This, we have said, is an illuminating paragraph. But it is satisfactory only when amplified in certain ways to which we seem to have been led in our preceding discussion. Thus, it cannot be said that the socially shared sense impressions are chosen as the raw material of the fine arts merely because they enable a multiplication of individual pleasures. The dominant passion of the artist is not merely to afford pleasure to the greatest possible number of observers. But so long as art is defined as an attempt to please, that is about all that follows from the social character of the higher senses. As a matter of fact, artists do not seek to please the greatest possible number of observers. They are often contented if a single observer is satisfied. And by satisfied, in this connection, one does not mean pleased. We have already seen that the most pleasing of all sense impressions are those afforded by the lower senses. If the mere production of pleasure is the chief aim of the artist, he would surely have resorted to those materials which in themselves and by their own direct effects facilitated his purpose.
The Unsystematic Relations of Taste Qualities
Another characteristic of those sense materials which enter into art products,—especially vision and hearing,—is the fact that the various experiences constituting the sense manifold exhibit structural and systematic relationships. We do not here refer to the possibility of spatial arrangement and form. This we have already discussed and dismissed as an inadequate criterion. We mean, rather, those facts represented, in the case of vision, by the color pyramid and similar schemes for representing the qualitative relations of visual sensations; and, in the case of sound, by the tonal scale and such graded intensity scales as may be devised. Definite and formulable relations with respect to such facts as fusion, harmony, tonality, and melody; saturation, contrast, complementariness, mixture, etc., may be made out in the cases of vision and hearing. Æsthetic manipulation takes the form of playing upon these relationships. The visual and auditory qualities constitute not merely a manifold, but yield systematic structures. But the sense of taste and the other lower sensation modes tend to constitute a mere unorganized manifold.
Now, it may be at once suggested that we here have the adequate criterion of the æsthetic for which we are searching, and that this is at bottom the reason why it is the visual and auditory experiences that are “described, discussed, repeated, and measured (and) creatively reëmbodied in works of art.”
But even this account is, as a matter of fact, very one-sided and in part, at least, fallacious. We do not know what structural systems would be exhibited by the lower sense experiences if we had only discussed them, measured them, and creatively embodied them to the degree to which we have gone in the case of the higher senses. We cannot be sure, in the present state of our knowledge, to what degree the appearance of superior organization on the part of the higher senses is due to the amount of effort and inquiry we have bestowed upon their examination. All that we really know is that innumerable studies have been made of sight and sound, and that we are able to represent their results in the form of schemes and systems; whereas, comparatively few studies of the intensive type have been made of the various “lower senses,” and we are proportionately unable to construct the corresponding schemes and structures. Which is cause and which is effect? Do the lower senses fail to provide the raw materials of æsthetic construction because of their lack of elaborate and systematic organization, or do they owe this very deficiency to the relative neglect they have suffered at the hands of the artist?
The Motive of Æsthetic Products
There is some further reason why the æsthetic sense impressions are those which are genetically most recent, in imagination the most capable of clear and persistent revival, pertaining mainly to the distance receptors, informing us of objects which may be socially shared, and capable of systematic and organized description. It seems that this reason is simply that the main thing about an æsthetic presentation, arrangement, or composition is, after all, its intellectual content, its “message.” The artist desires, above all, to eliminate our own immediate and instinctive reactions to his materials. In so far as he is an artist, he is not satisfied with presenting to us a pleasing array of sense materials. His main concern is in communicating to his observers some situation, some theme, some state of affairs, some meaning, some purely relational fact. Such emotions as are stirred in us he does not wish to come from his mere materials, but from his own manipulation of them, from the form or pattern which he gives them, from the meaning which he thereby conveys to us. The true artist, in other words, is neither a chemist, nor an athlete, nor a technician of any sort whatsoever, but a philosopher.
Stout makes a similar comment when he says: “The distinction between what we call the higher and lower senses rests on this contrast between the intrinsic impressiveness of sensations and their value for perceptual consciousness.... The relatively higher senses deserve this title in proportion as they are more delicately discriminative and more capable of being combined in successive and simultaneous groups and series, while preserving their distinctive differences. On the other hand, each several sensation is proportionately less important through its own intensity and pleasant or painful character. Any direct effect produced by its own intrinsic intensity and affective tone would interfere with its value as a vehicle of meaning—as an indication of something beyond its own existence. Thus, as perceptual consciousness becomes relatively more prominent and important, sensation is more delicately differentiated, more definitely restricted, less intense, and less strongly toned in the way of pleasure and pain.”
The comments one is offered in the books on “art,”—eulogies of Raphael’s rich color tones, Rembrandt’s lights and shadows, Rubens’ flesh tints, Meissonier’s minute details, Turner’s accurate reproduction of ferns and mosses, smoke and fog, and so on, represent a deliberate degradation of the work of the artist to the level of cookery, the manufacture of perfumery, dye-stuffs, and the operation of merry-go-rounds. It is crediting the artist with just that result which æsthetic manipulation has always sought not to produce,—the presentation of sense materials, which of their own right awaken strong feeling tone in the observer. When George Frederick Watts attempted, beyond those before him, to convey meaning through his arrangements of sense impressions he refused to attend minutely to the details of technique, and critics subsequently said of him, “His technique is faulty.” Perhaps it was, but that is the sort of comment one passes on an athlete, a ventriloquist, or a juggler. One might just as significantly criticize the literary style of a mathematician or a logician as the technique of an artist. Such criticisms, to be sure, have a legitimate place in life. But the critic of the mathematician’s literary style should not delude himself into the belief that he is discussing mathematics, nor the critic of the artist’s technique fancy that he is dealing with his art. For the real artist is a philosopher, and that is the reason why the lower senses are unæsthetic.