Though emphasising as much as possible the unity of art, we are compelled to admit that the feelings which are conveyed in its higher and lower forms may be essentially different. While meeting in the “lower” art of our own and earlier times with an expression of the most general emotions and instincts which, by the very vehemence of their pathos, may awaken the aversion of the refined critic, we partake, in the higher art-forms, of feelings that can be derived only from a dispassionate contemplation of nature. This difference between higher and lower manifestations, though especially marked in painting, can be observed in all forms of art. We have no wish to deny the necessity of discriminating between these “æsthetic feelings” of the higher art-forms and the elementary affections, which form the content of the sentimental, or, as the German philosophers would say, pathological art. The moods of æsthetic contemplation are, on the contrary, of so great significance that we can easily understand why they have been made the basis of so many systems of art-philosophy. From the point of view of the present work, which does not pretend to lay down a detailed criterion of perfection in art, but which only aims at explaining the most general social and psychological aspects of art-activity, it is necessary to adhere to the element which is common to all art, higher as well as lower, primitive or barbaric as well as civilised. And we can only, in passing, indicate the direction in which we believe an explanation is to be sought for the development of æsthetic attention and refined art-sense—those great problems which could be properly treated only in a separate work.
It has been pointed out by several authors on æsthetic, and even emphasised to excess, that a certain independence of the struggle for life is a condition for the appearance of a higher art. It is indeed a current fallacy that art must be the growth of culture and prosperity. But it is nevertheless incontestable, that the peculiar art-sense, the artistic intuition par excellence, can be developed only in nations and individuals who—be it by success in the struggle for life, by advantageous circumstances, or simply by a natural lightheartedness of their own—have grown superior to care for life’s necessities. This factor, however, is only a negative condition. By itself mere independence of wants could never have taught any one to derive an ever deeper and stronger pleasure from a thing which stands in no immediate relation to the primary emotions or the primary desires of the beholder or the artist. The æsthetic education of mankind, its growth in artistic refinement, could not have been accomplished without the influence of more positive factors.
In looking for such factors we unavoidably come to that datum which has been carefully excluded from the present part of our research, namely, the concrete work of art. Whatever may have been the conditions of their origin,—whether utilitarian or not,—poems, paintings, and sculptures must all have occasioned exercise of that interest and attention which is independent of the most immediate utilitarian interests. Even if poems, for instance, were written with a purpose primarily historical, they must have afforded both to the poet and to his audience the opportunity to consider them as pure works of art. Just as moral feelings have been gradually developed under the influence of actions which may originally have been quite non-ethical, so the refinement of æsthetic sense has been promoted by works of art, which may themselves have served entirely non-æsthetic purposes.
CHAPTER XI
THE CONCRETE ORIGINS OF ART
By explaining the art-impulse as a form of social expression we have accounted for art-creation and art-enjoyment as activities which have their end in themselves. The emotionalistic interpretation supplied us with a principle, which we were able to apply to all stages, the lower as well as the higher, of art-development. Without committing ourselves to any definite statements as to the purely æsthetic and autotelic character of the individual works of art, we felt ourselves to be right in assuming that a desire of “expression for its own sake,” or rather for the sake of its immediately enhancing or relieving effects on feeling, may have operated as an art-factor on all stages of culture, and thus have given an autotelic value even to the lowest manifestations of art. The driving force in art-creation became comprehensible by this assumption; and the most distinctive features of the creation itself could be deduced from this psychological principle. In attempting, however, to explain the refinement of artistic attention, we could no longer proceed with purely psychical factors. We were compelled to appeal to the influence exercised by the concrete work of art. The psychological demonstration proving inadequate, it was necessary to supplement it by an historical argument.
It may be thought, however, that in referring to the educative effects of the work of art we need not desert the domain of a strictly æsthetic and psychological inquiry. There is nothing improbable in the supposition that the products of an activity of themselves influence this activity, so as to bring about gradually a thorough change of its character. From the expressional impulse, which in the lower stages of culture gives rise to crude and simple manifestations, there might thus be derived, by the retroactive effects of these manifestations themselves, an increasingly refined form of expression. But such a sequence of tendency, however clear and consistent it may appear at the outset, cannot possibly be thought of as unsupported by outside influences. The more we examine it, the more we shall find that the series of causes is insufficient to explain the series of effects. This view, to which we are necessarily led by investigating any period of art-history, forces itself upon us with particular cogency when we turn our attention to the earliest stages of art-development.
Before the first work of art had been created, the art-impulse as well as the art-sense must necessarily have been in a very undeveloped state. The æsthetic cravings cannot possibly have gained any consciousness of their purposes ere they had realised themselves in some objective works. Of these objective works, on the other hand, it is only the simplest forms that can be derived solely from the pure art-impulse. We may consider a lyrical dance, or even a lyrical song, as direct outbursts of an emotional pressure, which, if unrelieved, would prove dangerous to the system. But we can scarcely imagine that any human being should be able to invent, say, a fully formed drama simply in order to convey in the most efficacious manner the feeling by which he is dominated. And it is yet more difficult to understand how the craving after social expression could have created, merely for its own satisfaction, such highly developed art-forms as painting and sculpture. While we are able to derive the mental compulsion which forces the artist to production, and the æsthetic qualities which give their distinctive character to his productions from the psychological notion of the art-impulse, we are compelled to look elsewhere for the origin and development of the concrete technical medium of which he avails himself in fulfilling his purpose.
As in this investigation we are no longer concerned with the abstract and ideal work of art, it seems that we may now reasonably appeal to those theories which we before found inadequate only because they did not account for the purely æsthetic qualities of artistic activity. The play-impulse, the impulse to attract by pleasing, the imitative impulse, etc., although they give us no information as to the essentially artistic criterion, may nevertheless have called into existence works and manifestations which fulfil the requirements of the several art-forms. Man may have composed dramas, may have painted pictures, may have made poems, in play, or out of the desire to please, or out of the inborn taste for mimicry. In particular the play-impulse must, as we have already admitted in the first part of this work, be dealt with as a factor of incalculable importance in the history of art. In his conclusive researches on animal and human play Professor Groos has succeeded in showing that the chief classes of art-forms are already foreshadowed in the various forms of experimentation—that most general and most important kind of play which can be observed not only among children, but even among the higher animals.[173] In the outcome of this simple and common activity we have, it may be said, a sufficient bulk of raw material of which the art-impulse, when once fully developed, can avail itself in order to fulfil its own essentially artistic purposes. And it would therefore seem as if there were no further problem to be solved with regard to the evolution of art.
Adherents of this view may, moreover, point to the fact that, apart from all the motive factors represented by the various non-æsthetic impulses, the development of art has been favoured by influences of a more passive or static character. It has evidently been of vital importance to the evolution of architecture and decoration that things of useful nature have provided these arts with a kind of concrete frame within which to display their manifestations. The effects of this material condition are so much the greater because with his constitutional conservatism man—whether civilised or primitive—always allows himself to be bound by old forms long after he has relinquished the technical procedures which have originally called these forms into existence. By the scientific “biological” researches on decorative art it has been conclusively shown how great a portion of the ornamental “store” consists of lines and combinations of lines which have quite automatically been borrowed from an earlier technique. Decorative motives, which to the uninitiated observer appear as products of spontaneous artistic activity, thus reveal themselves to the historical student as unintentional by-products of work. Where earlier investigators assumed an æsthetic composition, modern researches refer to the force of mental inertia and the cravings of expectant attention.[174]
There is no intention here to undervalue the methods which are nowadays employed in the study of decorative art, and which, indeed, the writer himself has endeavoured to apply in some earlier studies on art-theory. In the present research, however, it would be inappropriate to trace in detail the evolution by which forms originating in mere utility—as in basket-work—are gradually transformed into patterns or other artistic decorations; for this process, however fertile in effects it may be considered, cannot account for that phenomenon which, above all, constitutes the main object of our investigation. Although the psychical causes adduced above undeniably have called into existence some of the most familiar ideas in decoration, they cannot possibly explain the importance which decoration itself has attained in the various human societies. And the same remark evidently applies to all the other psychological sources from which art may be derived. The play-impulse, for example, no doubt suggests a concrete source, but it can in no way explain the important position which art occupies as a leading factor in social life. In order to understand why even in the lowest stages of development art has been acknowledged as a purpose worthy of being seriously pursued, we must investigate this activity in its connection with the most important biological and sociological purposes of life.