I
EVER since Plato reluctantly condemned art on the ground that it was mere imitation of superficial outward appearances the problem of art has been disputed on this basis. Plato did not allow the artist any initiative except to imitate, and his conception of ideal beauty had no connection with the activities of the poet, painter, and sculptor: it was not concerned with æsthetic beauty, but with intellectual and moral fitness and perfection. Aristotle gave a slightly different interpretation to the work of the artist, defining it as a description of the possible as contrasted with history which determines what has actually happened. Plotinus introduced the element of the ideal: the artist does not so much imitate natural reality as externalise an archetype existing in his mind or soul. Plotinus partly identified art with Plato's ideal beauty.
These three alternative views constitute the starting-point for the three chief divergent explanations of art which have been developed during the last two thousand years. In modern terminology they would be designated as theories of art, respectively as "reproduction," as "imagination," as "idealisation." The extent of their mutual discrepancy varies according to the exact meaning attached to the last two conceptions, imagination and idealisation. For instance, if the latter ultimately amounts to selecting certain particularly attractive real forms and events, it is virtually merely an eclectic process of reproduction. Imagination, again, may be regarded simply as a composite memory. Samuel Butler said, "Imagination is mainly memory, but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing with it." It is only in so far as imagination is creative that it is different in kind from reproduction, from perception and history. And if idealisation is not a selection of given realities but a making articulate of an inner vision it also is a kind of imagination, only it is confined to the pleasantly beautiful, the attractive. The importance of all three definitions tends to be diminished when, as is often the case with modern theories, the chief emphasis is laid on the feeling or emotional element in art. Natural objects and real events can presumably excite emotion as much as imaginative creations, and this fact appears to lend a new value to the act of reproduction. The centre of interest is transferred from the knowledge content to the feeling of the subject and the knowledge content, the consciousness of the object is regarded simply as a cause which brings about that for which art exists, viz., emotion. The aim of reproduction is no longer intrinsic, but falls outside in the resultant subjective feeling. But this means a somewhat arbitrary distinction between the emotion and the representation. In actual concrete experience the two are so closely linked together that they appear almost identical: the emotion inheres in the representation. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as an instance of cause and effect: it is not analogous to the process of a pin and the ensuing prick, where the cause, the pin, is quite distinct from and independent of the feeling of pain. Mere associations of ideas are, on the other hand, nearer to the cause and effect sequence. A certain scent recalls a whole chapter of one's past history. Mr. Bosanquet's portmanteau reminds him of Florence.[14] For this reason a tendency is apparent to connect emotion more definitely with imaginative and idealistic art. Mere reproduction is cold and bald and only evokes an emotion by a fortuitous association of ideas: whereas the genuine product "expresses" or contains the emotion; and in doing so it is thought that it inevitably alters the "natural" or "historical" fact, distorting, transmuting it.
[14] Three Lectures on Æsthetics, p. 49.
The applicability of these various theories appears on the surface, at any rate, to differ according to the different arts. No one can be a thorough-going realist with regard to music, which is so indisputably a self-contained independent construction. It may be debatable whether music expresses experiences which are not of music, but music certainly does not imitate or reproduce them unless they are in the first place sounds, and for the most part they are not. The problem, therefore, is not whether music reproduces but whether it "expresses" anything except itself. Literature, again, can only directly imitate conversations between people: for the rest it can only reproduce indirectly either by symbolising or expressing. The symbol is purely arbitrary, it is entirely a referring to something other than itself. Letters of the alphabet have become symbolical. The expression, on the other hand, contains something of the object expressed, it carries a world in itself and of its own. Literature is admittedly expression, and here the problem takes the form of a contrast between history and fiction, whether at bottom literature only expresses historical fact (realism) or imagined fact, the possible.
Painting and sculpture are for the æsthetic theorist in many ways the most complex of the arts. As has been pointed out, neither music nor literature can be said to reproduce directly if they reproduce at all, because they employ a different medium, namely, sounds and words. But painting and sculpture apparently employ as a medium the very objects to be reproduced or expressed, viz., colours and lines. In literature the word refers to a reality that seemingly is not itself a word. In painting the picture and the reality can apparently be "matched" so that here literally the picture imitates reality. Outside and around us are already colours and forms, but there are no words, and only the crudest sounds. And so painting is easily regarded as par excellence the imitative or reproductive art, and of all arts to have the easiest and most direct criterion: resemblance to external reality.