BECAUSE objects of art are expressive, they are a language. Rather they are many languages. For each art has its own medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of communication. Each medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any other tongue. The needs of daily life have given superior practical importance to one mode of communication, that of speech. This fact has unfortunately given rise to a popular impression that the meanings expressed in architecture, sculpture, painting, and music can be translated into words with little if any loss. In fact, each art speaks an idiom that conveys what cannot be said in another language and yet remains the same.
Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner. The work of art is complete only as it works in the experience of others than the one who created it. Thus language involves what logicians call a triadic relation. There is the speaker, the thing said, and the one spoken to. The external object, the product of art, is the connecting link between artist and audience. Even when the artist works in solitude all three terms are present. The work is there in progress, and the artist has to become vicariously the receiving audience. He can speak only as his work appeals to him as one spoken to through what he perceives. He observes and understands as a third person might note and interpret. Matisse is reported to have said: "When a painting is finished, it is like a new-born child. The artist himself must have time for understanding it." It must be lived with as a child is lived with, if we are to grasp the meaning of his being.
All language, whatever its medium, involves what is said and how it is said, or substance and form. The great question concerning substance and form is: Does matter come first ready-made, and search for a discovery of form in which to embody it come afterwards? Or is the whole creative effort of the artist an endeavor to form material so that it will be in actuality the authentic substance of a work of art? The question goes far and deep. The answer given it determines the issue of many other controverted points in esthetic criticism. Is there one esthetic value belonging to sense materials and another to a form that renders them expressive? Are all subjects fit for esthetic treatment or only a few which are set aside for that end by their intrinsically superior character? Is "beauty" another name for form descending from without, as a transcendent essence, upon material, or is it a name for the esthetic quality that appears whenever material is formed in a way that renders it adequately expressive? Is form, in its esthetic sense, something that uniquely marks off as esthetic from the beginning a certain realm of objects, or is it the abstract name for what emerges whenever an experience attains complete development?
All of these questions have been implicit in the discussions of the three previous chapters, and by implication have been answered. If an art product is taken to be one of self-expression and the self is regarded as something complete and self-contained in isolation, then of course substance and form fall apart. That in which a self-revelation is clothed, is, by the underlying assumption, external to the things expressed. The externality persists no matter which of the two is regarded as form and which as substance. It is also clear that if there be no self-expression, no free play of individuality, the product will of necessity be but an instance of a species; it will lack the freshness and originality found only in things that are individual on their own account. Here is a point from which the relation of form and substance may be approached.
The material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates that material in a distinctive way to reissue it into the public world in a form that builds a new object. This new object may have as its consequence similar reconstructions, recreations, of old and common material on the part of those who perceive it, and thus in time come to be established as part of the acknowledged world — as "universal." The material expressed cannot be private; that is the state of the madhouse. But the manner of saying it is individual, and, if the product is to be a work of art, induplicable. Identity of mode of production defines the work of a machine, the esthetic counterpart of which is the academic. The quality of a work of art is sui generis because the manner in which general material is rendered transforms it into a substance that is fresh and vital.
What is true of the producer is true of the perceiver. He may perceive academically, looking for identities with which he already is familiar; or learnedly, pedantically, looking for material to fit into a history or article he wishes to write, or sentimentally for illustrations of some theme emotionally dear. But if he perceives esthetically, he will create an experience of which the intrinsic subject matter, the substance, is new. An English critic, Mr. A. C. Bradley, has said that "poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as it actually exists; and an actual poem is a succession of experiences — sounds, images, thought — through which we pass when we read a poem. ... A poem exists in unnumberable degrees." And it is also true that it exists in unnumberable qualities or kinds, no two readers having exactly the same experience, according to the "forms," or manners of response brought to it. A new poem is created by everyone who reads poetically — not that its raw material is original for, after all, we live in the same old world, but that every individual brings with him, when he exercises his individuality, a way of seeing and feeling that in its interaction with old material creates something new, something previously not existing in experience.
A work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience. As a piece of parchment, of marble, of canvas, it remains (subject to the ravages of time) self-identical throughout the ages. But as a work of art, it is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced. No one doubts this fact in the rendering of a musical score; no one supposes that the lines and dots on paper are more than the recorded means of evoking the work of art. But what is true of it is equally true of the Parthenon as a building. It is absurd to ask what an artist "really" meant by his product: he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development. If he could be articulate, he would say "I meant just that, and that means whatever you or any one can honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience, get out of it." Any other idea makes the boasted "universality" of the work of art a synonym for monotonous identity. The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience.
It is simply an impossibility that anyone today should experience the Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen experienced it, any more than the religious statuary of the twelfth century can mean, esthetically, even to a good Catholic today just what it meant to the worshipers of the old period. The "works" that fail to become new are not those which are universal but those which are "dated." The enduring art-product may have been, and probably was, called forth by something occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the experiences of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own.
This is what it is to have form. It marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the origi, nal creator. Hence there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance. The work itself is matter formed into esthetic substance. The critic, the theorist, as a reflective student of the art product, however, not only may but must draw a distinction between them. Any skilled observer of a pugilist or a golf-player will, I suppose, institute distinctions between what is done and how it is done — between the knockout and the manner of the delivery of a blow; between the ball driven so many yards to such and such a line and the way the drive was executed. The artist, the one engaged in doing, will effect a similar distinction when he is interested in correcting an habitual error, or learning how better to secure a given effect. Yet the act itself is exactly what it is because of how it is done. In the act there is no distinction, but perfect integration of manner and content, form and substance.
The author just quoted, Mr. Bradley, in an essay on Poetry for Poetry's Sake, draws a distinction between subject and substance which may well form the start of our further discussion of this matter. The distinction may, I think, be paraphrased as that between matter for and matter in artistic production. The subject or "matter for" is capable of being indicated and described in other fashion than that of the art-product itself. The "matter in," the actual substance, is the art object itself and hence cannot be expressed in any other way. The subject for Milton's "Paradise Lost" is, as Bradley says, the fall of man in connection with the revolt of the angels — a theme already current in Christian circles and readily identifiable by anyone familiar with the Christian tradition. The substance of the poem, the esthetic matter, is the poem itself; what became of the subject as it underwent Milton's imaginative treatment. Similarly, one can tell another in words the subject or the "Ancient Mariner." But to convey to him its substance one would have to expose him to the poem and let the latter have its way with him.
The distinction that Bradley draws with respect to poems is equally applicable to every art, even architecture. The "subject" of the Parthenon is Pallas Athene, the Virgin Goddess, the presiding divinity of the city of Athens. If one will take a multitude of art products of all kinds and sorts and keep them in mind long enough to assign a subject to each, one will see that the substance of works of art dealing with the same "subject" is infinitely varied. How many poems are there in all languages having flowers, or even the rose, for their "subject"? Hence changes in art products are not arbitrary; they do not proceed, even when quite revolutionary, (as one school of critics always assumes) from the unregulated wish of undisciplined men to produce something new and startling. They are inevitable as the common things of the world are experienced in different cultures and different personalities. The subject that meant so much to the Athenian citizen of the fourth century B.C. is hardly more than a historic incident today. An English Protestant of the seventeenth century who savored to the full the theme of Milton's epic may have been so out of sympathy with the topic and setting of Dante's Divine Comedy as to be unable to appreciate the latter's artistic quality. Today an "unbeliever" may be the one who is most sensitive esthetically to such poems, just because of indifference to their antecedent subject-matter. On the other hand, many an observer of pictures is now unable to do full justice to the painting of Poussin in its intrinsic plastic qualities because its classical themes are so alien.
The subject, as Bradley says, is outside the poem; the substance is within it; rather, it is the poem. "Subject," however, itself varies over a wide range. It may be hardly more than a label; it may be the occasion that called out the work; or it may be the subject-matter which as raw material entered into the new experience of the artist and found transformation. The poems of Keats and Shelley on the sky-lark and nightingale probably did not have the songs of these birds alone for an occasioning stimulus. It is well, then, for the sake of clarity to discriminate not only substance from theme or topic, but both of them from antecedent subject-matter. The "subject" of the "Ancient Mariner" is the killing of an albatross by a sailor and what happened in consequence thereof. Its matter is the poem itself. Its subject-matter is all the experiences a reader brings with him of cruelty and pity in connection with a living creature. The artist himself can hardly begin with a subject alone. If he did, his work would almost surely suffer from artificiality. First comes subject-matter, then the substance or matter of the work; finally the determination of topic or theme.
Antecedent subject-matter is not instantaneously changed into the matter of a work of art in the mind of an artist. It is a developing process. As we have already seen, the artist finds where he is going because of what he has previously done; that is, the original excitation and stir of some contact with the world undergo successive transformation. That state of the matter he has arrived at sets up demands to be fulfilled and it institutes a framework that limits further operations. As the experience of transforming subject-matter into the very substance of the work of art proceeds, incidents and scenes that figured at first may drop out and others take their place, being drawn in by the suction of the qualitative material that aroused the original excitement.
The theme or subject, on the other hand, may be of no significance at all save for purposes of practical identification. I once saw a lecturer on painting obtain a cheap laugh from his audience by showing a cubistic picture and asking the audience to guess what it was about. He then told them its title — as if that were either its subject-matter or its substance. The artist had labeled his picture for some reason best known to himself, whether pour epater les bourgeois or because of its occasion, or because of some subtle affinity of quality, by the name of a historic personage. The implication of the lecturer and of the audience's laugh was that the obvious disparity between the title and the visible picture was somehow a reflection on the esthetic qualities of the latter. No one would allow his perception of the Parthenon to be influenced by the fact that he did not happen to know the signification of the word by which the building is called. Yet the fallacy exists, especially in connection with pictures, in many ways much more subtle than that illustrated by the incident of the lecture.
Titles are, so to say, social matters. They identify objects for easy reference, so that one knows what is meant when a symphony of Beethoven's is called the "Fifth" or when Titian's "Entombment" is mentioned. A poem of Wordsworth's may be specified by name, but it might be identified as the poem found on a certain page of a given edition, as well as by being called "Lucy Gray." Rembrandt's painting can be named the "Jewish Wedding," or that which hangs on a certain wall of a particular room in the Amsterdam gallery. Musicians usually call their works by number with perhaps an indication of the key. Painters prefer vague titles. Thus artists, perhaps unconsciously, strive to escape from the general tendency to link an object of art with some scene or course of events that listeners and spectators recognize from their prior experience. A picture may be catalogued merely "River at Twilight." Even then, many persons will suppose they must carry into their experience of it some remembered river once seen at that particular hour. But in such treatment the picture in so far ceases to be a picture and becomes an inventory or document, as if it were a colored photograph taken for historical or geological purposes or to serve the business of a detective.
The distinctions made are elementary; but they are basic in esthetic theory. When there is an end of confusion of subject and substance, there will also be an end, for example, of the ambiguities regarding representation such as have been discussed. Mr. Bradley calls attention to the common tendency to treat a work of art as a mere reminder of something, by the illustration of the sight-seer in a picture-gallery who remarks as he moves along, "This picture is so like my cousin," or that picture "the image of my birthplace," and who, after satisfying himself that one painting is about Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject and nothing but the subject of the next one. Unless the radical difference between subject and substance is appreciated, not only does the casual visitor go wrong, but critics and theorists judge objects of art in terms of their preconceptions as to what the subject-matter of art ought to be. The time is not far remote when the proper thing to say about the dramas of Ibsen was that they are "sordid"; and paintings that modify subject-matter in accordance with requirements of esthetic form in ways that involve distortion of physical shape are condemned as arbitrary and capricious. The painter's just retort to such a misunderstanding is found in a remark of Matisse. When someone complained to him that she had never seen a woman who looked like the one in his painting, he replied: "Madam, that is not a woman; that is a picture." The critics who drag in extraneous subject-matter — historical, moral, sentimental, or in the guise of established canons that prescribe proper themes — may be vastly superior in learning to the guide in the gallery who says nothing about paintings as pictures and a great deal about the occasions which produced them and the sentimental associations they arouse, the majesty of Mount Blanc or the tragedy of Anne Boleyn; but esthetically they stand on the same level.
The city man who lived in the country when he was a boy is given to purchasing pictures of green meadows with grazing cattle or purling brooks — especially if there is also a swimming hole. He obtains from such pictures a revival of certain values of his childhood minus attendant back-breaking experiences, plus, indeed, an added emotional value because of contrast with a present well-to-do estate. In all such cases the picture is not seen. The painting is used as a springboard for arriving at sentiments that are, because of extraneous subject-matter, agreeable. The subject-matter of experiences of childhood and youth is nevertheless a subconscious background of much great art. But to be the substance of art, it must be made into a new object by means of the medium employed, not merely suggested in a reminiscent way.
The fact that form and matter are connected in a work of art does not mean they are identical. It signifies that in the work of art they do not offer themselves as two distinct things: the work is formed matter. But they are legitimately distinguished when reflection sets in, as it does in criticism and in theory. We are then compelled to inquire as to the formal structure of the work, and in order to carry on this inquiry intelligently, we must have a conception of what form is generically. We may get a key to this idea by starting from the fact that one idiomatic use of the word makes it equivalent with shape or figure. Especially in connection with pictures is form frequently identified simply with the patterns defined by linear outlines of shapes. Now shape is only an element in esthetic form; it does not constitute it. In ordinary perception we recognize and identify things by their shapes; even words and sentences have shapes, when heard as well as when seen. Consider how a misplaced accent disturbs recognition more than does any other kind of mispronunciation.
For shape in relation to recognition is not limited to geometric or spatial properties. The latter play a part only as they are subordinated to adaptation to an end. Shapes that are not in our minds associated with any function are hard to grasp and retain. The shapes of spoons, knives, forks, household articles, pieces of furniture, are means of identification because of their association with purpose. Up to a certain point, then, shape is allied with form in its artistic sense. In both there is organization of constituent parts. In some sense the typical shape of even a utensil and tool indicates that the meaning of the whole has entered into the parts to qualify them. This is the fact that has led some theorists, like Herbert Spencer, to identify the source of "beauty" with efficient and economical adaptation of parts to the function of a whole. In some cases fitness is indeed so exquisite as to constitute visible grace independent of the thought of any utility. But this special case indicates the way in which shape and form differ generically. For there is more to grace than just lack of clumsiness, in the sense in which "clumsy" means inefficiency of adaptation to an end. In shape as such adaptation is intrinsically limited to a particular end — like that of a spoon for carrying liquids to the mouth. The spoon that in addition has that esthetic form called grace bears no such limitation.
A good deal of intellectual effort has been expended in trying to identify efficiency for a particular end with "beauty" or esthetic quality. But these attempts are bound to fail, fortunate as it is that in some cases the two coincide and humanly desirable as it is that they should always meet. For adaptation to a particular end is often (always in the case of complicated affairs) something perceived by thought, while esthetic effect is found directly in sense-perception. A chair may serve the purpose of affording a comfortable and hygienically efficient seat, without serving at the same time the needs of the eye. If, on the contrary, it blocks rather than promotes the role of vision in an experience, it will be ugly no matter how well adapted to use as a seat. There is no preestablished harmony that guarantees that what satisfies the need of one set of organs will fulfill that of all the other structures and needs that have a part in the experience, so as to bring it to completion as a complex of all elements. All we can say is that in the absence of disturbing contexts, such as production of objects for a maximum of private profit, a balance tends to be struck so that objects will be satisfactory — "useful" in the strict sense — to the self as a whole, even though some specific efficiency be sacrificed in the process. In so far there is a tendency for dynamic shape (as distinguished from bare geometric figure) to blend with artistic form.
Early in the history of philosophic thought the value of shape in making possible the definition and classification of objects was noted and was seized upon as a basis for a metaphysical theory of the nature of forms. The empirical fact of the relationship, effected by arrangement of parts to a definite end and use — like that of spoon or table or cup — was wholly neglected and even repudiated. Form was treated as something intrinsic, as the very essence of a thing in virtue of the metaphysical structure of the universe. It is easy to follow the course of reasoning that led to this result provided the relation of shape to use is once ignored. It is by form — in the sense of adapted shape — that we both identify and distinguish things in perception: chairs from tables, a maple from an oak. Since we note — or "know" them — in this way, and, since knowledge was believed to be a revelation of the true nature of things, it was concluded that things are what they are in virtue of having, intrinsically, certain forms.
Moreover, since things are rendered knowable by these forms, it was concluded that form is the rational, the intelligible, element in the objects and events of the world. Then it was set over against "matter," the latter being the irrational, the inherently chaptic and fluctuating, stuff upon which form was impressed. It was as eternal as the latter was shifting. This metaphysical distinction of matter and form was embodied in the philosophy that ruled European thought for centuries. Because of this fact it still affects the esthetic philosophy of form in relation to matter. It is the source of the bias in favor of their separation, especially when that takes the shape of assuming that form has a dignity and stability lacking to matter. Indeed, were it not for this background of tradition, it may be doubted whether it would occur to anyone that there is a problem in their relation, so clear would it be that the only distinction important in art is that between matter inadequately formed and material completely and coherently formed.
Objects of industrial arts have form — that adapted to their special uses. These objects take on esthetic form, whether they are rugs, urns, or baskets, when the material is so arranged and adapted that it serves immediately the enrichment of the immediate experience of the one whose attentive perception is directed to it. No material can be adapted to an end, be it that of use as spoon or carpet, until raw material has undergone a change that shapes the parts and that arranges these parts with reference to one another with a view to the purpose of the whole. Hence the object has form in a definitive sense. When this form is liberated from limitation to a specialized end and serves also the purposes of an immediate and vital experience, the form is esthetic and not merely useful.
It is significant that the word "design" has a double meaning. It signifies purpose and it signifies arrangement, mode of composition. The design of a house is the plan upon which it is constructed to serve the purposes of those who live in it. The design of a painting or novel is the arrangement of its elements by means of which it becomes an expressive unity in direct perception. In both cases, there is an ordered relation of many constituent elements. The characteristic of artistic design is the intimacy of the relations that hold the parts together. In a house we have rooms and their arrangement with respect to one another. In the work of art, the relations cannot be told apart from what they relate except in later reflection. A work of art is poor in the degree in which they exist in separation, as in a novel wherein plot — the design — is felt to be superimposed upon incidents and characters instead of being their dynamic relations to one another. To understand the design of a complicated piece of machinery we have to know the purpose the machine is intended to serve, and how the various parts fit in to the accomplishment of that purpose. Design is, as it were, superimposed upon materials that do not actually share in it, as privates engage in a battle while they have only a passive share in the general's "design" for the battle.
Only when the constituent parts of a whole have the unique end of contributing to the consummation of a conscious experience, do design and shape lose superimposed character and become form. They cannot do this so long as they serve a specialized purpose; while they can serve the inclusive purpose of having an experience only when they do not stand out by themselves but are fused with all other properties of the work of art. In dealing with the significance of form in painting, Dr. Barnes has brought out the necessity for this completeness of blending, the interpenetration of "shape" and pattern with color, space, and light. Form is, as he says, "the synthesis or fusion of all plastic means . .. their harmonious merging." On the other hand, pattern in its limited sense, or plan and design, "is merely the skeleton upon which plastic units ... are engrafted."*
This interfusion of all properties of the medium is necessary if the object in question is to serve the whole creature in his unified vitality. It therefore defines the nature of form in all the arts. With respect to a specialized utility, we can characterize design as being related to this and that end. One chair has a design fitted to give comfort; another, to hygiene; a third, to regal splendor. Only when all means are diffused through one another does the whole suffuse the parts so as to constitute an experience that is unified through inclusion instead of by exclusion. This fact confirms the position of the previous chapter as regards the union of qualities of direct sensuous vividness with other expressive qualities. As long as "meaning" is a matter of association and suggestion, it falls apart from the qualities of the sensuous medium and form is disturbed. Sense qualities are the carriers of meanings, not as vehicles carry goods but as a mother carries a baby when the baby is part of her own organism. Works of art, like words, are literally pregnant with meaning. Meanings, having their source in past experience, are means by which the particular organization that marks a given picture is effected. They are not added on by "association" but are either, and equally, the soul of which colors are the body or the body of which colors are the soul — according as we happen to be concerned with the picture.
Dr. Barnes has pointed out that not only are intellectual meaning carried over from past experiences to add expressiveness, but so are qualities that add emotional excitation, whether the excitation be of serenity or poignancy. "There are," as he says, "in our minds in solution a vast number of emotional attitudes, feelings ready to be reexcited when the proper stimulus arrives, and more than anything else it is these forms, this residue of experience, which, fuller and richer than in the mind of the ordinary man, constitute the artist's capital. What is called the magic of the artist resides in his ability to transfer these values from one field of experience to another, to attach them to the objects of our common life, and by his imaginative insight make these objects poignant and momentous."* Not colors, not sense qualities as such, are either matter or form, but these qualities as thoroughly imbued, impregnated, with transferred value. And then they are either matter or form according to the direction of our interest.
While some theorists make a distinction between sensuous and borrowed value because of the metaphysical dualism just mentioned, others make it from fear lest the work of art be unduly intellectualized. They are concerned to emphasize something which is in fact an esthetic necessity: the immediacy of esthetic experience. It cannot be asserted too strongly that what is not immediate is not esthetic. The mistake lies in supposing that only certain special things — those attached just to eye, ear, etc. — can be qualitatively and immediately experienced. Were it true that only qualities coming to us through sense-organs in isolation are directly experienced, then, of course, all relational material would be superadded by an association that is extraneous — or, according to some theorists, by a "synthetic" action of thought. From this point of view the strictly esthetic value of say a painting consists simply of certain relations and orders of relation that colors sustain to one another apart from relation to objects. The expressiveness they gain by being present as colors of water, rocks, clouds, etc., is due to art. On this basis, there is always a gap between the esthetic and the artistic. They are of two radically different kinds.
The psychology underlying this bifurcation was exploded in advance by William James when he pointed out that there are direct feelings of such relations as "if," "then," "and," "but," "from," "with." For he showed that there is no relation so comprehensive that it may not become a matter of immediate experience. Every work of art that ever existed had indeed already contradicted the theory in question. It is quite true that certain things, namely ideas, exercise a mediating function. But only a twisted and aborted logic can hold that because something is mediated, it cannot, therefore, be immediately experienced. The reverse is the case. We cannot grasp any idea, any organ of mediation, we cannot possess it in its full force, until we have felt and sensed it, as much so as if it were an odor or a color.
Those who are especially addicted to thinking as an occupation, are aware when they observe the processes of thought, instead of determining by dialectic what they must be, that immediate feeling is not limited in its scope. Different ideas have their different "feels," their immediate qualitative aspects, just as much as anything else. One who is thinking his way through a complicated problem finds direction on his way by means of this property of ideas. Their qualities stop him when he enters the wrong path and send him ahead when he hits the right one. They are signs of an intellectual "Stop and Go." If a thinker had to work out the meaning of each idea discursively, he would be lost in a labyrinth that had no end and no center. Whenever an idea loses its immediate felt quality, it ceases to be an idea and becomes, like an algebraic symbol, a mere stimulus to execute an operation without the need of thinking. For this reason certain trains of ideas leading to their appropriate consummation (or conclusion) are beautiful or elegant. They have esthetic character. In reflection it is often necessary to make a distinction between matters of sense and matters of thought. But the distinction does not exist in all modes of experience. When there is genuine artistry in scientific inquiry and philosophic speculation, a thinker proceeds neither by rule nor yet blindly, but by means of meanings that exist immediately as feelings having qualitative color.*
Qualities of sense, those of touch and taste as well as of sight and hearing, have esthetic quality. But they have it not in isolation but in their connections; as interacting, not as simple and separate entities. Nor are connections limited to their own kind, colors with colors, sounds with sounds. Even the utmost in the way of scientific control never succeeds in getting either a "pure" color or a pure spectrum of colors. A ray of light produced under scientific control does not end sharply and with uniformity. It has vague edges and so internal complexity. Moreover, it is projected on a background and only thus does it enter perception. And the background is not merely one of other hues and shades. It has its own qualities. No shadow cast by even the thinnest line is ever homogeneous. It is impossible to isolate a color from light so that no refraction occurs. Even under the most uniform laboratory conditions, a "simple" color will be complex to the extent of having a bluish edge. And the colors used in paintings are not pure spectral colors but are pigments, not projected on the void but applied on a canvas.
These elementary observations are made with reference to attempts to carry over alleged scientific findings about sense material into esthetics. They show that even on so-called scientific ground there are no experiences of "pure" or "simple" qualities, nor of qualities limited to the range of a single sense. But in any case there is an unbridgeable gap between science in the laboratory and the work of art. In a painting, colors are presented as those of sky cloud, river, rock, turf, jewel, silk, and so on. Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value due to these objects. Of color qualities it is peculiarly true that they are in perception what they are in relations of contrast and harmony with other qualities. Those who measure a picture by its linear draughtsmanship have attacked colorists on this very ground, pointing out that in contrast with the stable constancy of line, color is never twice alike, varying with every change of light and other conditions.
In contrast with the attempt to carry over misplaced abstractions of anatomy and psychology into esthetic theory, we may well listen to painters. For example, Cezanne says: "Design and color are not distinct. In the degree in which color is really painted, design exists. The more colors harmonize with one another, the more defined is design. When color is at its richest, form is most complete. The secret of design, of everything marked by pattern, is contrast and relation of tones." He quotes with approval the saying of another painter, Delacroix: "Give me the mud of the streets and if you will leave me also with power to surround it to my taste I will make of it a woman's flesh of delicious tint." The opposition of quality as immediate and sensuous to relation as purely mediate and intellectual is false in general theory, psychological and philosophical. In fine art it is absurd, since the force of an art product depends upon complete interpenetration of the two.
The action of any one sense includes attitudes and dispositions that are due to the whole organism. The energies belonging to the sense-organs themselves enter causally into the perceived thing. When some painters introduced the "pointillist" technique, relying upon the capacity of the visual apparatus to fuse dots of color physically separate on the canvas, they exemplified but they did not originate an organic activity that transforms physical existence into a perceived object. But this sort of modification is elementary. It is not just the visual apparatus but the whole organism that interacts with the environment in all but routine action. The eye, ear, or whatever, is only the channel through which the total response takes place. A color as seen is always qualified by implicit reactions of many organs, those of the sympathetic system as well as of touch. It is a funnel for the total energy put forth, not its wellspring. Colors are sumptuous and rich just because a total organic resonance is deeply implicated in them.
Even more important is the fact that the organism which responds in production of the experienced object is one whose tendencies of observation, desire and emotion, are shaped by prior experiences. It carries past experiences in itself not by conscious memory but by direct charge. This fact accounts for the existence of some degree of expressiveness in the object of every conscious experience. That fact has already been brought out. What is pertinent to the topic of esthetic substance turns upon the way in which the material of past experience, which loads present attitudes, operates in connection with material provided by means of the senses. In sheer recollection, for example, it is essential to keep the two apart; otherwise remembering is distorted. In purely acquired automatic action, past material is subordinated to the extent of not appearing at all in consciousness. In other cases, material of the past comes to consciousness but is consciously employed as an instrument to deal with some present problem and difficulty. It is kept down so as to serve some special end. If the experience is predominatingly one of investigation, it has the status of offering evidence or of suggesting hypotheses; if "practical," of furnishing cues to present action.
In esthetic experience, on the contrary, the material of the past neither fills attention, as in recollection, nor is subordinated to a special purpose. There is, indeed, a restriction imposed upon what comes. But it is that of contribution to the immediate matter of an experience now had. The material is not employed as a bridge to some further experience, but as an increase and individualization of present experience. The scope of a work of art is measured by the number and variety of elements coming from past experiences that are organically absorbed into the perception had here and now. They give it its body and its suggestiveness. They often come from sources too obscure to be identified in any conscious memorial way, and thus they create the aura and penumbra in which a work of art swims.
We see a painting through the eyes, and hear music through the ears. Upon reflection, we are then only too much given to supposing that in the experience itself visual or auditory qualities as such, are central if not exclusive. This carrying into the primary experience as part of its immediate nature whatever subsequent analysis finds in it, is a fallacy — one which James called the psychological fallacy. In seeing a picture, it is not true that visual qualities are as such, or consciously, central, and other qualities arranged about them in an accessory or associated fashion. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is no more true of seeing a picture than it is of reading a poem or a treatise on philosophy, in which we are not aware in any distinct way of the visual forms of letters and words. These are stimuli to which we respond with emotional, imaginative, and intellectual values drawn from ourselves, which then are ordered by interaction with those presented through the medium of words. The colors seen in a picture are referred to objects, not to the eye. For this reason alone are they emotionally qualified, up to the point sometimes of hypnotic force, and are significant or expressive. The organ that investigation, using anatomical and physiological lore to help it out, shows to be causally primary in conditioning the experience, may in the experience itself be as unobtrusive as are the brain tracts that are involved just as much as the eye is, but which only the trained neurologist knows anything about — and which even he is not aware of when he is absorbed in seeing something. When we perceive, by means of the eyes as causal aids, the liquidity of water, the coldness of ice, the solidity of rocks, the bareness of trees in winter, it is certain that other qualities than those of the eye are conspicuous and controlling in perception. And it is as certain as anything can be that optical qualities do not stand out by themselves with tactual and emotive qualities clinging to their skirts.
The point just made is not one of remote technical theory. It bears directly upon our main problem, the relation of substance and form. This bearing has many aspects. One of them is the inherent tendency of sense to expand, to come into intimate relations with other things than itself, and thus to take on form because of its own movement — instead of passively waiting to have form imposed on it. Any sensuous quality tends, because of its organic connections, to spread and fuse. When a sense quality remains on the relatively isolated plane on which it first emerges, it does so because of some special reaction, because it is cultivated for special reasons. It ceases to be sensuous and becomes sensual. This isolation of sense is not characteristic of esthetic objects, but of such things as narcotics, sexual orgasms, and gambling indulged in for the sake of the immediate excitement of sensation. In normal experience, a sensory quality is related to other qualities in such ways as to define an object. The organ of reception, which is focal, adds energy and freshness to meanings otherwise merely reminiscent, stale, or abstract. No poet is more directly sensuous than Keats. But no one has written poetry in which sensuous qualities are more intimately pervaded by objective events and scenes. Milton was seemingly inspired by what to most persons today is a dry and repellent theology. But he was sufficiently in the Shakespearean tradition so that his substance is that of direct drama composed on a majestic scale. If we hear a rich and haunting voice, we feel it immediately as the voice of a certain kind of personality. If we discover later that the person is, in fact, of a meager and thin nature, we feel as if we had been cheated. So we are always esthetically disappointed when the sensuous qualities and the intellectual properties of an object of art do not coalesce.
The moot problem of the relation of the decorative and the expressive is solved when it is viewed in the context of the integration of matter and form. The expressive inclines to the side of meaning, the decorative to that of sense. There is a hunger of the eyes for light and color; there is distinctive satisfaction when this hunger is fed. Wallpaper, rugs, tapestries, the marvelous play of changing tints in sky and flowers, fulfill the need. Arabesques, gay colors, have a like office in paintings. Some of the charm of architectural structures — for they have charm as well as dignity — derives from the fact that, in their exquisite adaptations of lines and spaces, they meet a similar organic need of the sensorimotor system.
Yet in all this, there is no isolated operation of particular senses. The conclusion to be drawn is that the distinctively decorative quality is due to unusual energy of a sensory tract that lends vividness and appeal to the other activities with which it is associated. Hudson was a person of extraordinary sensitiveness to the sensuous surface of the world. Speaking of his childhood when he was, as he says, "just a little wild animal running around on its hind legs, amazingly interested in the world in which it found itself," he goes on to say: "I rejoiced in colors, scents, in taste and touch: the blue of the sky, the verdure of earth, the sparkle of light on water, the taste of milk, of fruit, of honey, the smell of dry or moist soil, of wind and rain, of herbs and flowers; the mere feel of a blade of grass made me happy; and there were certain sounds and perfumes, and above all certain colors in flowers, and in the plumage and eggs of birds, such as the purple polished shell of the tinamou's egg, which intoxicated me with delight. When riding on the plain I discovered a patch of scarlet verbenas in full bloom, the creeping plants covering an area of several yards, with a moist greensward sprinkled abundantly with the shining flower bosses, I would throw myself from the pony with a cry of joy to lie on the turf among them and feast my sight on their brilliant color."
No one can complain of a lack of recognition of immediate sensuous effect in such an experience. It is the more noteworthy because not affecting that superior attitude toward qualities of smell, taste, and touch adopted by some writers since Kant. But it will be noted that "colors, scents, taste and touch" are not isolated. The enjoyment is of the color, feel, and scent of objects: blades of grass, sky, sunlight and water, birds. The sight, smell, and touch immediately appealed to are means through which the boy's entire being reveled in acute perception of the qualities of the world in which he lived — qualities of things experienced not of sensation. The active agency of a particular sense-organ is involved in the production of the quality, but the organ is not for this reason the focus of the conscious experience. The connection of qualities with objects is intrinsic in all experience having significance. Eliminate this connection and nothing remains but a senseless and unidentifiable succession of transitory thrills. When we have "pure" sensational experiences they come to us in moments of abrupt and coerced attention; they are shocks, and even shocks serve normally to incite curiosity to inquire into the nature of the situation that has suddenly interrupted our previous occupation. If the condition persists unchanged without ability to sink what is felt into a property of the object, the result is sheer exasperation — a thing far removed from esthetic enjoyment. To make the pathology of sensation the basis of esthetic enjoyment is not a promising undertaking.
Translate the enjoyment of the verbena creeping over the grass, sunlight sparkling on water, the shining polish of the bird's egg, into experiences of the live creature, and what we find is the very opposite of a single sense functioning alone, or of a number of senses merely adding their separate qualities together. The latter are coordinated into a whole of vitality by their common relations to objects. It is the objects that live an impassioned life. Art, like tat of Hudson himself in recreating the experience of childhood, but carries further, through selection and concentration, the reference to an object, to organization and order beyond mere sense, implicit in the experience of the child. The native experience in its continuous and cumulative character (properties that exist because "sensations" are of objects ordered in a common world and are not mere transient excitations), thus affords a frame of reference for the work of art. If the theory that primary esthetic experience is of isolated sense qualities were correct, it would be impossible for art to superimpose connection and order upon them.
The situation just described gives the key to understanding the relation in a work of art between decorative and expressive. Were enjoyment simply of qualities by themselves, the decorative and the expressive would have no connection with each other, one coming from immediate sense experience and the other from relations and meanings introduced by art. Since sense itself blends with relations, the difference between the decorative and the expressive is one of emphasis. Joie de vivre — the abandon that takes no thought for the morrow, the sumptuousness of fabrics, the gayety of flowers, the matured richness of fruits — is expressed through the decorative quality that springs directly out of the full play of sensuous qualities. If the range of expression in the arts is to be comprehensive, there are objects with values that must be rendered decoratively and others that must be rendered without it. A gay Pierrot at a funeral would clash with the others. When a court fool is introduced in a picture of the obsequies of his lord, his semblance must at least fit the requirements of the context. An excess of decorative quality in a particular setting has an expressiveness of its own — as Goya carries its exaggeration in some portraits of the court folk of his day to a point where their pomposity is made ridiculous. To demand that all art be decorative is as much a limitation of the material of art in its exclusion of expression of the somber as is a Puritanic demand that all art be grave.
The special bearing of the expressiveness of decoration on the problem of substance and form is that it proves the wrongness of the theories that isolate sense qualities. For in the degree in which decorative effect is achieved by isolation, it becomes empty embellishment, factitious ornamentation — like sugar figures on a cake — and external bedecking. There is no need for me to go out of my way to condemn the insincerity of using adornment to conceal weakness and cover up structural defects. But it is necessary to note that upon the basis of esthetic theories which separate sense and meaning, there is no artistic ground for such condemnation. Insincerity in art has an esthetic not just a moral source; it is found wherever substance and form fall apart. This statement does not signify that all structurally necessary elements should be evident to perception, as some extreme "functionalists" in architecture have insisted they should be. Such a contention confuses a rather bald conception of morals with art. * For, in architecture as in painting and poetry, raw materials are reordered through interaction with the self to make experience delightful.
Flowers in a room add to its expressiveness, when they harmonize with its furnishing and use without adding a note of insincerity — even though they cover up something structurally necessary.
The truth of the matter is that what is form in one connection is matter in another and vice-versa. Color that is matter with respect to expressiveness of some qualities and values is form when it is used to convey delicacy, brilliance, gayety. And this statement does not signify that some colors have one function and other colors another function. Take, for example, Velasquez's painting of the child Maria Theresa, the one with a vase of flowers at her right. Its grace and delicacy is unsurpassable; the delicacy pervades every aspect and part — dress, jewels, face, hair, hands, flowers; but exactly the same colors express not only the stuff of fabrics, but as always with Velasquez when he succeeds, the inherent dignity of a human being, a dignity that even in a royal personage is so intrinsic that it is not a trapping of royalty.
It does not follow, of course, that all works of art, even those of the highest quality, must possess such a complete interpenetration of the decorative and the expressive as is often exhibited in Titian, Velasquez and Renoir. Artists may be great in one direction or the other, and still be great. French painting, almost from its beginning, has been marked by a lively sense of the decorative. Lancret, Fragonard, Watteau may be delicate to the point at times of fragility, but they almost never exhibit the split between expressiveness and extraneous ornamentation that almost always marks Boucher. They prefer subjects that require delicacy and intimate subtlety to render them fully expressive. Renoir has more of the substance of common life in his paintings than they. But he uses every plastic means — color, light, line, and planes, in themselves and in their interrelations — to convey a sense of abounding joy in intercourse with common things. Friends who knew the models he used, sometimes complained, according to report, that he made them much more beautiful than they really were. But no one who looks at the paintings gets any sense of their being "fixed up" or prettified. What is expressed is the experience Renoir himself had of the joy of perceiving the world. Matisse is unrivaled among the decorative colorists of the present. At first he may give to the beholder a shock because of juxtaposition of colors that in themselves are garish and because at first physical blanks seem to be unesthetic. But when one has learned to see, one finds a marvelous rendering of a quality that is characteristically French — clearness, clarte. If the attempt to express it does not succeed — and, of course, it does not always — then the decorative quality stands out by itself and is oppressive — like too much sugar.
Hence, one important faculty in learning to perceive a work of art — a faculty that many critics do not possess — is power to grasp the phases of objects that specially interest a particular artist. Still-life painting would be as empty as is most genre painting if it did not, under the hand of a master, become expressive through its very decorative quality of significant structural factors, as Chardin renders volume and spacial positions in ways that caress the eye; while Cezanne achieves monumental quality with fruits, just as, on the opposite side, Guardi suffuses the monumental in buildings with a decorative glow.
As objects are transported from one culture-medium to another, decorative quality takes on a new value. Rugs and bowls of the Orient have patterns whose original value was usually religious or political — as tribal emblems — expressed in decorative semi-geometrical figures. The western observer does not get the former any more than he grasps the religious expressiveness in Chinese paintings of original Buddhist and Taoist connections. The plastic elements remain and sometimes give a false sense of the separation of decorative from expressive. Local elements were a kind of medium by which entrance fee was paid. The intrinsic value remains after local elements have been stripped away.
Beauty, conventionally assumed to be the especial theme of esthetics, has hardly been mentioned in what precedes. It is properly an emotional term, though one denoting a characteristic emotion. In the presence of a landscape, a poem or a picture that lays hold of us with immediate poignancy, we are moved to murmur or to exclaim "How beautiful." The ejaculation is a just tribute to the capacity of the object to arouse admiration that approaches worship. Beauty is at the furthest remove from an analytic term, and hence from a conception that can figure in theory as a means of explanation or classification. Unfortunately, it has been hardened into a peculiar object; emotional rapture has been subjected to what philosophy calls hypostatization, and the concept of beauty as an essence of intuition has resulted. For purposes of theory, it then becomes an obstructive term. In case the term is used in theory to designate the total esthetic quality of an experience, it is surely better to deal with the experience itself and show whence and how the quality proceeds. In that case, beauty is the response to that which to reflection is the consummated movement of matter integrated through its inner relations into a single qualitative whole.
There is another and more limited use of the term in which beauty is set off against other modes of esthetic quality — against the sublime, the comic, grotesque. Judging from results, the distinction is not a happy one. It tends to involve those who engage in it in dialectical manipulation of concepts and a compartmental pigeonholing that obstructs rather than aids direct perception. Instead of favoring surrender to the object, ready-made divisions lead one to approach an esthetic object with an intent to compare and thus to restrict the experience to a partial grasp of the unified whole. An examination of the cases in which the word is commonly used, apart from its immediate emotional sense mentioned above, reveals that one significance of the term is the striking presence of decorative quality, of immediate charm for sense. The other meaning indicates the marked presence of relations of fitness and reciprocal adaptation among the members of the whole, whether it be object, situation, or deed.
Demonstrations in mathematics, operations in surgery, are thus said to be beautiful — even a case of disease may be so typical in its exhibition of characteristic relations as to be called beautiful. Both meanings, that of sensuous charm and of manifestation of a harmonious proportion of parts, mark the human form in its best exemplars. The efforts that have been made by theorists to reduce one meaning to the other illustrate the futility of approaching the subject-matter through fixed concepts. The facts throw light upon the immediate fusion of form and matter, and upon the relativity of what is taken as form or as substance in a particular case to the purpose animating reflective analysis.
The sum of the whole discussion is that theories which separate matter and form, theories that strive to find a special locus in experience for each, are, in spite of their oppositions to one another, cases of the same fundamental fallacy. They rest upon separation of the live creature from the environment in which it lives. One school, one which becomes the "idealistic" school in philosophy when its implications are formulated, makes the separation in the interest of meanings or relations. The other school, the sensational-empiricist, makes the separation in behalf of the primacy of sense qualities. Esthetic experience has not been trusted to generate its own concepts for interpretation of art. These have been superimposed through being carried over, ready-made, from systems of thought framed without reference to art.
Nowhere has the result been more disastrous than with respect to the problem of matter and form. It would have been easy to fill the pages of this chapter with quotations from writers on esthetics asserting an original dualism of matter and form. I shall quote only one instance: "We call the facade of a Greek temple beautiful with special reference to its admirable form; whereas, in predicating beauty of a Norman castle, we refer rather to what the castle means — to the effect of imagination of its past proud strength and slow vanquishment by the unrelenting strokes of time."
This particular writer refers "form" directly to sense, and matter or "substance" to associated meaning. It would be just as easy to reverse the process. Ruins are picturesque; that is, their immediate pattern and color with overgrowing ivy, make a decorative appeal to sense; while, it might be argued, the effect of the Greek facade is due to a perception of relations of proportion, etc., which involve rational rather than sensuous considerations. Indeed, at first view, it seems more natural to ascribe matter to sense and form to mediating thought than vice versa. The fact is that distinctions in both directions are equally arbitrary. What is form in one context is matter in another and vice versa. Moreover, they change places in the same work of art with a shift in our interest and attention. Take the following stanzas of "Lucy Gray":
"Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind."
Did anybody who felt the poem esthetically make — at the same time — a conscious distinction of sense and thought, of matter and form? If so, they did not read or hear esthetically, for the esthetic value of the stanzas lies in the integration of the two. Nevertheless, after an absorbed enjoyment of the poem, one may reflect and analyze. One may consider how the choice of words, the meter and rhyme, the movement of the phrases, contribute to the esthetic effect. Not only this, but such an analysis, performed with reference to a more definite apprehension of form, may enrich further direct experience. Upon another occasion, these same traits taken in connection with the development of Wordsworth, his experience and theories, may be treated as matter rather than as from. Then the episode, the "story of the child faithful unto death" serves as a form in which Wordsworth embodied the material of his personal experience.
Since the ultimate cause of the union of form and matter in experience is the intimate relation of undergoing and doing in interaction of a live creature with the world of nature and man, the theories, which separate matter and form, have their ultimate source in neglect of this relation. Qualities are then treated as impressions made by things, and relations that supply meaning as either associations among impressions, or as something introduced by thought. There are enemies of the union of form and matter. But they proceed from our own limitations; they are not intrinsic. They spring from apathy, conceit, self-pity, tepidity, fear, convention, routine, from the factors that obstruct, deflect and prevent vital interaction of the life creature with the environment in which he exists. Only the being who is ordinarily apathetic finds merely transient excitement in a work of art; only one who is depressed, unable to face the situations about him, goes to it merely for medicinal solace through values he cannot find in his world. But art itself is more than a stir of energy in the doldrums of the dispirited, or a calm in the storms of the troubled.
Through art, meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted are clarified and concentrated, and not by thought working laboriously upon them, nor by escape into a world of mere sense, but by creation of a new experience. Sometimes the expansion and intensification is effected by means of
". . . some philosophic song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life";
sometimes it is brought about by a journey to far places, a venture to
"casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."
But whatever path the work of art pursues, it, just because it is a full and intense experience, keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness. It does so by reducing the raw materials of that experience to matter ordered through form.
*The Art in Painting, pp. 85 and 87. Chapter I of Book II should be consulted. Form in the sense defined is, as is shown there, "the criterion of value."
*See the chapter on Transferred Values, in the volume on The Art of Henri Matisse; the quotation is from p. 31. In the chapter, Dr. Barnes shows how much of the immediate emotional effect of the pictures of Matisse is unconsciously transferred from emotional values first connected with tapestry, posters, rosettes (including flower-patterns), tiles, stripes and bands, as of banners and many other objects.
* In connection with this matter, which bears not only on this particular topic, but on al questions connected with the intelligence that is characteristic of any artist, I refer to the essay on Qualitative Thought, contained in the volume Philosophy and Civilization.
* Geoffrey Scott in his Architecture of Humanism has well exposed and explained this fallacy.