IT has been repeatedly intimated that there is a difference between the art product (statue, painting or whatever), and the work of art. The first is physical and potential; the latter is active and experienced. It is what the product does, its working. For nothing enters experience bald and unaccompanied, whether it be a seemingly formless happening, a theme intellectually systematized, or an object elaborated with every loving care of united thought and emotion. Its very entrance is the beginning of a complex interaction; upon the nature of this interaction depends the character of the thing as finally experienced. When the structure of the object is such that its force interacts happily (but not easily) with the energies that issue from the experience itself; when their mutual affinities and antagonisms work together to bring about a substance that develops cumulatively and surely (but not too steadily) toward a fulfilling of impulsions and tensions, then indeed there is a work of art.
In the previous chapter, I emphasized the dependence of this final work upon the existence of rhythms in nature; as I pointed out, they are the conditions of form in experience and hence of expression. But an esthetic experience, the work of art in its actuality, is perception. Only as these rhythms, even if embodied in an outer object that is itself a product of art, become a rhythm in experience itself are they esthetic. And this rhythm in what is experienced is something quite different from intellectual recognition that there is rhythm in the external thing: as different as is the perceptual enjoyment of glowing harmonious colors from the mathematical equations that define them for a scientific inquirer.
I begin by applying this consideration to get rid of a false notion of rhythm that has, somehow, seriously infected esthetic theory. For the misconception springs from failure to take into account the fact that esthetic rhythm is a matter of perception and therefore includes whatever is contributed by the self in the active process of perceiving. And strangely enough the misconception in question exists side by side with statements that esthetic experience is an affair of immediacy of perception. The notion I refer to identifies rhythm with regularity of recurrence amid changing elements.
Before dealing directly with this conception, I want to point out its effect upon understanding art. The order of the elements of spatial objects as spatial and physical, that is apart from their entrance into that interaction which causes an experience, is, comparatively at least, fixed. Aside from a slow process of weathering, the lines and planes of a statue stay the same, and so do the configurations and intervals of a building. From this fact is derived the conclusion that there are two kinds of fine arts, the spatial and the temporal, and that only the latter are marked by rhythm: the counterpart of this error being that only buildings and statues possess symmetry. The mistake would be serious if it affected only theory. In fact denial of rhythm to pictures and buildings obstructs perception of qualities that are absolutely indispensable in their esthetic effect.
The identification of rhythm with literal recurrence, with regular return of identical elements, conceives of recurrence statically or anatomically instead of functionally; for the latter interprets recurrence on the basis of furtherance, through the energy of the elements, of a complete and consummatory experience. Since a favorite illustration of those who hold the theory is the ticking of a clock, it may be called the tick-tock theory. Although it should be evident upon a moment's reflection that if it were possible to experience a uniform series of tick-tocks, the effect would be either to put us to sleep or goad us to exasperation, yet the conception of such regularity is taken as furnishing the ground-plan, which is then supposed to be complicated by the superimposition of a number of other rhythms, each equally regular in itself. Of course, it may be possible to analyze mathematically an actually experienced rhythm into a combination of a basic regularity overlaid with a number of minor uniform repetitions. But the result is only a mechanical approximation to any vital or expressive rhythm. It is similar to the outcome of attempts to construct esthetically satisfactory curved lines (like those of a Greek vase) out of the combination of a number of curves, each of which is constructed according to rigid mathematical calculation.
An investigator undertook with the aid of a recording instrument an inquiry into the voices of singers. It was found that the voices of accomplished artists, those rated as superior, were registered in lines slightly above or slightly below the lines which stood for exact pitch, while singers still in training were much more likely to produce sounds that coincided exactly with the registers of exact intervals. The investigator remarked that the artists always "took liberties" with music. In fact these "liberties" mark the difference between mechanical or purely objective construction and artistic production. For rhythm involves constant variation. In the definition that was given of rhythm as ordered variation of manifestation of energy, variation is not only as important as order, but it is an indispensable coefficient of esthetic order. The greater the variation, the more interesting the effect, provided order is maintained — a fact that proves that the order in question is not to be stated in terms of objective regularities but requires another principle for its interpretation. This principle, once more, is that of cumulative progression toward the fulfillment of an experience in terms of the integrity of the experience itself — something not to be measured in external terms, though not attainable without the use of external materials, observed or imagined.
I may illustrate by a somewhat arbitrarily selected portion of verse, purposely taking that which, although interesting, is not of the highest order. Some lines from Wordsworth's "Prelude" will serve the purpose:
".. . the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of these two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes."
There is always something stupid about turning poetry into a prose that is supposed to explain the meaning of the poetry. But my purpose here in giving a prosaic analysis is not to explain the lines but to enforce a point of theory. So we notice that, in the first place, there is not a word that repeats the kind of fixed significance that might be set forth in a dictionary. The meaning of "wind, rain, sheep, tree, stone wall, mist" is a function of the whole situation expressed, and hence is a variable of that situation and not an external constant. The same thing is true of the adjectives: sleety, single, blasted, bleak, indisputable. Their sense is determined by the individual experience of desolation that is building; each contributes a furtherance of its realization, while each in turn is qualified by the experience into the construction of which it enters as an energizing factor. Then there is the variation in objects, some relatively motionless set over against those in motion; things seen and things heard, rain and wind; wall and music; tree and noise. Then there is the relatively slow pace as long as objects dominate, changing to an accelerated pace with events, with "the noise of wood and water," culminating in the push of the relentlessly advancing mist. It is this variation affecting every detail that makes the difference between such verses and a seesaw couplet. Yet "order" is maintained, not that indeed of repetition in substance or in form, but actively, since each element carries forward the building up of an integrally experienced situation, building it up without waste, and without incongruities that clash and destroy. Order, for esthetic purposes, is defined and measured by functional and operative traits.
Contrast these lines with, say, some gospel hymn from whose lilt and swing thousands have obtained a rudimentary esthetic satisfaction. The relatively external and physical character of the latter is manifest in the tendency to respond with a physical keeping of time; the poverty of the sentiment is due to the comparative uniformity of both matter and its treatment. Even in a ballad, refrains do not have in experience the uniformity they have in isolation. For as they enter into changing contexts they have a varying effect that carries on a cumulative conservation. It is possible for an artist to employ something that is externally sheer repetition to convey a sense of inexorable fate. But the effect depends upon a summation that is more than quantitative addition. Thus in music a repeated phrase, perhaps the one thrown at us at the beginning of a symphony, gains force because the new contexts in which it is found, color it and give it a new value, even if only that of a more insistent, precise and cumulative enunciation of a theme.
There is, of course, no rhythm without recurrence. But the reflective analysis of physical science is substituted for the experience of art when recurrence is interpreted as literal repetition, whether of material or exact interval. Mechanical recurrence is that of material units. Esthetic recurrence is that of relationships that sum up and carry forward. Recurring units as such call attention to themselves as isolated parts, and thus away from the whole. Hence they lessen esthetic effect. Recurring relationships serve to define and delimit parts, giving them individuality of their own. But they also connect; the individual entities they mark off demand, because of the relations, association and interaction with other individuals. Thus the parts vitally serve in the construction of an expanded whole.
The beat of the drum of the savage has also been held up as the model of rhythm, so that the "tick-tock" theory becomes the "tom-tom" theory. Here, too, it is held that a simple, rather monotonous, repetition of beats is the standard, and that it is varied by the addition of other rhythms each of which is itself uniform, while piquancy is introduced by the use of arythmic change. Unfortunately for the supposed objective basis of the theory, tom-tom beats do not occur alone, but as factors in a much more complex whole of varied singing and dancing. And instead of repetition there is a development, a working up to greater pitches of excitement, perhaps a frenzy, that has begun with relative slow and calm movements. What is even more important, the history of music shows that in fact the primitive rhythms, like those of the African negro, are more subtly varied, less uniform, than those of the music of civilized folk, just as those of northern negroes in the United States are usually more conventionalized than those of the south. The exigencies of part-music and the potentialities of harmony have operated to reduce to greater uniformity that phase of rhythm that consists in direct variations of intensity, while the theory in question demands a reverse movement.
The live creature demands order in his living but he also demands novelty. Confusion is displeasing but so is ennui. The 'touch of disorder" that lends charm to a regular scene is disorderly only from some external standard. From the standpoint of actual experience it adds emphasis, distinction, as long as it does not prevent a cumulative carrying forward from one part to another. If it were experienced as disorder it would produce an unresolved clash and be displeasing. A temporary clash, on the other hand, may be the factor of resistance that summons up energy to proceed the more actively and triumphantly. Only persons who have been spoiled in early life like things always soft; persons of vigor who prefer to live and who are not contented with subsisting find the too easy repulsive. The difficult becomes objectionable only when instead of challenging energy it overwhelms and blocks it. Some esthetic products have an immediate vogue; they are the "best sellers" of their day. They are "easy" and thus make a quick appeal; their popularity calls out imitators, and they set the fashion in plays or novels or songs for a time. But their very ready assimilation into experience exhausts them quickly; no new stimulus is derived from them. They have their day — and only a day.
Compare a picture by, say, Whistler with one by Renoir. In the former — in most cases — there will be found considerable stretches of color as nearly uniform as may be. Rhythms, with their necessary factors of contrast, are constituted only by the opposition of large blocks. On only a square inch of a painting by Renoir there will be found no two contiguous lines of exactly the same quality. We may not be conscious of this fact as we look at the picture, but we are conscious of its effect. It contributes to the immediate richness of the whole, and it provides the conditions for new stimulation of new responses upon every subsequent approach. This element of continual variation — provided dynamic relations of reenforcement, and conservation are met — is what makes a picture or any work of art wear.
What is true in the large is true in the small. Repetition of uniform units at uniform intervals is not only not rhythmic but is opposed to the experience of rhythm. A checkerboard effect is more pleasing than a large blank space or than one filled with lines that wander at random and that instead of defining figures interfere with the carrying forward of vision. For experience of the checkered arrangement is not so regular as is the object taken physically and geometrically. As the eye moves it takes in new and reenforcing surfaces, and careful observation will show that new patterns are almost automatically constructed. The squares run now vertically, now horizontally, now in one diagonal, now in the other; and the smaller squares construct not only larger squares but also rectangles and figures having stair-like outlines. The organic demand for variety is such that it is enforced in experience, even without much external occasion. Even the tick-tock of the clock as it is heard varies, because what is heard is an interaction of the physical event with changing pulsations of organic response. The often made comparison of music and architecture rests upon the fact that these arts, more directly than others, exemplify organic recurrences effected by cumulative relationships rather than by repetition of units. The esthetic vulgarity of many of our edifices, especially of those that line American city streets, is due to the monotony caused by regular repetition of forms, uniformly spaced, the architect depending only upon adventitious ornamentation for variety. An even more striking example is found in our terrible civil-war monuments and much of our municipal statuary.
I have said that the organism craves variety as well as order. The statement, however, is too weak for it sets forth a secondary property rather than the primary fact. The process of organic life is variation. In words which William James often quoted, it marks an instance of "ever, not quite." Craving as such arises only when this natural tendency is blocked by untoward circumstance, by the monotony of excess poverty or excess luxury. Every movement of experience in completing itself recurs to its beginning, since it is a satisfaction of the prompting initial need. But the recurrence is with a difference; it is charged with all the differences the journey out and away from the beginning has made. For random samples, take the return after many years to childhood's home; the proposition that is proved through a course of reasoning and the proposition as first enunciated; the meeting with an old friend after separation; the recurrence of a phrase in music; of a refrain in poetry.
Demand for variety is the manifestation of the fact that being alive we seek to live, until we are cowed by fear or dulled by routine. The need of life itself pushes us out into the unknown. This is the abiding truth of romance. It may degenerate into formless indulgence in motion and excitement for its own sake, and be expressed in pseudo-romanticism. But vocal classicism, that which preaches rather than enacts as does that which genuinely becomes classic, is always based on fear of life and retraction from its exigencies and challenges. The romantic when ordered by appropriate rhythm becomes classic, whenever the adventure undertaken is of scope sufficient to test as well as evoke the energies of men: The Iliad and Odyssey are perennial witnesses. Rhythm is rationality among qualities. The hold of the lowest order of rhythm upon the uncultivated shows that some order is desired in the stir of existence. And even the equations of mathematicians are evidence that variation is desired in the midst of maximum repetition, since they express equivalences, not exact identities.
Esthetic recurrence in short is vital, physiological, functional. Relationships rather than elements recur, and they recur in differing contexts and with different consequences so that each recurrence is novel as well as a reminder. In satisfying an aroused expectancy, it also institutes a new longing, incites a fresh curiosity, establishes a changed suspense. The completeness of the integration of these two offices, opposed as they are in abstract conception, by the same means instead of by using one device to arouse energy and another to bring it to rest, measures artistry of production and perception. A well-conducted scientific inquiry discovers as it tests, and proves as it explores; it does so in virtue of a method which combines both functions. And conversation, drama, novel, and architectural construction, if there is an ordered experience, reach a stage that at once records and sums up the value of what precedes, and evokes and prophesies what is to come. Every closure is an awakening, and every awakening settles something. This state of affairs defines organization of energy.
Insistence upon variation in rhythm may seem to be a laboring of the obvious. My excuse is not only that influential theories have slighted this property, but that there is a tendency to limit rhythm to some one phase of an art product: for instance, to tempo in music, lines in painting, meter in poetry; to flattened or smooth curves in sculpture. Such limitation always tends in the direction of what Bosanquet called "easy beauty," and when carried through logically, whether in theory or practice, results in some matter being left without form and some form being arbitrarily imposed upon matter.
In the "Spring" and "Birth of Venus" of Botticelli, the charm of arabesques and line in rhythmic patterns is easily felt. Its charm may easily seduce a spectator into making this phase of rhythm, more unconsciously than explicitly, a standard of judgment for experience of other paintings. It will then result in an overestimation of Botticelli in comparison with other painters. This in itself is a minor matter, since it is better to be sensitive to one aspect of form than to judge pictures merely as illustrations. What is more important is that it tends to create insensitiveness to ways of achieving rhythms that are at once more solid and more subtle: such as relations of planes, of masses, of colors not sharply delineated. Again, the adequacy of Greek sculpture as a means of expressing the human figure through the use of flattened or rounded planes is worth the admiration called forth by the statues of Pheidias. But it is not well when this particular rhythmic mode is set up as the sole standard. Then perception is obscured of what is characteristic of the best in Egyptian sculpture, obtained by relation of larger masses, of negro sculpture with its sharp angularities, of works like Epstein's that depend so largely upon rhythms of light obtained by continually broken surfaces.
The same instances exemplify the separation of substance and form that results when rhythm is limited to variation and recurrence in a single feature. Familiar ideas, standardized moral counsels, themes of conventional romance like the love of a Darby for some Joan, the established charm of objects such as rose and lily, are made more pleasing when clothed in rhyme and punctuated with metrical swing. But in such cases we are, at the end, only reminded in an agreeable way, occasioning a temporary titillation of pleasure, of what we have already experienced. When all materials are interpenetrated by rhythm, the theme or "subject" is transformed into a new subject-matter. There is that sudden magic which gives us the sense of an inner revelation brought to us about something we had supposed to be known through and through. In short, the reciprocal interpretation of parts and whole, which we have seen to constitute an object a work of art, is effected when all the constituents of the work, whether picture, drama, poem or building, stand in rhythmic connection with all other members of the same kind — line with line, color with color, space with space, illumination with light and shade in a painting — and all of these distinctive factors reenforce one another as variations that build up an integrated complex experience. It would be pedantic as well as ungenerous to deny all esthetic quality to an object that is marked in some one respect by rhythms that consolidate and organize the energies involved in having an experience. But the objective measure of greatness is precisely the variety and scope of factors which, in being rhythmic each to each, still cumulatively conserve and promote one another in building up the actual experience.
An attempt has been made to support the distinction between substance and form in works of art by contrasting "fineness" with "greatness." Art is fine, it is said, when form is perfected; but it is great because of the intrinsic scope and weight of the subject-matter dealt with, even though the manner of dealing with it is less fine. The novels of Jane Austen and of Sir Walter Scott have been used to illustrate the alleged distinction. I cannot find that it is valid. If the novels of Scott are greater in scope and amplitude than those of Miss Austen, although less fine, it is because, while no one phase of the means employed is carried through as perfectly as in the one medium in which Jane Austen excels, there is a wider range of subject-matter in which some degree of form is attained. It is not a question of form versus subject-matter but of the number of kinds of co-working formal relationships. A clear pool, a gem, a miniature, an illuminated manuscript, a short story have their own perfection, each after its kind. The single quality that dominates in each may be carried through more adequately than is any single system of relations in objects of greater scope and complexity. But the multiplication of effects in the latter, when they conduce to an unified experience, makes the latter "greater."
When it is a matter of technology, domestic economy, or social polity, we do not have to be told that rationality, intelligibility, is measured by orderly co-adaptation of means moving toward a common end. Absurdity is mutual nullification carried to its completion, becoming esthetic or "funny" when successfully executed. We are aware, in a corresponding way, that a man's practical ability is determined by his capacity to mobilize a variety of means and measures to accomplish a large result with the maximum of economy; and that economy becomes esthetically unpleasant when it is forced upon attention as a separate factor, while scope of means is magnificent, not silly display, when there is a corresponding extensive result. So too, we are aware that thinking consists in ordering a variety of meanings so that they move to a conclusion that all support and in which all are summed up and conserved. What we perhaps are less cognizant of is that this organization of energies to move cumulatively to a terminal whole in which the values of all means and media are incorporated is the essence of fine art.
In the practice and reasoning of ordinary life, organization is less direct, and the sense of the conclusion or consummation comes, comparatively at least, only at the end, instead of being carried at every stage. This postponement of the sense of completion, this lack of the presence of continuous perfecting, reacts, of course, to reduce means used to the state of mere means. They are indispensable antecedent conditions, but they are not intrinsic constituents of the end. In such cases, in other words, organization of energies is piecemeal, one replacing another, while in the artistic process it is cumulating and conserving. And thus we are brought again to rhythm. For whenever each step forward is at the same time a summing up and fulfillment of what precedes, and every consummation carries expectation tensely forward, there is rhythm.
In ordinary life, much of our pressing forward is impelled by outside necessities, instead of an onward motion like that of waves of the sea. Similarly, much of our resting is recuperation from exhaustion; it, too, is compelled by something external. In rhythmic ordering, every close and pause, like the rest in music, connects as well as delimits and individualizes. A pause in music is not a blank, but is a rhythmic silence that punctuates what is done while at the same time it conveys an impulsion forward, instead of arresting at the point which it defines. In looking at a picture or reading a poem or drama, we sometimes take the same feature in its defining and closing quality, sometimes in its transitive office. Normally, the way we take it depends upon the direction of our interest at that particular point in our experience. But there are art-products in which an element insists upon being taken in only one way. Then there is the kind of restriction that is found in painting by the exaggeration of line in the Florentine school; of light in Leonardo, and in Raphael under the influence of Leonardo; of atmosphere in the thoroughgoing impressionists. To achieve an exact balance of mergings that carry forward and pauses that accentuate and define is extremely difficult, and we can derive genuine esthetic satisfaction from objects in which it is not accomplished. But organization of energy is none the less partial in such cases.
The active as distinct from morphological character of the rhythm of acts and undergoings, of defining rests and forward impulsions, is made clear in art by the fact that the artist uses that which is usually found ugly to get esthetic effect; colors that clash, sounds that are discordant, cacophonies in poetry, seemingly dark and obscure places or even sheer blanks — as in Matisse — in painting. It is the way the thing is related that counts. The familiar instance of Shakespeare's employing the comic in the midst of tragedy is in point. It does more than relieve strain on the part of the spectator. It has a more intrinsic office in that it punctuates tragic quality. Any product whose quality is not of the very "easy" sort exhibits dislocations and dissociations of what is usually connected. The distortion found in paintings serves the need of some particular rhythm. But it does more. It brings to definite perception values that are concealed in ordinary experience because of habituation. Ordinary prepossession must be broken through if the degree of energy required for an esthetic experience is to be evoked.
Unfortunately, in writing upon esthetic theory one is compelled to speak in generalized terms because it is impossible to present the work in which the material exists in its individualized form. But I shall engage in a schematic illustration drawn from an actual painting.* In looking at this particular object I have in mind, attention is first caught by the objects in which masses point upward: the first impression is that of movement from below to above. This statement does not mean that the spectator is explicitly conscious of vertically direct rhythms, but that, if he stops to analyze, he finds that the first and dominant impression is determined by patterns so constituted by rhythms. Meantime the eye is also moving across the picture though the interest remains in patterns that rise. Then there is a halt, an arrest, a punctuating pause as vision comes in the opposite lower corner upon a definite mass that instead of fitting into the vertical patterns transfers attention to the weight of horizontally disposed masses. Were the picture badly composed, the variation would operate as a disturbing interruption, a break in experience instead of as a re-direction of interest and attention, thus expanding the significance of the object. As it is, the close of one phase of order gives a new set to expectancy and this is fulfilled as vision travels back, by a series of colored areas dominantly horizontal in character. Then, as that phase of perception completes itself, attention is drawn to the ordered variation in color characteristic of these masses. Then as attention is redirected to the vertical patterns — at the point from which we set out — we miss the design constituted by color variation and find attention directed toward spatial intervals determined by a series of receding and intertwined planes. The impression of depth, implicit of course, in perception from the first is made explicit by this particular rhythmic order.
In the building up of this pictorial perception, four kinds of organic energy, merged in the original total impression, have been called into special intensity of action, and yet there has been no break in experience. Nor does the story cease at this point. As one becomes more aware of the factors that constitute depth in space, a scene in the far distance stands out. This scene, considering its indicated distance, is characterized by marked luminosity. Then vision is set to perceiving more definitely the rhythms of luminosity that give enhanced value to the picture as a whole. Here are some five systems of rhythm. Each of these, if further examined, would disclose minor rhythms within it. Each rhythm, major or minor, interacts with all the others to engage different systems of organic energy. But they also have to interact with one another in such ways that energy is consistently organized as well as called forth. Sometimes in an object of a new kind, one meets with a surprise that is disconcerting. This happens in objects so eccentric as to be of little worth; it also happens, upon their first appearance, with works of high esthetic value. It takes time to discern whether the shock is caused by inherent breaks in the organization of the object, or by lack of preparation in the perceiver.
What has been said may seem to exaggerate the temporal aspect of perception. I have, without doubt, stretched out elements that are usually more or less telescoped. But in no case can there be perception of an object except in a process developing in time. Mere excitations, yes; but not an object as perceived, instead of just recognized as one of a familiar kind. If our view of the world consisted of a succession of momentary glimpses, it would be no view of the world nor of anything in it. If the roar and the rushing stream of Niagara were limited to an instantaneous noise and peep, there would not be perceived the sound or sight of any object, much less of the particular object called Niagara Falls. It would not be grasped even as a noise. Nor would mere isolated continuation of the external noise beating on the ear effect anything except increased confusion. Nothing is perceived except when different senses work in relation with one another except when the energy of one "center" is communicated to others, and then new modes of motor responses are incited which in turn stir up new sensory activities. Unless these various sensory-motor energies are coordinated with one another there is no perceived scene or object. But equally there is none when — by a condition impossible to fulfill in fact — a single sense alone is operative. If the eye is the organ primarily active, then the color quality is affected by qualities of other senses overtly active in earlier experiences. In this way it is affected with a history; there is an object with a past. And the impulsion of the motor elements which are involved effects an extension into the future, since it gets ready for what is to come and in a way predicts what is to happen.
The denial of rhythm to pictures, edifices, and statues, or the assertion that it is found in them only metaphorically, rests upon ignorance of the inherent nature of every perception. Of course there are recognitions that are virtually instantaneous. But these occur only when, through a sequence of past experiences, the self has become expert in certain directions, be it simply in seeing at a glance that a certain object is a table or that a painting is by a particular artist, say Manet. Because present perception utilizes an organization of energies worked out serially in the past is no reason for eliminating temporal quality from perception. And in any case, if the perception is esthetic, an instantaneous identification is only its beginning. There is no inherent esthetic value in identifying a picture as such and such. The identification may arouse attention and lead to dwelling upon the painting in such a way that parts and relations are called out to compose a whole.
We are hardly conscious of anything metaphorical when we say of one picture or of a story that it is dead, and of another that it has life. To explain just what we mean when we say this, is not easy. Yet the consciousness that one thing is limp, that another has the heavy inertness of inanimate things, while another seems to move from within, arises spontaneously. There must be something in the object that instigates it. Now that which marks off the living from the dead is not bustle and ado, nor does a picture literally move. The living being is characterized by having a past and a present; having them as possessions of the present, not just externally. And I suggest that it is precisely when we get from an art product the feeling of dealing with a career, a history, perceived at a particular point of its development, that we have the impression of life. That which is dead does not extend into the past nor arouse any interest in what is to come.
The common element in all the arts, technological and useful, is organization of energy as means for producing a result. In products that strike us as merely useful, our only concern is with something beyond the thing, and if we are not interested in that ulterior product then we are indifferent to the object itself. It may be passed over without our really seeing it or may be idly inspected as we look casually at any curiosity we are told is remarkable. In the esthetic object the object operates — as of course one having an external use may also do — to pull together energies that have been separately occupied in dealing with many different things on different occasions, and to give them that particular rhythmic organization that we have called (when thinking of the effect and not of the mode of its effectuation), clarification, intensification, concentration. Energies that remain in a potential state with respect to one another, however actual of themselves, evoke and reenforce one another directly for the sake of the experience that results.
What is true of original production is true of appreciative perception. We speak of perception and its object. But perception and its object are built up and completed in one and the same continuing operation. What is called the object, the cloud, river, garment, has imputed to it an existence independent of an actual experience; still more is this true of the carbon molecule, the hydrogen ion, the entities of science generally. But the object of — or better in — perception is not one of a kind in general, a sample of a cloud or river, but is this individual thing existing here and now with all the unrepeatable particularities that accompany and mark such existences. In its capacity of object-of-perception, it exists in exactly the same interaction with a living creature that constitutes the activity of perceiving. Now under the pressure of external circumstances or because of internal laxity, objects of most of our ordinary perception lack completeness. They are cut short when there is recognition; that is to say when the object is identified as one of a kind, or of a species within the kind. For such recognition suffices to enable us to employ the object for customary purposes. It is enough to know that those objects are rain-clouds to induce us to carry an umbrella. The full perceptual realization of just the individual clouds they are might even get in the way of utilizing them as an index of a specific, a limited, kind of conduct. Esthetic perception, on the other hand, is a name for a full perception and its correlative, an object or event. Such a perception is accompanied by, or rather consists in, a release of energy in its purest form; which, as we have seen, is one that is organized and so rhythmic.
We do not need to feel, therefore, that we are speaking metaphorically nor apologize for animism when we speak of a painting as alive, and its figures, as well as architectural and sculptural forms, as manifesting movement. The "Entombment" of Titian does more than suggest the carrying of depressed weight; it conveys or expresses it. The ballet girls of Degas are actually on tiptoe to dance; the children in Renoir's paintings are intent upon their reading or sewing. In Constable, verdure is moist; and in Courbet a glen drips and rocks shine with cool wetness. When fishes are not darting or lazily balancing themselves, when clouds are not floating or scudding, when trees are not reflecting light, they do not evoke the energy appropriate to realization of the full energy of the object. If the perception is then eked out by reminiscences or by sentimental associations derived from literature — as is usually the case in paintings popularly regarded as poetic — a simulated esthetic experience occurs.
Paintings that seem dead in whole or part are those in which intervals merely arrest, instead of also carrying forward. They are "holes," blanks. What we call dead spots are, from the side of the percipient, the things that enforce a partial or frustrated organization of outgoing energy. There are works of art that merely excite, in which activity is aroused without the composure of satisfaction, without fulfillment within the terms of the medium. Energy is left without organization. Dramas are then melodramatic; paintings of nudes are pornographic; the fiction that is read leaves us discontented with the world in which we are, alas, compelled to live without the opportunity for the romantic adventure and high heroism suggested by the story-book. In those novels, in which characters are the puppets of their authors, our revulsion comes from the fact that life is pretended, not enacted. The simulation of life by a show of animation and vivacity leaves us with the same irritation of incompletion that follows continued idle chatter.
I have probably seemed to some to have exaggerated the importance of rhythm at the expense of symmetry. As far as explicit words are concerned, I have done so. But only with respect to words. For the idea of organized energy means that rhythm and balance cannot be separated, although they may be distinguished by thought. Putting it briefly and schematically, when attention dwells especially upon the traits and aspects in which completed organization is displayed, we are especially aware of symmetry, the measuring of one thing in relation to another. Symmetry and rhythm are the same thing felt with the difference of emphasis that is due to attentive interest. When intervals that define rest and relative fulfillment are the traits that especially characterize perception, we are aware of symmetry. When we are concerned with movement, with comings and goings rather than arrivals, rhythm stands out. But in every case, symmetry, since it is the equilibrium of counteracting energies, involves rhythm, while rhythm occurs only when movement is spaced by places of rest, and hence involves measure.
Of course at times, the two fall apart in an art product. But this fact signifies that it is not esthetically complete, that on the one hand there are holes, dead spots, and, on the other, unmotivated and unresolved excitations. In reflective experience as such, in investigation called forth by problematic situations, there is a rhythm of seeking and rinding, of reaching out for a tenable conclusion and coming to what is at least a tentative one. But, as a rule, these phases are too incidental to affect the process with conspicuous esthetic quality. When they become emphatic and are unified with subject-matter, there is the same kind of consciousness that there is in the presence of any artistic construction. In merely simulated and academic art, on the other hand, balance does not coincide with subject-matter but is an arbitrary pose, which in its isolation from movement becomes in time highly wearisome.
The connection of intensity and extensity and of both with tension is not a verbal matter. There is no rhythm save where there is alternation of compressions and releases. Resistance prevents immediate discharge and accumulates tension that renders energy intense. Its release from this state of detention takes necessarily the form of a sequential spreading out. In a picture, cold and warm colors, complementary colors, light and shade, up and down, back and forwards, right and left are, schematically speaking, the means by which the kind of opposition is brought about in a picture that results in balance. In early paintings, this symmetry is effected mainly by means of oppositions in positions to right and left, or by an obvious diagonal arrangement. Now there is energy of position and, hence, in even these pictures, symmetry is not merely spatial. But it is weak, as in the silhouette pictures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the important figure is placed in the exact center, and figures almost identical with one another are placed in nearly exact lateral correspondence. Later, pyramidal forms are depended upon. Such arrangements owe much of their force to factors outside the picture. Stability of objects is accomplished by reminding us of familiar modes securing equilibrium. Thus the effect of symmetry in the picture is associational rather than intrinsic. The tendency in painting has been to the development of relations such that balance cannot be topographically indicated by selection of particular figures but is a function of the whole picture. The "center" of the picture is not spatial but is the focus of interacting forces.
The definition of symmetry in static terms is the exact correspondent of the error by which rhythm is conceived to be recurrence of elements. Balance is balancing, a matter of distribution of weights with respect to the way they act upon one another. The two pans of the scales balance when their push and pull on each other is adjusted. And scales exist in actuality (instead of potentially) only when their pans are operating antagonistically to each other with reference to reaching an equilibrium. Since esthetic objects depend upon a progressively enacted experience, the final measure of balance or symmetry is the capacity of the whole to hold together within itself the greatest variety and scope of opposed elements.
The connection of balance with stress of weights is inherent. Work in any sphere is performed only by the interworking of opposed forces — as by the antagonistic systems of the muscular frame. Hence everything depends in a work of art upon the scale attempted — that is the reason it is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. There is no such thing as a force strong or weak, great or petty, in itself. Miniatures and quatrains have their own perfection, and mere bigness is offensive in its empty pretentiousness. To say that one part of a painting, drama, or novel is too weak, means that some related part is too strong — and vice-versa. Absolutely speaking, nothing is strong or weak; it is the way it works and is worked on. It is sometimes surprising in an architectural vista to see how a low building rightly placed will pull together surrounding high buildings instead of being annihilated by them.
The commonest fault in works having some claim to be called works of art is the effort to get strength by exaggeration of some one element. At first, as with temporary best-sellers in any line, there is an immediate response. But such works do not wear. As time passes it becomes every day more evident that what had been taken to be strength signifies weakness on the part of counterbalancing factors. No sensuous charm, however great in amount, is cloying if it is counteracted in relation to other factors. But in isolation sugariness is one of the most quickly exhausted qualities. The "he-man" style in literature soon wearies because it is evident (even if only subconsciously) that, in spite of violent movement, no real strength is displayed, the counteracting energies being only pasteboard and plaster figures. The seeming strength of one element is at the expense of weakness in other elements. Even the sensationalism of a novel or stage-play refers only to a lack of relations which affects the quality of the whole, not any one incident in itself. A critic has observed of O'Neill's plays that they suffer from lack of retardations; everything moves too quickly and hence too easily, and the result is an overcrowding. Painters at work are obliged to work here and there, not all over the picture at once. And they are aware of the necessity of "keeping down" the part they are at work upon at any particular time. Every writer has to solve the same problem. Unless it is solved, other parts are not "kept up." In most cases the esthetic objection to doses of morals and of economic or political propaganda in works of art will be found upon analysis to reside in the overweighing of certain values at the expense of others until, except for those in a similar state of one-sided enthusiasm, weariness rather than refreshment sets in.
The manifestation of a single form of energy in isolation results in uncoordinated movements, the human organism being, in fact, complex, and hence requiring adjustment of many varied factors. There is a great difference between violence and intensity of action. Watch young children who have the intention of acting in a play, and a succession of unrelated movements will be observed. They gesticulate, tumble and roll, each pretty much on his own account, with little reference to what others are doing. The acts of even the same child have little sequence. Such a case exemplifies, by way of contrast, the artistic relation between intensity and extension. Because energy is not restrained by other elements that are at once antagonistic and cooperative, action proceeds by jerks and spasms. There is discontinuity. Where energy is rendered tense by reciprocal oppositions, it unfolds in ordered extension. The contrast that is extreme in the case of a well-constructed and well-executed play set over against a childish scramble is found in lesser measure in all cases of contrasting esthetic value. Paintings, buildings, poems, novels, all have different degrees of volume — not to be confused with bulk. They are esthetically thick and thin, solid and crumbling, well-knit and loose-jointed. This property of extension, of related variety, is the kinetic phase which marks the release of energies that are restrained in ordered intervals of rest. But once more the order of these intervals (that constitute the symmetry of the work) is not regulated on the basis of units of time or space. When it is so determined, the effect is mechanical, like the seesaw of a jingling rhyme. In an art product, intervals are regular whenever they are determined by mutual reenforcement of parts with respect to the effect of unity and totality. This is what is meant by calling symmetry dynamic and functional.
In seeing a picture or an edifice, there is the same compression from accumulation in time that there is in hearing music, reading a poem or novel, and seeing a drama enacted. No work of art can be instantaneously perceived because there is then no opportunity for conservation and increase of tension, and hence none for that release and unfolding which give volume to a work of art. In most intellectual work, in all save those flashes that are distinctly esthetic, we have to go backwards; we have consciously to retrace previous steps and to recall distinctly particular facts and ideas. Getting ahead in thought is dependent upon these conscious excursions of memory into the past. But only when esthetic perception is interrupted (whether by lapse on the part of artist or perceiver) are we compelled to turn back, say in seeing a play on the stage, to ask ourselves what went before in order to get the thread of movement. What is retained from the past is embedded within what is now perceived and so embedded that, by its compression there, it forces the mind to stretch forward to what is coming. The more there is compressed from the continuous series of prior perceptions, the richer the present perception and the more intense the forward impulsion. Because of the depth of concentration, the release of contained materials as it unrolls gives subsequent experiences a wider span consisting of a larger number of defined particularities: what I have called the extension and volume corresponding to the intension of energy due to multiplied resistances.
It follows that the separation of rhythm and symmetry from each other and the division of the arts into temporal and spatial is more than a misapplied ingenuity. It is based on a principle that is destructive, so far as it is heeded, of esthetic understanding. Moreover, it has now lost the support from the scientific side it was once supposed to have. For physicists have been forced in virtue of the character of their own subject-matter to see that their units are not those of space and time, but of space-time. The artist made in action if not in conscious thought this belated scientific discovery from the very beginning. For he has always dealt perforce with perceptual instead of conceptual material, and, in what is perceived, the spatial and temporal always go together. It is interesting to note that the discovery was made in science when it was found that the process of conceptual abstraction could not be carried to the point of excluding the act of observation without destroying the possibility of verification.
When, therefore, the scientific inquirer was obliged to take the consequences of the act of perception into account in connection with his subject-matter, he passed from space and time to a unity which he could describe only as space-time. He thus came upon a fact that is exemplified in every ordinary perception. For the extension and volume of an object, its spatial properties cannot be directly experienced — or perceived — in a mathematical instant, nor can temporal properties of events be experienced save as some energy displays itself in an extensive way. Thus the artist only does with respect to the temporal and spatial qualities of the material of perception what he does with respect to all the content of ordinary perception. He selects, intensifies, and concentrates by means of form: rhythm and symmetry being of necessity the form that material takes when it undergoes the clarifying and ordering operations of art.
Apart from loss of supposed scientific sanction, the separation of temporal and spatial in the fine arts was always inept. As Croce has said, we are specifically (or separately) conscious of temporal sequence in music and poetry, and of spatial co-existence in architecture and painting, only when we pass from perception to analytic reflection. The supposition that we directly hear musical tones to be in time and directly see colors as being in space, reads into an immediate experience a later interpretation of it due to reflection. We see intervals and directions in pictures and we hear distances and volumes in music. If movement alone were perceived in music and rest alone in painting, music would be wholly without structure and pictures nothing but dry bones.
Nevertheless, though the distinction between spatial and temporal arts is wrongly drawn, since all objects of art are matters of perception and perception is not instantaneous, music in its evident temporal emphasis illustrates perhaps better than any other art the sense in which form is the moving integration of an experience. In music, form, for which even the musical have to find spatial language and which even the musical often see as a structure, the form develops with the hearing of the music. Any point in the musical development, that is to say, any tone, is what it is in that musical object — or perception — by virtue of what has gone before and what is musically impinging or prophesied. A melody is set by the tonic note, to which an expectancy of return is set up as a tension of attention. The "form" of the music becomes form in the career of the listening. Moreover, any section of the music and any cross-section of it has precisely the balance and symmetry, in chords and harmonies, as a painting, statue, or building. A melody is a chord deployed in time.
The term "energy" has been used many times in this discussion. Perhaps insistence upon the idea of energy in connection with fine art seems to some minds out of place. Yet there are certain commonplaces that it is proper to utter in connection with art that cannot be intelligible unless the fact of energy be made central: its power to move and stir, to calm and tranquillize. And surely either rhythm and balance are either characters foreign to art or else art, because of their basic role, is only definable as organization of energies. With respect to what the work of art does to us and for us, I see but two alternatives. Either it operates because some transcendent essence (usually called "beauty") descends upon experience from without, or esthetic effect is due to art's unique transcript of the energy of the things of the world. As between these two alternatives, I do not know how mere argument can determine the choice. But it is something to know what is involved in making the choice.
Taking my stand, then, upon the connection of esthetic effect with qualities of all experience as far as any experience is unified, I would ask how art can be expressive and yet not be imitative or slavishly representative, save by selecting and ordering the energies in virtue of which things act upon us and interest us? If art is in any sense reproductive, and yet reproduces neither details nor generic features, it necessarily follows that art operates by selecting those potencies in things by which an experience — any experience — has significance and value. Elimination gets rid of forces that confuse, distract, and deaden. Order, rhythm and balance, simply means that energies significant for experience are acting at their best.
The terms "ideal" has been cheapened by sentimental popular use, and by use in philosophic discourse for apologetic purposes to disguise discords and cruelties in existence. But there is a definite sense in which art is ideal — namely, the sense just indicated. Through selection and organization those features that make any experience worth having as an experience are prepared by art for commensurate perception. There must be, in spite of all indifference and hostility of nature to human interests, some congruity of nature with man or life could not exist. In art the forces that are congenial, that sustain not this or that special aim but the processes of enjoyed experience itself, are set free. That release gives them ideal quality. For what ideal can man honestly entertain save the idea of an environment in which all things conspire to the perfecting and sustaining of the values occasionally and partially experienced?
An English writer, Galsworthy I think, has somewhere defined art "as the imaginative expression of energy which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal by exciting in him impersonal emotion." Energies that constitute the objects and events of the world and hence determine our experience are the "universal." "Reconciliation" is the attaining, in immediate unargumentative form, of periods of harmonious cooperation of man and the world in experiences that are complete. The resultant emotion is "impersonal" because it is attached not to personal fortune but to the object to the construction of which the self has surrendered itself in devotion. Appreciation is equally impersonal in its emotional quality because it also involves construction and organization of objective energies.
*Barnes' The Art in Painting, French Primitives and Their Forms, and The Art of Henri Matisse, give many detailed analyses of pictures.
*Barnes' The Art in Painting, French Primitives and Their Forms, and The Art of Henri Matisse, give many detailed analyses of pictures.