Human Traits and their Social Significance

by Irwin Edman

The æsthetic experience, indeed, as specifically æsthetic, rather than merely sensuous or intellectual, is, it might be said, almost wholly a matter of form. It is the artist's function, as it is occasionally his achievement, to give satisfying, determinate forms to the indeterminate and miscellaneous materials at his command. Formlessness is for the creator of beauty the unpardonable sin. To give clarity and coherence to the vague ambiguous scintillations of sound, to chisel a specific perfection out of the indefinite inviting possibilities of marble, to form precise and consecutive suggestions out of the random and uncertain music of words, is to achieve, in so far, success in art. Nor does form mean formality. Experience is so various and fertile, and so far outruns the types under which human invention and imagination can apprehend it, that inexhaustible novelty is possible. Novelty, on the other hand, does not mean formlessness. The artist must, if he is to be successful, always remain something of an artisan. However beautiful his vision, he must have sufficient command of the technical resources to his craft to give a specific and determinate embodiment to his ideal.

Every one has haunting premonitions of beauty; it is the business of the artist to give realization in form to the hints of the beautiful which are present in matter as we meet it in experience, and to the imaginative longings which they provoke.

In which forms different individuals will find satisfaction depends on all the circumstances which go to make one individual different from another. There cannot be in the case of art, any more than in any other experience, absolute standards. We can be pleased only with those arrangements of sound or color to which our sensibilities have early been educated. Even the most catholic of tastes becomes restricted in the course of education. To Western ears, there is at first no music at all in Chinese music, and Beethoven would appear to the Chinese as barbarous as their compositions appear to us.

But while in a wide sense, conformity to the average determines or limits our possible appreciation of the beautiful, within these limits certain elements are intrinsically more pleasing than others. Those elements of experience, in the first place, more readily acquire æsthetic values, which in themselves strikingly impress the senses. Thus tallness in a man, because it is in the first place striking, becomes readily incorporated into our standard of the beautiful. And all elements in themselves beautiful, the human eye, the curve of the arm, the wave of the hair, come to be emphasized. These outstanding elements may themselves become conventionalized and standardized, so that objects of art which conform to them are insured thereby of a certain degree of recognition as beautiful. Too close a conformity produces monotonous formalities, cloying classicisms. Too wide a divergence results in shock and unpleasantness. The history of all the arts, however, is full of instances of how the taste of a people can be educated to new forms. Ruskin had to educate the English people to an appreciation of Turner. The poets of the Romantic period were condemned by the critics brought up on the rigid classic models. The so-called Romantic movements in the arts are, at their best, departures from old forms, not into formlessness, but into new, various, and more fruitful forms. Romanticism at its worst dissolves into mere formlessness and inarticulate ecstacies. Infinite variety of forms the world of experience may be made to wear, but sensations, emotions, and ideas must be given some form, if they are to pass from a fruitless yearning after beauty into its positive incarnation in objects of art.

All forms have their characteristic emotional effects, as have all materials, even apart from the emotions or ideas they express. The glitter of gold and the sparkle of diamonds, the strength of marble, the sturdiness of oak—we hardly can think of these materials without thinking of the associations which go with them. Similarly the symmetry of the colonnades of a temple, the multiplicity and variety of Gothic architecture, even so simple a form as a circle, provoke a great or slight characteristic emotional reaction. Likewise, a staccato or a fluent rhythm in music, a march, or a dance movement, have, even apart from their unconscious or intentional expressiveness, specific emotional values. In literature, also, where the value of the words themselves might be expected to give place entirely to the emotions or ideas of which they are the expressive instruments, poems may themselves, by their form and music, be provocative of specific emotional effects.

"...And over them the sea wind sang,
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.

Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves,
And barren chasms, and all to left and right,
The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang,
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels—
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon."[1]

[Footnote 1: From Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur.]

Here the effect lies partly in the form, but more especially in the timbre and reverberation of the words themselves. In other cases, it is the form that is the chief ingredient in the effect produced. In Alfred Noyes's "The Barrel Organ," apart from the meaning, it is the rhythmic form that is of chief æsthetic value:

"Come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time,
Come down to Kew in lilac time, it is n't far from London,
And you shall wander hand-in-hand with love in summer's wonderland.
Come down to Kew in lilac time; it is n't far from London.