to that which explains the genesis of benevolence. The pleasures and pains belong to us, but we attach them to the objects which occasion them; what we call the soul of things is our own soul projected outside ourselves and imparted to the things which have been associated with our feelings.
By a few facts, chosen out of a vast number at our disposal, I have tried to show that the æsthetic feeling has progressed by evolution from the social form to that of individualism, and from man to nature. This mode of objective exposition has seemed to me preferable, because it allows us to seize in a concrete and verifiable shape the law of its development and increase in complexity.