There seems to be no original artistic tendency or art-instinct. In primitive times, the body was decorated with a view to attracting notice, and especially to attracting a mate. Then, by slow degrees, decoration travelled from person to surroundings: first, from the body to the clothes, and then again from clothes to house. But as the primitive house is a rude structure, and its owner poor, not much can be done by way of individual house-adornment; and so we find the members of a tribe clubbing together, so to speak, to decorate the common house, the temple. Æsthetics now enters into the service of religion.
Again: as the tribes settled down to agricultural pursuits, man became a labourer and learned to work; systematic and regular work grew to be a necessity. But work means play; if we labour, we must also have recreation. How, then, shall grown-up people play? They have lost their interest in childish games. Æsthetics comes to the rescue; art is the play, the proper recreation, of grown-up workers; we speak, and speak rightly, of Shakespeare’s ‘plays’ and of ‘playing’ the violin. Æsthetics has now lost its distinctively religious meaning, and has been turned to secular purposes.
In no less than three ways, therefore, has æsthetics proved itself to be of practical importance. It has been useful in courtship; it has been useful as enhancing the impressiveness of religious ceremonies; it is still eminently useful as the play of adults. Curiosity and empathy have both entered into it; curiosity in the manipulation of shells and feathers, of brush and cutting edge; empathy in the affairs of courtship and worship. Further than this we can hardly go. The psychological essence of tragedy, in Hamlet or Antigone, and the psychological essence of comedy, in Dogberry and Verges, still escape us; there are many theories, but no one of them is convincing.
It seems, also, that there is no specific religious tendency or instinct. Religion has been ascribed to fear, to an instinct of dependence, to an instinctive recognition of the infinite, and so on; but modern writers agree that it cannot derive from a single source. “Religion,” says Professor Leuba, “is rooted in instinctive impulses and in instincts,—in fear, acquisitiveness, pugnacity, curiosity, love, etc. But the relation that instinct bears to religion is no other than that obtaining between instinct and commerce or any complex social activity.” Religion, like art, has a strong practical sanction; the worshipper expects to control the forces of nature, and to secure the action of gods and spirits upon human minds and bodies; while religion itself satisfies the desire for power and for social recognition, quickens intelligence, and regulates and unifies the community. We understand something of the growth of religious ideas, as we know something of the development of art; but the contents of a religious system, and the products of artistic construction, do not take us far towards the explication of human tendencies.
In a word, then, the problem which we have here formulated is too difficult for solution now or in the near future. We cannot ‘get behind’ the masterpiece, the achievement of civilisation; the conditions are too complex. We cannot draw any certain conclusion from the study of origins; for primitive man, as we know him, is very like ourselves, both in convention and in reasoning; Professor Boas finds no evidence that “hereditary mental faculty has been improved by civilisation”; the savage may be untutored, but he is as complicatedly human as the best of us. We can say, negatively, that neither the situations which are met by sentiment nor the tendencies to which these situations appeal are unique; and that is, in itself, something gained. No genuine problem is insoluble; and further work, partly along the older lines and partly perhaps by new methods which bear directly upon man’s instinctive tendencies, will some day answer the questions raised in these paragraphs.
[§ 72]. Mood, Passion, Temperament.—With lapse of secondary attention, the sentiments lapse, as we have seen, into feeling-attitudes. It appears, from ordinary observation, that they may also persist, in weakened form, as moods. Thus, the moods acquiescence-indecision-incredulity correspond with the sentiments belief-doubt-disbelief; and we speak of a critical humour, a religious frame of mind, and so on. It is doubtful whether the sentiments rise to the intensity of passion; we speak, it is true, of a passionate humility, of a passion of disapprobation or of renunciation; but it is probable that these experiences are emotive, singly and not multiply determined.
A detailed classification of the temperaments would include forms characterised by special susceptibility to sentiment and by type of response, intellectual, artistic, and so forth. Meantime, the crude fourfold arrangement of p. 227 seems to cover the cases: the ascetic temperament, for instance, falls under the melancholic, the critical under the phlegmatic, the ‘artistic’ of current speech under the choleric or sanguine.
(1) What do you mean by ‘style’? Do not write commonplace; think the question out, and answer it in psychological terms.