The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable, or but rarely, elsewhere. Would that they were! They are not incomplete; they might better be described as ordinary experiences completed. They are not such that the most adequately equipped person can dispense with them and suffer no loss, and this loss is not momentary, but recurrent and permanent; the best equipped are precisely the people who most value these experiences. Nor is Art, as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its’ function in the youth of the world, but with the development of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred. Nor again is it something which may be postponed while premillennial man grapples with more immediate problems. The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be raised or lowered.
Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with more or less specific effects of the experiences of the arts, with the effects, upon single definite groups or systems of impulses, of their exercise in these experiences. The Play Theory tends to limit us to these consequences. Important though they are, we must not overlook the more general effects which any well-organised experience produces. They may in certain cases be extraordinarily widespread. Such an apparently irrelevant test as the ability to stand upon one foot without unsteadiness has recently been employed, by Mr Burt, as an index to mental and especially to emotional organisation. All our activities react upon one another to a prodigious extent in ways which we can only as yet conjecture.
Finer adjustment, clearer and more delicate accommodation or reconciliation of impulses in any one field tends to promote it in others. A step in mathematical accomplishment, other things being equal, facilitates the acquisition of a new turn in ski-ing. Other things are rarely equal it should perhaps be remarked. If this is true even of such special narrowly restricted impulses as are involved in a scientific technique, it is far more evident when the major, the most widespread systems, those active in our responses to human beings and to the exigences of existence, are engaged.
There is abundant evidence that removal of confusion in one sphere of activity tends to be favourable to its removal elsewhere. The ease with which a trained mind approaches a new subject is the plainest example, but equally a person whose ordinary emotional experience is clear, controlled and coherent, is the least likely to be thrown into confusion by an unheard-of predicament. Complications sometimes obscure this effect: a mathematician approaching psychology may attempt to apply methods which are inappropriate, and the sanest people may prove stupid in their dealings with individuals of other races. The specialist, either intellectual or moral, who is helpless outside his own narrow field is a familiar figure in inferior comedy. But what would have to be shown before the principle is invalidated is that, granted equal specialisation, the successful specialist is not better fitted for life in general than his unsuccessful confrère. Few people, however, will dispute the assertion that transference of ability frequently occurs although the mode by which it comes about may be obscure.
When very widespread and very fundamental impulses are implicated, where attitudes constantly taken up in ordinary life are aroused, this transference effect may be very marked. Everybody knows the feeling of freedom, of relief, of increased competence and sanity, that follows any reading in which more than usual order and coherence has been given to our responses. We seem to feel that our command of life, our insight into it and our discrimination of its possibilities, is enhanced, even for situations having little or nothing to do with the subject of the reading. It may be a chapter of Gösta Berling or of The ABC of Atoms, the close of the Vanity of Human Wishes, or the opening of Harry Richmond; whatever the differences the refreshment is the same. And conversely everybody knows the diminution of energy, the bafflement, the sense of helplessness, which an ill-written, crude, or muddled book, or a badly acted play, will produce, unless the critical task of diagnosis is able to restore equanimity and composure.
Neither the subject nor the closeness of correspondence between the experience and the reader’s own situation has any bearing upon these effects. But indeed, to anyone who realises what kind of a thing an experience is, and through what means it comes about, the old antithesis between subject and treatment ceases to be of interest (cf. Chapter XVI). They are not separable or distinct things and the division is of no service. In this case the effects we are considering depend only upon the kind and degree of organisation which is given to the experiences. If it is at the level of our own best attempts or above it (but not so far above as to be out of reach) we are refreshed. But if our own organisation is broken down, forced to a cruder, a more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily incapacitated, not only locally but generally. It is when what we are offered, and inveigled into accepting, is only slightly inferior to our own developed capacity, so that it is no easy matter to see what is wrong, that the effect is greatest. Stuff of an evident and extreme badness is exhilarating rather than depressing when taken from a discriminating standpoint; and there need be nothing snobbish or self-congratulatory in such reading. What is really discomposing and damaging to the critical reader is the mediocre, the work which falls just below his own standards of response. Hence the rage which some feel at the productions of Sir James Barrie, Mr Locke, or Sir Hall Caine, a rage which work comparatively devoid of merits fails to excite.
These effects are not merely momentary or evanescent; if we would understand the place of the arts in civilisation we must consider them more closely. An improvement of response is the only benefit which anyone can receive, and the degradation, the lowering of a response, is the only calamity. When we take into account not merely the impulses actually concerned in the experience but all the allied groups which thrive or suffer with it, and all the far-reaching effects of success or failure upon activities which may seem to be independent, the fact that some people feel so keenly about the arts is no longer surprising.
Underestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always due to ignorance of the workings of the mind. Experiences such as these, into which we willingly and whole-heartedly enter, or into which we may be enticed and inveigled, present peculiar opportunities for betrayal. They are the most formative of experiences, because in them the development and systematisation of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response; the range and complexity of the impulse-systems involved is less; the need for action, the comparative uncertainty and vagueness of the situation, the intrusion of accidental irrelevancies, inconvenient temporal spacing—the action being too slow or too fast—all these obscure the issue and prevent the full development of the experience. We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs. The comparison will bear pressing. The results, for good or evil, of the untrammelled response are not lost to us in our usual trafficking.
CHAPTER XXXII
The Imagination
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded.