FORM as something that organizes material into the matter of art has been considered in the previous chapter. The definition that was given tells what form is when it is achieved, when it is there in a work of art. It does not tell how it comes to be, the conditions of its generation. Form was defined in terms of relations and esthetic form in terms of completeness of relations within a chosen medium. But "relation" is an ambiguous word. In philosophic discourse it is used to designate a connection instituted in thought. It then signifies something indirect, something purely intellectual, even logical. But "relation" in its idiomatic usage denotes something direct and active, something dynamic and energetic. It fixes attention upon the way things bear upon one another, their clashes and unitings, the way they fulfill and frustrate, promote and retard, excite and inhibit one another.
Intellectual relations subsist in propositions; they state the connection of terms with one another. In art, as in nature and in life, relations are modes of interaction. They are pushes and pulls; they are contractions and expansions; they determine lightness and weight, rising and falling, harmony and discord. The relations of friendship, of husband and wife, of parent and child, of citizen and nation, like those of body to body in gravitation and chemical action, may be symbolized by terms or conceptions and then be stated in propositions. But they exist as actions and reactions in which things are modified. Art expresses, it does not state; it is concerned with existences in their perceived qualities, not with conceptions symbolized in terms. A social relation is an affair of affections and obligations, of intercourse, of generation, influence and mutual modification. It is in this sense that "relation" is to be understood when used to define form in art.
Mutual adaptation of parts to one another in constituting a whole is the relation which, formally speaking, characterizes a work of art. Every machine, every utensil, has, within limits, a similar reciprocal adaptation. In each case, an end is fulfilled. That which is merely a utility satisfies, however, a particular and limited end. The work of esthetic art satisfies many ends, none of which is laid down in advance. It serves life rather than prescribing a defined and limited mode of living. This service would be impossible were not parts bound together in the esthetic object in distinctive ways. How is it that each part is a dynamic part, that is, plays an active part, in constituting this kind of a whole? This is the question which confronts us.
In his Enjoyment of Poetry, Max Eastman uses the apt illustration of a man crossing the river, we will say coming into New York City on a ferry boat, to bring out the nature of an esthetic experience. Some men regard it as simply a journey to get them where they want to be — a means to be endured. So, perhaps, they read a newspaper. One who is idle may glance at this and that building identifying it as the Metropolitan Tower, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and so on. Another, impatient to arrive, may be on the lookout for landmarks by which to judge progress toward his destination. Still another, who is taking the journey for the first time, looks eagerly but is bewildered by the multiplicity of objects spread out to view. He sees neither the whole nor the parts; he is like a layman who goes into an unfamiliar factory where many machines are plying. Another person, interested in real estate, may see, in looking at the skyline, evidence in the height of buildings, of the value of land. Or he may let his thoughts roam to the congestion of a great industrial and commercial center. He may go on to think of the planlessness of arrangement as evidence of the chaos of a society organized on the basis of conflict rather than cooperation. Finally the scene formed by the buildings may be looked at as colored and lighted volumes in relation to one another, to the sky and to the river. He is now seeing esthetically, as a painter might see.
Now the characteristic of the last-named vision in contrast with the others mentioned is that it is concerned with a perceptual whole, constituted by related parts. No one single figure, aspect, or quality is picked out as a means to some further external result which is desired, nor as a sign of an inference that may be drawn. The Empire State Building may be recognized by itself. But when it is seen pictorially it is seen as a related part of a perceptually organized whole. Its values, its qualities as seen, are modified by the other parts of the whole scene, and in turn these modify the value, as perceived, of every other part of the whole. There is now form in the artistic sense.
Matisse has described the actual process of painting in the following way: "If, on a clean canvas, I put at intervals patches of blue, green and red, with every touch that I put on, each of those previously laid on loses in importance. Say I have to paint an interior; I see before me a wardrobe. It gives me a vivid sensation of red; I put on the canvas the particular red that satisfies me. A relation is now established between this red and the paleness of the canvas. When I put on besides a green, and also a yellow to represent the floor, between this green and the yellow and the color of the canvas there will be still further relations. But these different tones diminish one another. It is necessary that the different tones I use be balanced in such a way that they do not destroy one another. To secure that, I have to put my ideas in order; the relationships between tones must be instituted in such a way that they are built up instead of being knocked down. A new combination of colors will succeed to the first one and will give the wholeness of my conception."*
Now there is nothing different in principle here from what is done in the furnishing of a room, when the householder sees to it that tables, chairs, rugs, lamps, color of walls, and spacing of the pictures on them are so selected and arranged that they do not clash but form an ensemble. Otherwise there is confusion — confusion, that is, in perception. Vision cannot then complete itself. It is broken up into a succession of disconnected acts, now seeing this, now that, and no mere succession is a series. When masses are balanced, colors harmonized, and lines and planes meet and intersect fittingly, perception will be serial in order to grasp the whole and each sequential act builds up and reenforces what went before. Even at first glance there is the sense of qualitative unity. There is form.
In a word, form is not found exclusively in objects labeled works of art. Wherever perception has not been blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency to arrange events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified perception. Form is a character of every experience that is an experience. Art in its specific sense enacts more deliberately and fully the conditions that effect this unity. Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment. The connection of form with substance is thus inherent, not imposed from without. It marks the matter of an experience that is carried to consummation. If the matter is of a jolly sort, the form that would be fitting to pathetic matter is impossible. If expressed in a poem, then meter, rate of movement, words chosen, the whole structure, will be different, and in a picture so will the whole scheme of color and volume relationships. In comedy, a man at work laying bricks while dressed in evening clothes is appropriate; the form fits the matter. The same subject-matter would bring the movement of another experience to disaster.
The problem of discovering the nature of form is thus identical with that of discovering the means by which are effected the carrying forward of an experience to fulfillment. When we know these means, we know what form is. While it is true that every matter has its own form, or is intimately individual, yet there are general conditions involved in the orderly development of any subject-matter to its completion, since only when these conditions are met does a unified perception take place.
Some of the conditions of form have been mentioned in passing. There can be no movement toward a consummating close unless there is a progressive massing of values, a cumulative effect. This result cannot exist without conservation of the import of what has gone before. Moreover, to secure the needed continuity, the accumulated experience must be such as to create suspense and anticipation of resolution. Accumulation is at the same time preparation, as with each phase of the growth of a living embryo, Only that is carried on which is led up to; otherwise there is arrest and a break. For this reason consummation is relative; instead of occurring once for all at a given point, it is recurrent. The final end is anticipated by rhythmic pauses, while that end is final only in an external way. For as we turn from reading a poem or novel or seeing a picture the effect presses forward in further experiences, even if only subconsciously.
Such characteristics as continuity, cumulation, conservation, tension and anticipation are thus formal conditions of esthetic form. The factor of resistance is worth especial notice at this point. Without internal tension there would be a fluid rush to a straightaway mark; there would be nothing that could be called development and fulfillment. The existence of resistance defines the place of intelligence in the production of an object of fine art. The difficulties to be overcome in bringing about the proper reciprocal adaptation of parts constitute what in intellectual work are problems. As in activity dealing with predominatingly intellectual matters, the material that constitutes a problem has to be converted into a means for its solution. It cannot be sidestepped. But in art the resistance encountered enters into the work in a more immediate way than in science. The perceiver as well as artist has to perceive, meet, and overcome problems; otherwise, appreciation is transient and overweighted with sentiment. For, in order to perceive esthetically, he must remake his past experiences so that they can enter integrally into a new pattern. He cannot dismiss his past experiences nor can he dwell among them as they have been in the past.
A rigid predetermination of an end-product whether by artist or beholder leads to the turning out of a mechanical or academic product. The processes by which the final object and perception are reached are not, in such cases, means that move forward in the construction of a consummating experience. The latter is rather of the nature of a stencil, even though the copy from which the stencil is made exists in mind and not as a physical thing. A statement that an artist does not care how his work eventuates would not be literally true. But it is true that he cares about the end-result as a completion of what goes before and not because of its conformity or lack of conformity with a ready-made antecedent scheme. He is willing to leave the outcome to the adequacy of the means from which it issues and which it sums up. Like the scientific inquirer, he permits the subject-matter of his perception in connection with the problems it presents to determine the issue, instead of insisting upon its agreement with a conclusion decided upon in advance.
The consummatory phase of experience — which is intervening as well as final — always presents something new. Admiration always includes an element of wonder. As a Renaissance writer said: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." The unexpected turn, something which the artist himself does not definitely foresee, is a condition of the felicitous quality of a work of art; it saves it from being mechanical. It gives the spontaneity of the unpremeditated to what would otherwise be a fruit of calculation. The painter and poet like the scientific inquirer know the delights of discovery. Those who carry on their work as a demonstration of a preconceived thesis may have the joys of egotistic success but not that of fulfillment of an experience for its own sake. In the latter they learn by their work, as they proceed, to see and feel what had not been part of their original plan and purpose.
The consummatory phase is recurrent throughout a work of art and in the experience of a great work of art the points of its incidence shift in successive observations of it. This fact sets the insuperable barrier between mechanical production and use and esthetic creation and perception. In the former there are no ends until the final end is reached. Then work tends to be labor and production to be drudgery. But there is no final term in appreciation of a work of art. It carries on and is, therefore, instrumental as well as final. Those who deny this fact confine the significance of "instrumental" to the process of contributing to some narrow, if not base, office of efficacy. When the fact is not given a name, they acknowledge it. Santayana speaks of being "carried by contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal." This statement applies to art as to nature, and it indicates an instrumental function exercised by a work of art. We are carried to a refreshed attitude toward the circumstances and exigencies of ordinary experience. The work, in the sense of working, of an object of art does not cease when the direct act of perception stops. It continues to operate in indirect channels. Indeed, persons who draw back at the mention of "instrumental" in connection with art often glorify art for precisely the enduring serenity, refreshment, or re-education of vision that are induced by it. The real trouble is verbal. Such persons are accustomed to associate the word with instrumentalities for narrow ends — as an umbrella is instrumental to protection from rain or a mowing machine to cutting grain.
Some features, that at first sight seem extraneous, belong in fact to expressiveness. For they further the development of an experience so as to give the satisfaction peculiar to striking fulfillment. This is true, for example, of evidence of unusual skill and of economy in use of means, when these traits are integrated with the actual work. Skill is then admired not as part of the external equipment of the artist, but as an enhanced expression belonging to the object. For it facilitates the carrying on a continuous process to its own precise and definite conclusion. It belongs to the product and not merely to the producer, because it is a constituent of form; just as the grace of a greyhound marks the movements he performs rather than is a trait possessed by the animal as something outside the movements.
Costliness is, also, as Santayana has pointed out, an element in expression, a costliness that has nothing in common with vulgar display of purchasing power. Rarity counts to intensify expression whether the rarity is that of infrequent occurrence of patient labor, or because it has the glamor of a distant clime and initiates us into hardly known modes of living. Such instances of costliness are part of form because they operate as do all factors of the new and unexpected in promoting the building up of a unique experience. The familiar may also have this effect. There are others beside Charles Lamb who are peculiarly sensitive to the charm of the domestic. But they celebrate the familiar instead of reproducing its forms in waxy puppets. The old takes on a new guise in which the sense of the familiar is rescued from the oblivion that custom usually effects. Elegance is also a part of form for it marks a work whenever subject-matter moves to its conclusion with inevitable logic.
Some of the traits mentioned are more often referred to technique than to form. The attribution is correct whenever the qualities in question are referred to the artist rather than to his work. There is a technique that obtrudes, like the flourishes of a writing master. If skill and economy suggest their author, they take us away from the work itself. The traits of the work which suggest the skill of its producer are then in the work but they are not of it. And the reason they are not of it is precisely the negative side of the point which I am emphasizing. They do not take us anywhere in the institution of unified developing experience; they do not act as inherent forces to carry the object of which they are a professed part to consummation. Such traits are like any other superfluous or excrescent element. Technique is neither identical with form nor yet wholly independent of it. It is, properly, the skill with which the elements constituting form are managed. Otherwise it is show-off or a virtuosity separated from expression.
Significant advances in technique occur, therefore, in connection with efforts to solve problems that are not technical but that grow out of the need for new modes of experience. This statement is as true of esthetic arts as of the technological. There are improvements in technique that have to do merely with the bettering of an old-style vehicle. But they are insignificant in comparison with the change in technique from the wagon to the automobile when social needs called for a rapid transportation under personal control that was not possible even with the railway locomotive. If we take developments in the major techniques of painting during and since the Renaissance we find that they were connected with efforts to solve problems that grew out of the experience expressed in painting and not out of the craftsmanship of painting itself.
There was first the problem of transition from depiction of contours in flat-like mosaics to "three-dimensional" presentations. Until experience expanded to demand expression of something more than decorative renderings of religious themes determined by ecclesiastic fiat there was nothing to motivate this change. In its own place, the convention of "flat" painting is just as good as any other convention, as Chinese rendering of perspective is as perfect in one way as that of Western painting in another. The force that brought about the change in technique was the growth of naturalism in experience outside of art. Something of the same sort applies to the next great change, mastery of means for rendering aerial perspective and light. The third great technical change was the use by the Venetians of color to effect what other schools, especially the Florentine, had accomplished by means of the sculpturesque line — a change indicative of a vast secularization of values with its demand for the glorification of the sumptuous and suave in experience.
I am not concerned, however, with the history of an art, but with indicating how technique functions in respect to expressive form. The dependence of significant technique upon the need for expressing certain distinctive modes of experience is testified to by the three stages that usually attend the appearance of a new technique. At first there is experimentation on the side of artists, with considerable exaggeration of the factor to which the new technique is adapted. This was true of the use of line to define recognition of the value of the round, as with Mantegna; it is true of the typical impressionists in respect to light-effects. On the side of the public there is general condemnation of the intent and subject-matter of these adventures in art. In the next stage, the fruits of the new procedure are absorbed; they are naturalized and effect certain modifications of the old tradition. This period establishes the new aims and hence the new technique as having "classic" validity, and is accompanied with a prestige that holds over into subsequent periods. Thirdly, there is a period when special features of the technique of the masters of the balanced period are adopted for imitation and made ends in themselves. Thus in the later seventeenth century, the treatment of dramatic movement characteristic of Titian and still more of Tintoretto, by means chiefly of light and shade, is exaggerated to the point of the theatrical. In Guercino, Caravaggio, Feti, Carracci, Ribera, the attempt to depict movement dramatically results in posed tableaux and defeats itself. In this third stage (which dogs creative work after the latter has received general recognition), technique is borrowed without relation to the urgent experience that at first evoked it. The academic and eclectic result.
I have previously stated that craftsmanship alone is not art. What is now added is the often ignored point of the thorough relativity of technique to form in art. It was not lack of dexterity that gives early Gothic sculpture its special form nor that gives Chinese paintings their special kind of perspective. The artists said what they had to say better with the techniques they used than they could have done with another. What to us is a charming naivete was to them the simple and direct method of expressing a felt subject-matter. For this reason, while there is not continuity of repetition in any esthetic art, neither is there, of necessity, advance. Greek sculpture will never be equaled in its own terms. Thorwaldsen is no Pheidias. That which Venetian painters achieved will stand unrivaled. The modern reproduction of the architecture of the Gothic cathedral always lacks the quality of the original. What happens in the movement of art is emergence of new materials of experience demanding expression, and therefore involving in their expression new forms and techniques. Manet went back in time to achieve his brushwork, but his return involved no mere copying of an old technique.
The relativity of technique to form is nowhere better exemplified than in Shakespeare. After his reputation was established as the universal literary artist, critics thought it necessary to assume that greatness adhered to all his work. They built up theories of literary form on the basis of special techniques. They were shocked when a more accurate scholarship showed that many much lauded things were borrowed from the conventions of the Elizabethan stage. To those who have identified technique with form, the effect is to deflate Shakespeare's greatness. But his substantial form remains just what it always has been and is unaffected by his local adaptations. Allowance for some aspects of his technique should indeed but concentrate attention upon what is significant in his art.
It is hardly possible to overstate the relativity of technique. It vares with all sorts of circumstances having little relation to the work of art — perhaps a new discovery in chemistry that affects pigments. The significant changes are those which affect form itself in its esthetic sense. The relativity of technique to instruments is often overlooked. It becomes important when the new instrument is a sign of a change in culture — that is, in material to be expressed. Early pottery is largely determined by the potters' wheel. Rugs and blankets owe much of their geometric design to the nature of the instrument of weaving. Such things by themselves are like the physical constitution of an artist — as Cezanne wished he had Manet's muscles. Such things become of more than antiquarian interest only when they relate to a change in culture and experience. The technique of those who painted long ago on walls of caves and who carved bone served the purpose that conditions offered or imposed. Artists always have used and always will use all kinds of techniques.
There is, on the other side, a tendency among lay critics to confine experimentation to scientists in the laboratory. Yet one of the essential traits of the artist is that he is born an experimenter. Without this trait he becomes a poor or a good academician. The artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualized experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. This problem cannot be solved once for all. It is met in every new work undertaken. Otherwise an artist repeats himself and becomes esthetically dead. Only because the artist operates experimentally does he open new fields of experience and disclose new aspects and qualities in familiar scenes and objects.
If, instead of saying "experimental" one were to say "adventurous," one would probably win general assent — so great is the power of words. Because the artist is a lover of unalloyed experience, he shuns objects that are already saturated, and he is therefore always on the growing edge of things. By the nature of the case, he is as unsatisfied with what is established as is a geographic explorer or a scientific inquirer. The "classic" when it was produced bore the marks of adventure. This fact is ignored by classicists in their protest against romantics who undertake the development of new values, often without possessing means for their creation. That which is now classic is so because of completion of adventure, not because of its absence. The one who perceives and enjoys esthetically always has the sense of adventure in reading any classic that Keats had in reading Chapman's Homer.
Form in the concrete can be discussed only with respect to actual works of art. These cannot be presented in a book on the theory of esthetics. But absorption in a work of art so complete as to exclude analysis cannot be long sustained. There is a rhythm of surrender and reflection. We interrupt our yielding to the object to ask where it is leading and how it is leading there. We then become occupied in some degree with the formal conditions of a concrete form. We have, indeed, already mentioned these conditions of form in speaking of cumulation, tension, conservation, anticipation, and fulfillment as formal characteristics of an esthetic experience. The one who withdraws far enough from the work of art to escape the hypnotic effect of its total qualitative impression will not use these words nor be explicitly conscious of the things for which they stand. But the traits he distinguishes as those which gave the work its power over him are reducible to such conditions of form as have been stated.
The total overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in seizure by a sudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of entrance into a cathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass and majestic proportions fuse in one indistinguishable whole. We say with truth that a painting strikes us. There is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about. As the painter Delacroix said about this first and pre-analytic phase, "before knowing what the picture represents you are seized by its magical accord." This effect is particularly conspicuous for most persons in music. The impression directly made by an harmonious ensemble in any art is often described as the musical quality of that art.
Not only, however, is it impossible to prolong this stage of esthetic experience indefinitely, but it is not desirable to do so. There is only one guarantee that this direct seizure be at a high level, and that is the degree of cultivation of the one experiencing it. In itself it may be, and often is, the result of cheap means employed upon meretricious stuff. And the only way in which to rise from that level to one where there is intrinsic assurance of worth is through intervening periods of discrimination. Distinction in product is intimately connected with the process of distinguishing.
While both original seizure and subsequent critical discrimination have equal claims, each to its own complete development, it must not be forgotten that direct and unreasoned impression comes first. There is about such occasions something of the quality of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it does not, even in the presence of the same object. It cannot be forced, and, when it does not arrive, it is not wise to seek to recover by direct action the first fine rapture. The beginning of esthetic understanding is the retention of these personal experiences and their cultivation. For, in the end, nourishing of them will pass into discrimination. The outcome of discrimination will often be to convince us that the particular thing in question was not worthy of calling out the rapt seizure; that in fact the latter was caused by factors adventitious to the object itself. But this outcome is itself a definite contribution to esthetic education and lifts the next direct impression to a higher level. In the interest of discrimination, as well as that of direct capture by the object, the one sure means is refusal to simulate and pretend when that which, when it was intense, seemed to the ancients to be a kind of divine madness, does not arrive.
The phase of reflection in the rhythm of esthetic appreciation is criticism in germ and the most elaborate and conscious criticism is but its reasoned expansion. The development of that particular theme belongs elsewhere.* But one topic belonging within that general theme must at least be touched upon here. Many tangled problems, multifarious ambiguities, and historic controversies are involved in the question of the subjective and objective in art. Yet if the position that has been taken regarding form and substance is correct, there is at least one important sense in which form must be as objective as the material which it qualifies. If form emerges when raw materials are selectively arranged with reference to rendering an experience unified in movement to its intrinsic fulfillment, then surely objective conditions are controlling forces in the production of a work of art. A work of fine art, a statue, building, drama, poem, novel, when done, is as much a part of the objective world as is a locomotive or a dynamo. And, as much as the latter, its existence is causally conditioned by the coordination of materials and energies of the external world. I do not mean that this is the whole of the work of art; even the product of industrial art was made to serve a purpose and is actually, instead of potentially, a locomotive as it operates in conditions where it produces consequences beyond its bare physical being; as, namely, it transports human beings and goods. But I do mean that there can be no esthetic experience apart from an object, and that for an object to be the content of esthetic appreciation it must satisfy those objective conditions without which cumulation, conservation, reenforcement, transition into something more complete, are impossible. The general conditions of esthetic form, of which I spoke a few paragraphs ago, are objective in the sense of belonging to the world of physical materials and energies: while the latter do not suffice for an esthetic experience, they are a sine qua non of its existence. And the immediate artistic evidence for the truth of this statement is the interest that obsesses every artist in observing the world about him and his devoted care for the physical media with which he works.
What, then, are those formal conditions of artistic form that are rooted deep in the world itself? The implications of the question involve no material not already considered. Interaction of environment with organism is the source, direct or indirect, of all experience and from the environment come those checks, resistances, furtherances, equilibria, which, when they meet with the energies of the organism in appropriate ways, constitute form. The first characteristic of the environing world that makes possible the existence of artistic form is rhythm. There is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music exist. Were it not so, rhythm as an essential property of form would be merely superimposed upon material, not an operation through which material effects its own culmination in experience.
The larger rhythms of nature are so bound up with the conditions of even elementary human subsistence, that they cannot have escaped the notice of man as soon as he became conscious of his occupations and the conditions that rendered them effective. Dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine, are in their alternation factors that directly concern human beings.
The circular course of the seasons affects almost every human interest. When man became agricultural, the rhythmic march of the seasons was of necessity identified with the destiny of the community. The cycle of irregular regularities in the shape and behavior of the moon seemed fraught with mysterious import for the welfare of man, beast, and crops, and inextricably bound up with the mystery of generation. With these larger rhythms were bound up those of the ever-recurring cycles of growth from seed to a maturity that reproduced the seed; the reproduction of animals, the relation of male and female, the never-ceasing round of births and deaths.
Man's own life is affected by the rhythm of waking and sleeping, hungering and satiety, work and rest. The long rhythms of agrarian pursuits were broken into minuter and more directly perceptible cycles with the development of the crafts. With the working of wood, metal, fibers, clay, the change of raw material into consummated result, through technically controlled means, is objectively manifest. In working the matter, there are the recurrent beats of patting, chipping, molding, cutting, pounding, that mark off the work into measures. But more significant were those times of preparation for war and planting, those times of celebrating victory and harvest, when movements and speech took on cadenced form.
Thus, sooner or later, the participation of man in nature's rhythms, a partnership much more intimate than is any observation of them for purposes of knowledge, induced him to impose rhythm on changes where they did not appear. The apportioned reed, the stretched string and taut skin rendered the measures of action conscious through song and dance. Experiences of war, of hunt, of sowing and reaping, of the death and resurrection of vegetation, of stars circling over watchful shepherds, of constant return of the inconstant moon, were undergone to be reproduced in pantomime and generated the sense of life as drama. The mysterious movements of serpent, elk, boar, fell into rhythms that brought the very essence of the lives of these animals to realization as they were enacted in dance, chiseled in stone, wrought in silver, or limned on the walls of caves. The formative arts that shaped things of use were wedded to the rhythms of voice and the self-contained movements of the body, and out of the union technical arts gained the quality of fine art. Then the apprehended rhythms of nature were employed to introduce evident order into some phase of the confused observations and images of mankind. Man no longer conformed his activities of necessity to the rhythmic changes of nature's cycles, but used those which necessity forced upon him to celebrate his relations to nature as if she had conferred upon him the freedom of her realm.
The reproduction of the order of natural changes and the perception of that order were at first close together, so close that no distinction existed between art and science. They were both called techne. Philosophy was written in verse and, under the influence of imaginative endeavor, the world became a cosmos. Early Greek philosophy told the story of nature, and since a story has beginning, movement, and climax, the substance of the story demanded esthetic form. Within the story, minor rhythms became parts of the great rhythm of generation and destruction, of coming into being and passing out of being; of remission and concentration; of aggregation and dispersion; of consolidation and dissolution. The idea of law emerged with the idea of harmony, and conceptions that are now prosaic commonplaces emerged as parts of the art of nature as that was construed in the art of language.
The existence of a multitude of illustrations of rhythm in nature is a familiar fact. Oft cited are the ebb and flow of tides, the cycle of lunar changes, the pulses in the flow of blood, the anabolism and katabolism of all living processes. What is not so generally perceived is that every uniformity and regularity of change in nature is a rhythm. The terms "natural law" and "natural rhythm" are synonymous. As far as nature is to us more than a flux lacking order in its mutable changes, as far as it is more than a whirlpool of confusions, it is marked by rhythms. Formulae for these rhythms constitute the canons of science. Astronomy, geology, dynamics, and kinematics record various rhythms that are the orders of different kinds of change. The very conceptions of molecule, atom, and electron arise out of the need of formulating lesser and subtler rhythms that are discovered. Mathematics are the most generalized statements conceivable corresponding to the most universally obtaining rhythms. The one, two, three, four, of counting, the construction of lines and angles into geometric patterns, the highest flights of vector analysis, are means of recording or of imposing rhythm.
The history of the progress of natural science is the record of operations that refine and that render more comprehensive our grasp of the gross and limited rhythms that first engaged the attention of archaic man. The development reached a point where the scientific and artistic parted ways. Today the rhythms which physical science celebrates are obvious only to thought, not to perception in immediate experience. They are presented in symbols which signify nothing in sense-perception. They make natural rhythms manifest only to those who have undergone long and severe discipline. Yet a common interest in rhythm is still the tie which holds science and art in kinship. Because of this kinship, it is possible that there may come a day in which subject-matter that now exists only for laborious reflection, that appeals only to those who are trained to interpret that which to sense are only hieroglyphics, will become the substance of poetry, and thereby be the matter of enjoyed perception.
Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence, underlying all realization of order in change, it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as well as the dance. Since man succeeds only as he adapts his behavior to the order of nature, his achievements and victories, as they ensue upon resistance and struggle, become the matrix of all esthetic subject-matter; in some sense they constitute the common pattern of art, the ultimate conditions of form. Their cumulative orders of succession become without express intent the means by which man commemorates and celebrates the most intense and full moments of his experience. Underneath the rhythm of every art and of every work of art there lies, as a substratum in the depths of the subconsciousness, the basic pattern of the relations of the live creature to his environment.
It is not, therefore, just because of the systole and diastole in the coursing of the blood, or alternate inspiration and exhalation in breathing, the swing of the legs and arms in locomotion, nor because of any combination of specific exemplifications of natural rhythm, that man delights in rhythmic portrayals and presentations. The importance of such considerations is great. But ultimately the delight springs from the fact that such things are instances of the relationships that determine the course of life, natural and achieved. The supposition that the interest in rhythm which dominates the fine arts can be explained simply on the basis of rhythmic processes in the living body is but another case of the separation of organism from environment. Man attended to the environment long before he gave much observation or thought to his own organic processes and certainly long before he developed attentive interest to his own mental states.
Naturalism is a word of many meanings in philosophy as well as in art. Like most 'isms — classicism and romanticism, idealism and realism in art — it has become an emotional term, a war cry of partisans. In respect to art, even more than in respect to philosophy, formal definitions leave us cold; by the time we arrive at them, the elements that stirred the blood and aroused admiration in the concrete have vanished. In poetry, "nature" is often associated with an interest that is distinct from, if not opposed to, matter derived from the life of men in association. As with Wordsworth, nature is, then, that to which one turns in communion for the sake of consolation and peace
". .. when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of the heart,"
In painting, "naturalism" suggests turning to the more incidental and, as it were, informal, the more immediately evident aspects of earth, sky, and water in distinction from those pictures that attend to structural relationships. But naturalism in the broadest and deepest sense of nature is a necessity of all great art, even of the most religiously conventional and of abstract painting, and of the drama that deals with human action in an urban setting. Discrimination can be made only with reference to the particular aspect and phase of nature in which the rhythms that mark all relationships of life and its setting are displayed.
Natural and objective conditions must be used in any case to carry through to completion the expression of the values that belong to an integrated experience in its immediate quality. But naturalism in art means something more than the necessity all arts are under of employing natural and sensuous media. It means that all which can be expressed is some aspect of the relation of man and his environment, and that this subject-matter attains its most perfeet wedding with form when the basic rhythms that characterize the interaction of the two are depended upon and trusted with abandon. "Naturalism" is often alleged to signify disregard of all values that cannot be reduced to the physical and animal. But so to conceive nature is to isolate environing conditions as the whole of nature and to exclude man from the scheme of things. The very existence of art as an objective phenomenon using natural materials and media is proof that nature signifies nothing less than the whole complex of the results of the interaction of man, with his memories and hopes, understanding and desire, with that world to which one-sided philosophy confines "nature." The true antithesis of nature is not art but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped convention.
Not but that there exist conventions which are vital and natural. The arts in certain times and places are controlled by conventions of rite and ceremony. Yet they do not then of necessity become barren and unesthetic, for the conventions themselves live in the life of the community. Even when they assume prescribed hieratic and liturgical shapes, they may express what is active in the experience of the group. When Hegel asserted that the first stage in art is always "symbolic" he hinted, in terms of his philosophy, at the fact that certain arts were once free to express only that aspect of experience that had a priestly or royal sanction. Yet it was still an aspect of experience that was expressed. Moreover, as a generalization, the characterization is false. For in all times and places, there have been popular arts of song, dance, storytelling, and picture-making, outside of officially sanctioned and directed arts. The secular arts were, however, more directly naturalistic, and, whenever secularism invaded experience, their qualities remade the official arts in a naturalistic direction. As far as this did not occur, that which was once vital degenerated. Witness, for example, the degenerate baroque that is found in public squares in southwestern Europe. It is trivial to the point of frivolity, with cupids masquerading for cherubs, as a typical example.
Genuine naturalism is as different from imitation of things and traits as it is from imitation of the procedures of artists upon whom time has conferred specious authority — specious because not arising from experience of the things which they experienced and expressed. It is a term of contrast and signifies a deeper and wider sensitivity to some aspect of the rhythms of existence than had previously existed. It is a term of contrast, because it signifies that in some particular a personal perception has been substituted for a convention. Let me recur to what was previously said about the expression of beatification in paintings. The assumption that certain definite lines stand for a given emotion is a convention that does not arise from observation; it stands in the way of acute sensitivity of response. Genuine naturalism supervened when the unfixity of human features under the influence of emotions was perceived; when their own variety of rhythm was reacted to. I do not mean to restrict limiting conventions to ecclesiastic influence. More hampering ones arise within artists themselves when they become academic, like the later eclectic painting in Italy and most of English poetry in the eighteenth century. What for convenience I call "realistic" art (the word is arbitrary but the thing exists), in distinction from naturalistic, reproduces details but misses their moving and organizing rhythm. Like a photograph it wears out, save for the recording purposes of prose. It wears out because the object can be approached only from one fixed point of view. The relations that form a subtle rhythm promote approach from changing points of view. How many individualized varieties of personal experience utilize a rhythm that is formally the same, though it is actually differentiated by the material which it forms into the substance of a work of art!
In opposition to the so-called poetic diction that flourished in England after the death of Milton, Wordsworth's poetry was a naturalistic revolt. The assumption (due to misunderstanding of something that Wordsworth wrote) that its essence was a use of words of the common idiom makes nonsense of his actual work. For it assumes that he continued the separation of form and substance characteristic of earlier poetry, only turning it face-about. In fact, its significance is illustrated in an early couplet of the poet when that is taken in connection with a comment of his own.
"And, fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines."
This is verse rather than poetry. It is stark description untouched by emotion. As Wordsworth himself said of it: "This is feebly and imperfectly exprest." But he goes on to add, "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetic history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency. I could not at this time have been above fourteen years of age."
Here is a definite instance of transition from the conventional, from something abstractly generalized that both sprang from and conduced to incomplete perception, to the naturalistic — to an experience that corresponded more subtly and sensitively to the rhythm of natural change. For it was not mere variety, mere flux, he wished to express, but that of ordered relationships — the relation of accent of leaves and boughs to variations of sunshine. The details of place and time, of the particular oak, disappear; the relation remains and yet not in the abstract but definitely, though, in this particular case, rather prosaically embodied.
The discussion involves no diversion from the theme of rhythm as a condition of form. Other persons may prefer some other word than "naturalistic" to express escape from convention to perception. But whatever word is used, it must, if it is to be true to refreshment of esthetic form, emphasize sensitivity to natural rhythm. And this fact brings me to a short definition of rhythm. It is ordered variation of changes. When there is a uniformly even flow, with no variations of intensity or speed, there is no rhythm. There is stagnation even though it be the stagnation of unvarying motion. Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. There is a wealth of suggestion in the phrase "takes place." The change not only comes but it belongs; it has its definite place in a larger whole. The most obvious instances of rhythm concern variations in intensity as, in the verses quoted from Wordsworth, certain forms grow strong against the weaker forms of other boughs and leaves. There is no rhythm of any kind, no matter how delicate and no matter how extensive, where variation of pulse and rest do not occur. But these variations of intensity are not, in any complex rhythm, the whole of the matter. They serve to define variations in number, in extent, in velocity, and in intrinsic qualitative differences, as of hue, tone, etc. That is, variations of intensity are relative to the subject-matter directly experienced. Each beat, in differentiating a part within the whole, adds to the force of what went before while creating a suspense that is a demand for something to come. It is not a variation in a single feature but a modulation of the entire pervasive and unifying qualitative substratum.
A gas that evenly saturates a container, a torrential flood sweeping away all resistance, a stagnant pond, an unbroken waste of sand, and a monotonous roar are wholes without rhythm. A pond moving in ripples, forked lightning, the waving of branches in the wind, the beating of a bird's wing, the whorl of sepals and petals, changing shadows of clouds on a meadow, are simple natural rhythms.* There must be energies resisting each other. Each gains intensity for a certain period, but thereby compresses some opposed energy until the latter can overcome the other which has been relaxing itself as it extends. Then the operation is reversed, not necessarily in equal periods of time but in some ratio that is felt as orderly. Resistance accumulates energy; it institutes conservation until release and expansion ensue. There is, at the moment of reversal, an interval, a pause, a rest, by which the interaction of opposed energies is defined and rendered perceptible. The pause is a balance or symmetry of antagonistic forces. Such is the generic schema of rhythmic change save that the statement fails to take account of minor coincident changes of expansion and contraction that are going on in every phase and aspect of an organized whole, and of the fact that the successive waves and pulses are themselves cumulative with respect to final consummation.
With respect to human emotion, an immediate discharge that is fatal to expression is detrimental to rhythm. There is not enough resistance to create tension, and thereby a periodic accumulation and release. Energy is not conserved so as to contribute to an ordered development. We get a sob or shriek, a grimace, a scowl, a contortion, a fist striking out wildly. Darwin's book entitled Expression of Emotions — more accurately their discharge — is full of examples of what happens when an emotion is simply an organic state let loose on the environment in direct overt action. When complete release is postponed and is arrived at finally through a succession of ordered periods of accumulation and conservation, marked off into intervals by the recurrent pauses of balance, the manifestation of emotion becomes true expression, acquiring esthetic quality — and only then.
Emotional energy continues to work but now does real work; it accomplishes something. It evokes, assembles, accepts, and rejects memories, images, observations, and works them into a whole toned throughout by the same immediate emotional feeling. Thereby is presented an object that is unified and distinguished throughout. The resistance offered to immediate expression of emotion is precisely that which compels it to assume rhythmic form. This, indeed, is Coleridge's explanation of meter in verse. Its origin, he says, he "would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. . . . This salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state which it counteracts, and this balance of antagonists becomes organized into meter by a supervening act of will or judgment, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure." There is "an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose." Meter thus "tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility of both the general feelings and the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise and the quick reciprocations of curiosity gratified and re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence." Music complicates and intensifies the process of genial reciprocating antagonism, suspense and reenforcement, where the various "voices" at once oppose and answer one another.
Santayana has truly remarked: "Perceptions do not remain in the mind, as would be suggested by the trite simile of the seal and the wax, passive and changeless, until time wears off their rough edges and makes them fade. No, perceptions fall into the brain rather as seeds into a furrowed field or even as sparks into a keg of gunpowder. Each image breeds a hundred more, sometimes slowly and subterraneously, sometimes (as when a passionate train is started) with a sudden burst of fancy." Even in abstract processes of thought, connection with the primary motor apparatus is not entirely severed, and the motor mechanism is linked up with reservoirs of energy in the sympathetic and endocrine system. An observation, an idea flashing into the mind, starts something. The result may be a too direct discharge to be rhythmic. There may be a display of rude undisciplined force. There may be a feebleness that allows energy to dissipate itself in idle day-dreaming. There may be too great openness of certain channels due to habits having become blind routines — when activity takes the form sometimes identified exclusively with "practical" doing. Unconscious fears of a world unfriendly to dominating desires breed inhibition of all action or confine it within familiar channels. There are multitudes of ways, varying between poles of tepid apathy and rough impatience, in which energy once aroused, fails to move in an ordered relation of accumulation, opposition, suspense and pause, toward final consummation of an experience. The latter is then inchoate, mechanical, or loose and diffuse. Such cases define, by contrast, the nature of rhythm and expression.
Physically, if you turn a faucet only a little, resistance to the flow compels a conservation of energy until resistance is overcome. Then water comes in individual drops and at regular intervals. If a stream of water falls a sufficient distance, as in a cataract, surface tension causes the stream to reach the bottom in single globules. Polarity, or opposition of energies, is everywhere necessary to the definition, the delimitation, that resolves an otherwise uniform mass and expanse into individual forms. At the same time the balanced distribution of opposite energies provides the measure or order which prevents variation from becoming a disordered heterogeneity. Paintings as well as music, drama, and the novel are characterized by tension. In its obvious forms it is seen in the use of complementary colors, the contrast of foreground and background, of central and peripheral objects. In modern paintings, the necessary contrast and relation of light and dark is not attained by using shading, umbers and browns, but by pure colors each of which in itself is bright. Curves similar to one another are used in defining contours but with opposed direction, up and down, forward and back. Single lines also exhibit tension. As Leo Stein has remarked, "Tension in line can be observed if one will follow the outline of a vase and notice the force it takes to bend the line of a contour. This will depend upon the inherent elasticity of the line, the direction and energy imparted by the previous portion, and so on." The universality of use of intervals in works of art is significant. They are not breaks, since they bring about both individualized delimitation and proportionate distribution. They specify and they relate at the same time.
The medium through which energy operates determines the resulting work. The resistance to be overcome in song, dance, and dramatic presentation is partly within the organism itself, embarrassment, fear, awkwardness, self-consciousness, lack of vitality, and partly in the audience addressed. Lyrical utterance and dance, the sounds emitted by musical instruments stir the atmosphere or the ground. They do not have to meet the opposition that is found in reshaping external material. Resistance is personal and consequences are directly personal on the side of both producer and consumer. Yet eloquent utterance is not writ in water. The organisms, the persons concerned are in some measure remade. Composer, writer, painter, sculptor, work in a medium that is more external and at a greater remove from the audience than do actor, dancer, and musical performer. They reshape an external material that offers resistance and sets up tensions within, while they are relieved of the pressure exercised by an immediate audience. The difference goes deep. It appeals to difference in temperament and talent and different moods in the audience. Painting and architecture cannot receive the direct excited simultaneous acclaim evoked by the theater, the dance, and the musical performance. The direct personal contact established by eloquence, music, and enacted drama is sui generis.
The immediate effect of the plastic and architectural arts is not organic but in the enduring environing world. It is at once more indirect and more lasting. Song and drama recorded in letters, music that is written, take their place among the formative arts. The effect of the objective modifications brought about in the formative arts is dual. On the one hand, there is a direct lowering of tension between man and the world. Man finds himself more at home, since he is in a world that he has participated in making. He becomes habituated and relatively at ease. In some cases and within certain limits, the resulting greater accommodation of man and the environment to each other is unfavorable to further esthetic creation. Things are now too smooth; there is not enough irregularity to create demand for a new manifestation and opportunity for a new rhythm. Art becomes stereotyped, and contented with playing minor variations upon old themes in styles and manners that are agreeable because they are the channels of pleasant reminiscence. The environment is, in so far, exhausted, worn out, esthetically speaking. The recurrence of the academic and eclectic in the arts is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. And if we usually associate the academic with painting and sculpture rather than with, say, poetry or the novel, it is none the less true that the reliance of the latter upon stock scenes, variations of familiar situations and dressings-up of readily recognized types of character have all the traits that make us call a picture academic.
But in time, this very familiarity sets up resistance in some minds. Familiar things are absorbed and become a deposit in which the seeds or sparks of new conditions set up a turmoil. When the old has not been incorporated, the outcome is merely eccentricity. But great original artists take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned but digested it. Then the very conflict set up between it and what is new in themselves and in their environment creates the tension that demands a new mode of expression. Shakespeare may have had "little Latin and less Greek" but he was such an insatiable devourer of accessible material that he would have been a plagiarist if the material had not at once antagonized and cooperated with his personal vision by means of an equally insatiable curiosity concerning the life surrounding him. The great innovators in modern painting were more assiduous students of the pictures of the past than were the imitators who set the contemporary fashion. But the materials of their personal vision operated to oppose the old traditions and out of the reciprocal conflict and reenforcement came new rhythms.
In the facts indicated are the foundations of an esthetic theory based on art and not on extraneous preconceptions. Theory can be based only upon an understanding of the central role of energy within and without, and of that interaction of energies which institutes opposition in company with accumulation, conservation, suspense and interval, and cooperative movement toward fulfillment in an ordered, or rhythmical experience. Then the inward energy finds release in expression and the outward embodiment of energy in matter takes on form. Here we have a fuller and more explicit case of that relation between doing and undergoing of organism and environment whose product is an experience. The rhythm peculiar to different relations between doing and undergoing is the source of the distribution and apportionment of elements that conduces to directness and unity of perception. Lack of proper relationship and distribution produces a confusion that blocks singleness of perception. Just relationship produces the experience by virtue of which a work of art both excites and composes. The doing stirs while undergone consequences bring a phase of tranquillity. A thorough and related undergoing effects an accumulation of energy that is the source of further discharge in activity. The resulting perception is ordered and clear and at the same time emotionally toned.
It is possible to exaggerate the quality of serenity in art. There is no art without the composure that corresponds to design and composition in the object. But there is also none without resistance, tension, and excitement; otherwise the calm induced is not one of fulfillment. In conception, things are distinguished that in perception and emotion belong together. The distinctions, which become antitheses in philosophic reflection, of sensuous and ideal, surface and content or meaning, of excitement and calm, do not exist in works of art; and they are not there merely because conceptual oppositions have been overcome but because the work of art exists at a level of experience in which these distinctions of reflective thought have not arisen. From variety excitement may occur, but in mere variety there are no resistances to be overcome and brought to a pause. There is nothing more diverse than furniture scattered about a sidewalk waiting for the moving van. Yet order and serenity do not emerge when these things are forced together in the van. They must be distributed in relation to one another as in the furnishing of a room to compose a whole. Cooperation of distribution and unification bring about that movement of change which excites and the fulfillment which calms.
There is an old formula for beauty in nature and art: Unity in variety. Everything depends upon how the preposition "in" is understood. There may be many articles in a box, many figures in a single painting, many coins in one pocket, and many documents in safe. The unity is extraneous and the many are unrelated. The significant point is that unity and manyness are always of this sort or approximate it when the unity of the object or scene is morphological and static. The formula has meaning only when its terms are understood to concern a relation of energies. There is no fullness, no many parts, without distinctive differentiations. But they have esthetic quality, as in the richness of a musical phrase, only when distinctions depend upon reciprocal resistances. There is unity only when the resistances create a suspense that is resolved through cooperative interaction of the opposed energies. The "one" of the formula is the realization through interacting parts of their respective energies. The "many" is the manifestation of the defined individualizations due to opposed forces that finally sustain a balance. Thus the next theme is the organization of energies in a work of art. For the unity in variety that characterizes a work of art is dynamic.
*From Notes d'un Peintre, published in 1908. In another connection one might dwell upon the implications of the phrase concerning the necessity for "putting ideas in order."
*See Chapter XIII.
*The fact that we designate it a "whorl" indicates that we are subconsciously aware of the tension of energies involved.