I. In recent times, especially in France, many writers have occupied themselves with the relations between the æsthetic feeling and social conditions. It is sufficient to mention the names of Taine, Hennequin, Guyau,[[210]] but all are studying the question under its contemporary, or at least its civilised form; they place themselves at an epoch when art has already to a great extent lost its social value. For Hennequin, a form of art expresses a nation, because, having adopted it, the nation recognises itself therein as in a mirror. The famous theory (Taine’s) of the work of art as the necessary product of race, time, and environment is much contested and very vague. Still more vague is Guyau’s view: “Art is, through the medium of feeling, an extension of society to all natural beings and even to beings conceived as transcending the limits of nature, or, in fact, to fictitious beings, created by human imagination.” It is an abuse to words to apply the name of society in this way: a society implies solidarity; every other use of the word is merely arbitrary. The question is, therefore, Has art been a co-operative factor in the establishment of solidarity among men? It is in this sense only that it has or has had a social character. Now, to find in it this characteristic in a clear, positive, incontestable form, we must go back to the beginning, to an epoch when æsthetic needs collaborated in social unity and served a social end. This characteristic is, as we have already said, so evident—at least as far as the arts resulting in movement are concerned—that it seems preferable briefly to recapitulate how differentiation and individualism gradually came about.
We have seen that, in the beginning, dancing is everywhere and always a collective manifestation, regulated and safeguarded by tradition, later on by laws, as in the Greek republics, and later still subject to the influence of fancy and individual caprice—to the great scandal of the conservatives. But the evolution of this art has been poor enough when compared with its two acolytes, poetry and music. Poetry, even when separated from dancing, long remains inseparable from music; it is sung and accompanied by the playing of an instrument. It is at first anonymous; whoever the author may be, it is common property; it belongs to the clan, the group, as if it were the work of all. Later,—the first social differentiation,—there are found corporations of poet-singers: the ἀοιδοὶ, rhapsodists, jongleurs, minstrels, bards; among the higher Negro races of the Upper Nile these corporations are held inviolable, even in time of war.[[211]] Afterwards the poet’s individualism, freed from its association with music, accentuates and asserts itself, and becomes the definitive form among civilised nations. It would not be rash to say that, in our day, poetry is tending more and more in the direction of pure subjectivity and absolute individualism. Stuart Mill even ventured to say, “All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy”; and according to him, “the peculiarity of poetry appears to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener”;[[212]] which proves how little he understood of its true origin. I do not inquire whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilisation advances; the complete antithesis to its collective character in the earliest ages.
Indissolubly associated at first with dancing and poetry, music shares the common destiny; it is subject to inflexible rules, it is a State function, an instrument of education and order. Its function among the Greeks, especially the Dorians, is well known, as also its importance to philosophers who, like Plato, wished to reform or reconstruct society. In two other widely separated parts of the world, among absolutely different people, we find, in China, 2000 years before our era, a Minister of Music, whose importance is continually insisted on by the philosophers; and in Mexico, before the conquest, an official academy of music, regulating both that art and poetry. It is therefore regarded as being, in the first place, of social utility. It thus passes through a process of evolution similar to that already described in the case of poetry, slowly separates from it, and still more slowly takes its great flight to become the least imperfect mode of expressing the most refined and intimate feelings, and to admit of no rule outside itself. The separation which took place at the Renaissance between religious music, which is in its essence collective, and secular music, which tends towards individualism, would, if need were, supply other proofs in support of the regular march of æsthetic evolution.
In the group of plastic arts, the relation between æsthetic activity and individual or social utility shows itself less clearly, and rather under the form of a parasitical superfetation. Here the evolution has started from two quite distinct sources: the one, leading to no great results, is the ornamentation of the human body, which, however, has, as we have seen, a certain social value as a sign. The other, architecture, is for this group the equivalent of dancing, i.e., the primordial and synthetic form whence differentiation started. As soon as man had passed the period of caverns and such shelters, and had learnt to construct durable buildings, he worked at first for gods and kings, who embodied the social order and were alone worthy of so great an effort, or for the assemblies and deliberations of the clan, as is seen even at the present day in the case of many savages, whose rudimentary architecture is only shown in the construction of the communal house. The work is at once architecture, sculpture, and painting, forming an inseparable whole, as do dancing, poetry, and music. Then the association was gradually dissolved, the independence of each art asserted itself, and each of these arts, at first exclusively reserved for kings or the community at large, afterwards entered the service of the rich and great, and, in time, of every one, thus becoming more and more individualised.
In short, the relation between disinterested æsthetic feeling, and practical, utilitarian ways of thinking, would be scarcely intelligible if we confined our attention to civilised ages. It has varied greatly, and in these variations we can distinguish three principal stages.
The first stage is that of close relation. Æsthetic pleasure, in its rudimentary form, co-exists with the useful, or rather, is involved with it in a common state of consciousness—the agreeable. To be felt, it must possess some individual or social utility. This mental state is still, at this very hour, that of many human beings, probably of the majority.[[213]]
The second stage is that of loose relation. Emerson’s saying, that what Nature at one time provides for use she afterwards turns to ornament, is the formula which sums up this period. The æsthetic feeling has no fixed connection with the conservation of the individual; it is called up by occurrences which give its distant, disinterested echo, serving the purpose of pleasure only. The legends, the genii, fairies, mythological beings who have become mere material for poems, pictures, operas, were once a belief, a reality, a terror, of which we retain only the similitude in the shape of a game.[[214]] There are many reasons why the serf of the Middle Ages was not inspired with any sort of poetry by the Gothic castles or the donjons built on high rocks whose ruins we admire. It is possible that one day, under some entirely different civilisation, our factories, with their tall chimneys, may become material for art by calling up memories of a vanished past.
The third stage is that of complete liberation, which has its expression in the thesis of art for art’s sake. My object is neither to defend it, nor to attack it, nor to pronounce judgment on it, but simply to ascertain its existence in theory and practice, and that it only makes its appearance at a late age and in mature civilisation.
To sum up: there is no more an innate and infused notion of the beautiful than there is an innate and infused notion of the good, but a system of æsthetics which comes into being just as morality does; and the history of the æsthetic feeling is that of its fluctuations during the process of coming into being.
II. The second aspect of its evolution consists in the progressive movement which sets it free from strict anthropomorphism, gradually withdrawing it from the purely human and extending it so as to embrace everything. The best way to follow this movement of extension is to put the question in a concrete form, as Grant Allen has done.[[215]] What objects did man at first consider beautiful, and in what order did he extend this judgment? In so doing we avoid the disadvantages of an a priori proceeding and the risk of confusion.