WHAT subject-matter is appropriate for art? Are there materials inherently fit and others unfit? Or are there none which are common and unclean with respect to artistic treatment? The answer of the arts themselves has been steadily and progressively in the direction of an affirmative answer to the last question. Yet there is an enduring tradition that insists art should make invidious distinctions. A brief survey of the theme may accordingly serve as an introduction to the special topic of this chapter, namely, the aspects of the matter of art that are common to all the arts.
I had occasion in another connection to refer to the difference between the popular arts of a period and the official arts. Even when favored arts came out from under patronage and control of priest and ruler, the distinction of kinds remained even though the name "official" is no longer a fitting designation. Philosophic theory concerned itself only with those arts that had the stamp and seal of recognition by the class having social standing and authority. Popular arts must have flourished, but they obtained no literary attention. They were not worthy of mention in theoretical discussion. Probably they were not even thought of as arts.
Instead, however, of dealing with the early formulation of an invidious distinction among the arts, I shall select a modern representative, and then indicate briefly some aspects of the revolt that has broken down the barriers once set up. Sir Joshua Reynolds presents us with the statement that since the only subjects fit for treatment in painting are those "generally interesting," they should be "some eminent instance of heroic action or heroic suffering," such as "the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history. Such, too, are the capital events of Scripture." All the great paintings of the past, according to him, belong to this "historical school," and he goes on to say that "upon this principle, the Roman, the Florentine, the Bolognese schools have formed their practice and by it they have deservedly obtained the highest praise" — the omission of the Venetian and Flemish schools, side by side with the commendation of the eclectic school, being a sufficient comment from the strictly artistic side. What would he have said if he had been able to anticipate the ballet girls of Degas, the railway-coaches of Daumier — actually third class — or the apples, napkins, and plates of Cezanne?
In literature the dominant tradition in theory was similar. It was constantly asserted that Aristotle had once for all delimited the scope of tragedy, the highest literary mode, by declaring that the misfortunes of the noble and those in high place were its proper material, while those of the common people were intrinsically fit for the lesser mode of comedy. Diderot virtually announced a historic revolution in theory when he said there was need for bourgeois tragedies, and that, instead of putting on the stage only kings and princes, private persons are subject to terrible reverses which inspire pity and terror. And again he asserts that domestic tragedies, although having another tone and action than classic drama, can have their own sublimity — a prediction assuredly fulfilled by Ibsen.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, following the period that Housman calls one of sham or counterfeit poetry, verse masquerading as poetry, "The Lyrical Ballads" of Wordsworth and Coleridge ushered in a revolution. One of the principles that animated its authors was stated by Coleridge as follows: "One of the two cardinal points in poetry consists of faithful adherence to such characters and incidents as will be found in every village and its vicinity when there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves." I hardly need point out that long before Reynolds' day a similar revolution was well along in painting. It took a long stride when the Venetians in addition to celebrating the sumptuousness of the lives about them gave nominally religious themes a distinctly secular treatment. Flemish painters, in addition to Dutch genre painters, Breughel the elder, for example, and French painters like Chardin, turned frankly to ordinary themes. Painting of portraits was extended from nobility to wealthy merchants with the growth of commerce, and then to men less conspicuous. Toward the end of the nineteenth century all lines were swept away as far as plastic arts are concerned.
The novel has been the great instrument of effecting change in prose literature. It shifted the center of attention from the court to the bourgeoisie, then to the "poor" and the laborer, and then to the common person irrespective of station. Rousseau owes most of his permanent enormous influence in the field of literature to his imaginative excitement about "le peuple", certainly more to that cause than to his formal theories. The part played by folk-music, especially in Poland, Bohemia, and Germany, in the expansion and renewal of music is too well known to require more than notice. Even architecture, the most conservative of all the arts, has felt the influence of a transformation similar to that the other arts have undergone. Railway stations, bank buildings and post-offices, even churches, are no longer exclusively built as imitations of Greek temples and medieval cathedrals. The art of established "orders" has been influenced as much by revolt against fixation in social classes as by technological developments in cement and steel.
This brief sketch has only one purpose: to indicate that, in spite of formal theory and canons of criticism, there has taken place one of those revolutions that do not go backward. Impulsion beyond all limits that are externally set inheres in the very nature of the artist's work. It belongs to the very character of the creative mind to reach out and seize any material that stirs it so that the value of that material may be pressed out and become the matter of a new experience. Refusal to acknowledge the boundaries set by convention is the source of frequent denunciations of objects of art as immoral. But one of the functions of art is precisely to sap the moralistic timidity that causes the mind to shy away from some materials and refuse to admit them into the clear and purifying light of perceptive consciousness.
The interest of an artist is the only limitation placed upon use of material, and this limitation is not restrictive. It but states a trait inherent in the work of the arist, the necessity of sincerity; the necessity that he shall not fake and compromise. The universality of art is so far away from denial of the principle of selection by means of vital interest that it depends upon interest. Other artists have other interests, and by their collective work, unembarrassed by fixed and antecedent rule, all aspects and phases of experience are covered. Interest becomes one-sided and morbid only when it ceases to be frank, and becomes sly and furtive — as it doubtless does in much contemporary exploitation of sex. Tolstoi's identification of sincerity as the essence of originality compensates for much that is eccentric in his tractate on art. In his attack upon the merely conventional in poetry, he declares that much of its material is borrowed, artists feeding like cannibals upon one another. Stock material consists, he says, of "all sorts of legends, sagas and ancient traditions; maidens, warriors, shepherds, hermits, angels, devils of all sorts; moonlight, thunder, mountains, the sea, precipices, flowers, long hair; lions, lambs, doves, nightingales — because they have often been used by former artists in their productions."
In his desire to restrict the material of art to themes drawn from the life of the common man, factory worker and especially peasant, Tolstoi paints a picture of the conventional restrictions that is out of perspective. But there is truth enough in it to serve as illustration of one all-important characteristic of art: Whatever narrows the boundaries of the material fit to be used in art hems in also the artistic sincerity of the individual artist. It does not give fair play and outlet to his vital interest. It forces his perceptions into channels previously worn into ruts and clips the wings of his imagination. I think the idea that there is a moral obligation on an artist to deal with "proletarian" material, or with any material on the basis of its bearing on proletarian fortune and destiny is an effort to return to a position that art has historically outgrown. But as far as proletarian interest marks a new direction of attention and involves observation of materials previously passed over, it will certainly call into activity persons who were not moved to expression by former materials, and will disclose and thus help break down boundaries of which they were not previously aware. I am somewhat skeptical about Shakespeare's alleged personal aristocratic bias. I fancy that his limitation was conventional, familiar, and therefore congenial to pit as well as to stalls. But whatever its source, it limited his "universality."
Evidence that the historic movement of the art has abolished restrictions of its subject-matter that once were justified on alleged rational grounds does not prove that there is something common in the matter of all the arts. But it suggests that with the vast extension of its scope to take in (potentially) anything and everything, art would have lost its unity, dispersed into connected arts, till we could not see the woods for the trees nor a single tree for its branches, were there not a core of common substance. The obvious reply to this suggested inference is that the unity of the arts resides in their common form. Acceptance of this reply commits us, however, to the idea that form and matter are separate, and leads us therefore to return to the assertion that an art product is formed substance, and that what appears upon reflection as form when one interest is uppermost appears as matter when change of interest gives another turn to direction.
Apart from some special interest, every product of art is matter and matter only, so that the contrast is not between matter and form but between matter relatively unformed and matter adequately formed. The fact that reflection finds distinctive form in pictures cannot be set against the fact that a painting consists simply of pigments placed on canvas, since any arrangement and design they have is, after all, a property of the substance and of nothing else. Similarly, literature as it exists is just so many words, spoken and written. "Stuff" is everything, and form a name for certain aspects of the matter when attention goes primarily to just these aspects. The fact that a work of art is an organization of energies and that the nature of the organization is all important, cannot militate against the fact that it is energies which are organized and that organization has no existence outside of them.
The acknowledged community of form in different arts carries with it by implication a corresponding community of substance. It is this implication which I now propose to explore and develop. I have previously noted that artist and perceiver alike begin with what may be called a total seizure, an inclusive qualitative whole not yet articulated, not distinguished into members. Speaking of the origin of his poems, Schiller said: "With me the perception is at first without a clear and definite object. This takes shape later. What precedes is a peculiar musical mood of mind. Afterwards comes the poetical idea." I interpret this saying to mean something of the kind just stated. Moreover, not only does the "mood" come first, but it persists as the substratum after distinctions emerge; in fact they emerge as its distinctions.
Even at the outset, the total and massive quality has its uniqueness; even when vague and undefined, it is just that which it is and not anything else. If the perception continues, discrimination inevitably sets in. Attention must move, and, as it moves, parts, members, emerge from the background. And if attention moves in a unified direction instead of wandering, it is controlled by the pervading qualitative unity; attention is controlled by it because it operates within it. That verses are the poem, are its substance, is so truistic that it says nothing. But the fact which the truism records could not exist unless matter, poetically felt, came first, and came in such a unified and massive way as to determine its own development, that is its specification into distinctive parts. If the percipient is aware of seams and mechanical junctions in a work of art, it is because the substance is not controlled by a permeating quality.
Not only must this quality be in all "parts," but it can only be felt, that is, immediately experienced. I am not trying to describe it, for it cannot be described nor even be specifically pointed at — since whatever is specified in a work of art is one of its differentiations. I am only trying to call attention to something that everyone can realize is present in his experience of a work of art, but that is so thoroughly and pervasively present that it is taken for granted. "Intuition" has been used by philosophers to designate many things — some of which are suspicious characters. But the penetrating quality that runs through all the parts of a work of art and binds them into an individualized whole can only be emotionally "intuited." The different elements and specific qualities of a work of art blend and fuse in a way which physical things cannot emulate. This fusion is the felt presence of the same qualitative unity in all of them. "Parts" are discriminated, not intuited. But without the intuited enveloping quality, parts are external to one another and mechanically related. Yet the organism which is the work of art is nothing different from its parts or members. It is the parts as members — a fact that again brings us to the one pervasive quality that remains the same quality in being differentiated. The resulting sense of totality is commemorative, expectant, insinuating, premonitory. *
There is no name to be given it. As it enlivens and animates, it is the spirit of the work of art. It is its reality, when we feel the work of art to be real on its own account and not as a realistic exhibition. It is the idiom in which the particular work is composed and expressed, that which stamps it with individuality. It is the background which is more than spatial because it enters into and qualifies everything in the focus, everything distinguished as a part and member. We are accustomed to think of physical objects as having bounded edges; things like rocks, chairs, books, houses, trade, and science, with its efforts at precise measurement, have confirmed the belief. Then we unconsciously carry over this belief in the bounded character of all objects of experience (a belief founded ultimately in the practical exigencies of our dealings with things) into our conception of experience itself. We suppose the experience has the same definite limits as the things with which it is concerned. But any experience the most ordinary, has an indefinite total setting. Things, objects, are only focal points of a here and now in a whole that stretches out indefinitely. This is the qualitative "background" which is defined and made definitely conscious in particular objects and specified properties and qualities. There is something mystical associated with the word intuition, and any experience becomes mystical in the degree in which the sense, the feeling, of the unlimited envelope becomes intense — as it may do in experience of an object of art. As Tennyson said:
"Experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move,"
For although there is a bounding horizon, it moves as we move. We are never wholly free from the sense of something that lies beyond. Within the limited world directly seen, there is a tree with a rock at its foot; we fasten our sight upon the rock, and then upon the moss on the rock, perhaps we then take a microscope to view some tiny lichen. But whether the scope of vision be vast or minute, we experience it as a part of a larger whole and inclusive whole, a part that now focuses our experience. We might expand the field from the narrower to the wider. But however broad the field, it is still felt as not the whole; the margins shade into that indefinite expanse beyond which imagination calls the universe. This sense of the including whole implicit in ordinary experiences is rendered intense within the frame of a painting or poem. It, rather than any special purgation, is that which reconciles us to the events of tragedy. The symbolists have exploited this indefinite phase of art; Poe spoke of "a suggestive indefiniteness of vague and therefore spiritual effect," while Coleridge said that every work of art must have about it something not understood to obtain its full effect.
About every explicit and focal object there is a recession into the implicit which is not intellectually grasped. In reflection we call it dim and vague. But in the original experience it is not identified as the vague. It is a function of the whole situation, and not an element in it, as it would have to be in order to be apprehended as vague. At twilight, dusk is a delightful quality of the whole world. It is its appropriate manifestation. It becomes a specialized and obnoxious trait only when it prevents distinct perception of some particular thing we desire to discern.
The undefined pervasive quality of an experience is that which binds together all the defined elements, the objects of which we are focally aware, making them a whole. The best evidence that such is the case is our constant sense of things as belonging or not belonging, of relevancy, a sense which is immediate. It cannot be a product of reflection, even though it requires reflection to find out whether some particular consideration is pertinent to what we are doing or thinking. For unless the sense were immediate, we should have no guide to our reflection. The sense of an extensive and underlying whole is the context of every experience and it is the essence of sanity. For the mad, the insane, thing to us is that which is torn from the common context and which stands alone and isolated, as anything must which occurs in a world totally different from ours. Without an indeterminate and undetermined setting, the material of any experience is incoherent.
A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live. This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with esthetic intensity. It explains also the religious feeling that accompanies intense esthetic perception. We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experiences. We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves. I can see no psychological ground for such properties of an experience save that, somehow, the work of art operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an enveloping undefined whole that accompanies every normal experience. This whole is then felt as an expansion of ourselves. For only one frustrated in a particular object of desire upon which he had staked himself, like Macbeth, finds that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Where egotism is not made the measure of reality and value, we are citizens of this vast world beyond ourselves, and any intense realization of its presence with and in us brings a peculiarly satisfying sense of unity in itself and with ourselves.
Every work of art has a particular medium by which, among other things, the qualitative pervasive whole is carried. In every experience we touch the world through some particular tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with it, it comes home to us, through a specialized organ. The entire organism with all its charge of the past and varied resources operates, but it operates through a particular medium, that of eye, as it interacts with eye, ear, and touch. The fine arts lay hold of this fact and push it to its maximum of significance. In any ordinary visual perception, we see by means of light; we distinguish by means of reflected and refracted colors: that is a truism. But in ordinary perceptions, this medium of color is mixed, adulterated. While we see, we also hear; we feel pressures, and heat or cold. In a painting, color renders the scene without these alloys and impurities. They are part of the dross that is squeezed out and left behind in an act of intensified expression. The medium becomes color alone, and since color alone must now carry the qualities of movement, touch, sound, etc., that are present physically on their own account in ordinary vision, the expressiveness and energy of color are enhanced.
Photographs to primitive folk have, so it is said, a fearful magical quality. It is uncanny that solid and living things should be thus presented. There is evidence that when pictures of any kind first made their appearance, magical power was imputed to them. Their power of representation could come only from a supernatural source. To one who is not rendered callous by common contact with pictorial representations there is still something miraculous in the power of a contracted, flat, uniform thing to depict the wide and diversified universe of animate and inanimate things: it is possibly for this reason that popularly "art" tends to denote painting, and "artist" one who paints. Primitive man also imputed to sounds when used as words the power to control supernaturally the acts and secrets of men and to command, provided the right word was there, the forces of nature. The power of mere sounds to express in literature all events and objects is equally marvelous.
Such facts as these seem to me to suggest the role and significance of media for art. At first sight, it seems a fact not worth recording that every art has a medium of its own. Why put it down in black and white that painting cannot exist without color, music without sound, architecture without stone and wood, statuary without marble and bronze, literature without words, dancing without the living body? The answer has, I believe, been indicated. In every experience, there is the pervading underlying qualitative whole that corresponds to and manifests the whole organization of activities which constitute the mysterious human frame. But in every experience, this complex, this differentiated and recording, mechanism operates through special structures that take the lead, not in dispersed diffusion through all organs at once — save in panic when, as we truly say, one has lost one's head. "Medium" in fine art denotes the fact that this specialization and individualization of a particular organ of experience is carried to the point wherein all its possibilities are exploited. The eye or ear that is centrally active does not lose its specific character and its special fitness as the bearer of an experience that it uniquely makes possible. In art, the seeing or hearing that is dispersed and mixed in ordinary perceptions is concentrated until the peculiar office of the special medium operates with full energy, free from distraction.
"Medium" signifies first of all an intermediary. The import of the word "means" is the same. They are the middle, the intervening, things through which something now remote is brought to pass. Yet not all means are media. There are two kinds of means. One kind is external to that which is accomplished; the other kind is taken up into the consequences produced and remains immanent in them. There are ends which are merely welcome cessations and there are ends that are fulfillments of what went before. The toil of a laborer is too often only an antecedent to the wage he receives, as consumption of gasoline is merely a means to transportation. The means cease to act when the "end" is reached; one would be glad, as a rule, to get the result without having to employ the means. They are but a scaffolding.
Such external or mere means, as we properly term them, are usually of such a sort that others can be substituted for them; the particular ones employed are determined by some extraneous consideration, like cheapness. But the moment we say "media," we refer to means that are incorporated in the outcome. Even bricks and mortar become a part of the house they are employed to build; they are not mere means to its erection. Colors are the painting; tones are the music. A picture painted with water colors has a quality different from that painted with oil. Esthetic effects belong intrinsically to their medium; when another medium is substituted, we have a stunt rather than an object of art. Even when substitution is practiced with the utmost virtuosity or for any reason outside the kind of end desired, the product is mechanical or a tawdry sham — like boards painted to resemble stone in the construction of a cathedral, for stone is integral not just physically, but to the esthetic effect.
The difference between external and intrinsic operations runs through all the affairs of life. One student studies to pass an examination, to get promotion. To another, the means, the activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it. The consequence, instruction, illumination, is one with the process. Sometimes we journey to get somewhere else because we have business at the latter point and would gladly, were it possible, cut out the traveling. At other times we journey for the delight of moving about and seeing what we see. Means and end coalesce. If we run over in mind a number of such cases we quickly see that all the cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic. This externality may even be regarded as a definition of the non-esthetic.
Being "good" for the sake of avoiding penalty, whether it be going to jail or to hell, makes conduct unlovely. It is as anesthetic as is going to the dentist's chair so as to avoid a lasting injury. When the Greeks identified the good and beautiful in actions, they revealed, in their feeling of grace and proportion in right conduct, a perception of fusion of means and ends. The adventures of a pirate have at least a romantic attraction lacking in the painful acquisitions of him who stays within the law merely because he thinks it pays better in the end to do so. A large part of popular revulsion against utilitarianism in moral theory is because of its exaggeration of sheer calculation. "Decorum" and "propriety" which once had a favorable, because esthetic, meaning are taking on a disparaging signification because they are understood to denote a primness or smugness assumed because of desire for an external end. In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical. Much of what is termed spiritual is also unesthetic. But the unesthetic quality is because the things denoted by the word also exemplify separation of means and end; the "ideal" is so cut off from the realities, by which alone it can be striven for, that it is vapid. The "spiritual" gets a local habitation and achieves the solidity of form required for esthetic quality only when it is embodied in a sense of actual things. Even angels have to be provided in imagination with bodies and wings.
I have referred more than once to the esthetic quality that may inhere in scientific work. To the layman the material of the scientist is usually forbidding. To the inquirer there exists a fulfilling and consummatory quality, for conclusions sum up and perfect the conditions that lead up to them. Moreover, they have at times an elegant and even austere form. It is said that Clark-Maxwell once introduced a symbol in order to make a physical equation symmetrical, and that it was only later that experimental results gave the symbol its meaning. I suppose that it is also true that if businessmen were the mere money-grubbers they are often supposed to be by the unsympathetic outsider, business would be much less attractive than it is. In practice, it may take on the properties of a game, and even when it is socially harmful it must have an esthetic quality to those whom it captivates.
Means are, then, media when they are not just preparatory or preliminary. As a medium, color is a go-between for the values weak and dispersed in ordinary experiences and the new concentrated perception occasioned by a painting. A phonographic disk is a vehicle of an effect and nothing more. The music which issues from it is also a vehicle but is something more; it is a vehicle which becomes one with what it carries; it coalesces with what it conveys. Physically, a brush and the movement of the hand in applying color to canvas are external to a painting. Not so artistically. Brushstrokes are an integral part of the esthetic effect of a painting when it is perceived. Some philosophers have put forth the idea that esthetic effect or beauty is a kind of ethereal essence which, in accommodation to flesh, is compelled to use external sensuous material as a vehicle. The doctrine implies that were not the soul imprisoned in the body, pictures would exist without colors, music without sounds, and literature without words. Except, however, for critics who tell us how they feel without telling or knowing in terms of media used why they feel as they do, and except for persons who identify gush with appreciation, media and esthetic effect are completely fused.
Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception. Such sensitiveness does not lug in extraneous material. When, for example, paintings are looked at as illustrations of historical scenes, of literature, of familiar scenes, they are not perceived in terms of their media. Or, when they are looked at simply with reference to the technique employed in making them what they are, they are not esthetically perceived. For here, too, means, are separated from ends. Analysis of the former becomes a substitute for enjoyment of the latter. It is true that artists seem themselves often to approach a work of art from an exclusively technical standpoint — and the outcome is at least refreshing after having had a dose of what is regarded as "appreciation." But in reality, for the most part, they so feel the whole that it is not necessary to dwell upon the end, the whole, in words, and so they are freed to consider how the latter is produced.
The medium is a mediator. It is a go-between of artist and perceiver. Tolstoi in the midst of his moral preconceptions often speaks as an artist. He is celebrating this function of an artist when he makes the remarks already quoted about art as that which unites. The important thing for the theory of art is that this union is effected through the use of special material as a medium. By temperament, perhaps by inclination and aspiration, we are all artists — up to a certain point. What is lacking is that which marks the artist in execution. For the artist has the power to seize upon a special kind of material and convert it into an authentic medium of expression. The rest of us require many channels and a mass of material to give expression to what we should like to say. Then the variety of agencies employed get in the way of one another and render expression turbid, while the sheer bulk of material employed makes it confused and awkward. The artist sticks to his chosen organ and its corresponding material, and thus the idea singly and concentratedly felt in terms of the medium comes through pure and clear. He plays the game intensely, because strictly.
Something which Delacroix said of painters of his day applies to inferior artists generally. He said they used coloration rather than color. The statement signified that they applied color to their represented objects instead of making them out of color. This procedure signifies that colors as means and objects and scenes depicted were kept apart. They did not use color as medium with complete devotion. Their minds and experience were divided. Means and end did not coalesce. The greatest esthetic revolution in the history of painting took place when color was used structurally; then pictures ceased to be colored drawings. The true artist sees and feels in terms of his medium and the one who has learned to perceive esthetically emulates the operation. Others carry into their seeing of pictures and hearing of music preconceptions drawn from sources that obstruct and confuse perception.
Fine art is sometimes defined as power to create illusions. As far as I can see this statement is a decidedly unintelligent and misleading way of stating a truth — namely, that artists create effects by command of single medium. In ordinary perception we depend upon contribution from a variety of sources for our understanding of the meaning of what we are undergoing. The artistic use of a medium signifies that irrelevant aids are excluded and one sense quality is concentratedly and intensely used to do the work usually done loosely with the aid of many. But to call the result an illusion is to mix matters that should be distinguished. If measure of artistic merit were ability to paint a fly on a peach so that we are moved to brush it off or grapes on a canvas so that birds come to peck at them, a scarecrow would be a work of consummate fine-art when it succeeds at keeping away the crows.
The confusion of which I have just spoken can be cleared up. There is something physical, in its ordinary sense of real existence. There is the color or sound that constitutes the medium. And there is an experience having a sense of reality, quite likely a heightened one. This sense would be illusory, if it were like that which appertains to the sense of the real existence of the medium. But it is very different. On the stage the media, the actors and their voices and gestures, are really there; they exist. And the cultivated auditor has as a consequence a heightened sense (supposing the play to be genuinely artistic) of the reality of things of ordinary experience. Only the uncultivated theatergoer has such an illusion of the reality of what is enacted that he identifies what is done with the kind of reality manifested in the psychical presence of the actors, so that he tries to join in the action. A painting of trees or rocks may make the characteristic reality of tree or rock more poignant than it had ever been before. But that does not imply that the spectator takes a part of the picture to be an actual rock of the kind he could hammer or sit on. What makes a material a medium is that it is used to express a meaning which is other than that which it is in virtue of its bare physical existence: the meaning not of what it physically is, but of what it expresses.
In the discussion of the qualitative background of experience and of the special medium through which distinct meanings and values are projected upon it, we are in the presence of something common in the substance of the arts. Media are different in the different arts. But possession of a medium belongs to them all. Otherwise they would not be expressive, nor without this common substance could they possess form. I referred earlier to Dr. Barnes' definition of form as the integration, through relations, of color, light, line and space. Color is evidently the medium. But the other arts not only have something corresponding to color as medium but they have as a property of their substance something which exercises the same function that line and space perform in a picture. In the latter, line demarcates, delimits, and the result is presentation of distinct objects, figure or shape being the means by which an otherwise indiscriminate mass is defined into identifiable objects, persons, mountains, grass. Every art has individualized, defined members. Every art so uses its substantial medium as to give complexity of parts to the unity of its creations.
The function we are likely to assign to line, upon first thinking of it, is that of form. A line relates, connects. It is an integral means of determining rhythm. Reflection shows, however, that what gives the just relationship in one direction constitutes individuality of parts in the other direction. Suppose we are looking at an ordinary "natural" landscape, consisting of trees, undergrowth, a patch of grassy field, and a few hills in the background. The scene consists of these parts. But they do not compose well as far as the entire scene is concerned. The hills and some of the trees are not placed right; we want to rearrange them. Some of the branches do not fit; and, while some of the underbrush makes a good setting, other parts of it are confusingly in the way.
Physically the things mentioned are parts of the scene. But they are not parts of it if we take it as an esthetic whole. Now our first tendency, looking at the matter esthetically, would probably be to assign the defects to the form, to the side of inadequate and disturbing relationship of contour, mass, and placing. And we should not be wrong in feeling that jar and interference arise from this source. But if we carry analysis further, we see that defect in relationship on one side is defect in individual structure and definiteness on the other side. We should find that the changes we make in order to get a better composition also serve to give parts an individualization, a definiteness, in perception they did not have before.
The same sort of thing holds when accent and interval are in question. They are determined by the necessity of maintaining the relations that bind parts into a whole. But also without these elements, parts would be a jumble, running aimlessly into one another; they would lack the demarcation that individualizes. In music or verse there would be meaningless lapses. If a painting is to be a picture, there must be not only rhythm, but mass — the common substratum of color — must be defined into figures; otherwise there are smears, blotches, and blurs.
There are pictures in which colors are subdued and yet the painting gives us a sense of glow and splendor, while the colors in other paintings are bright to the point of loudness, and yet the total effect is of something drab. Vividly bright color, except at the hands of an artist, is reasonably sure to suggest a chromo. But with an artist, a color garish in itself or even muddy may enhance energy. The explanation of such facts as these is that an artist uses color to define an object, and accomplishes this individualization so completely that color and object fuse. The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glow — gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid — crowns, robes, sunlight. Except as they express objects, through being the significant color-quality of materials of ordinary experience, colors effect only transient excitations — as red arouses while another color soothes. Take any art one pleases, and it will appear that the medium is expressive because it is used to individualize and define, and this not just in the sense of physical outline but in the sense of expressing that quality which is one with the character of an object; it renders character distinct by emphasis.
What would a novel or drama be without different persons, situations, actions, ideas, movements, events? These are marked off technically by acts and scenes in the drama, by various entrances and exits and all the devices of stagecraft. But the latter are just means of throwing elements into such relief that they complete objects and episodes on their own account — as rests in music are not blanks, but, while they continue a rhythm, punctuate and institute individuality. What would an architectural structure be without differentiation of masses, and a differentiation that is not just physical and spatial, but one that defines parts, windows, doors, cornices, supports, roof, and so on? But by dwelling unduly on a fact that is always present in any complex significant whole, I may appear to make a mystery out of a thing that is our most familiar experience — that no whole is significant to us except as it is constituted by parts that are themselves significant apart from the whole to which they belong — that, in short, no significant community can exist save as it is composed of individuals who are significant.
The American watercolorist, John Marin, has said of a work of art: "Identity looms up as the great sheet anchor. And as nature in the fashioning of man has adhered strictly to Identity, Head, Body, Limbs and their separate contents, identities in themselves, working every part within itself and through and with the other parts, its neighbors, at its best approaching a beautiful balance, so this art product is made up of neighbor identities. And if an identity in this make-up doesn't take its place and part it's a bad neighbor. And if the chords connecting the neighbors do not take their places and parts, it's a bad service, a bad contact. So this Art product is a village in itself." These identities are the parts that are themselves individual wholes in the substance of the work of art.
In great art, there is no limit set to the individualization of parts within parts. Leibniz taught that the universe is infinitely organic because every organic thing is constituted ad infinitum of other organisms. One may be skeptical of the truth of this proposition as regards the universe, but, as a measure of artistic achievement, it is true that every part of a work of art is potentially at least so constituted, since it is susceptible of indefinite perceptual differentiation. We see buildings in which there is little or nothing in the parts to arrest attention — unless from sheer ugliness. * Our eyes literally glance over and by. In trivial music, parts are simply means of passing on; they do not hold us as parts, nor as the succession goes on do we hold what precedes as parts; as with the esthetically cheap novel, we may get a "kick" from the excitation of movement, but there is nothing to dwell upon unless there is an individualized object or event. On the other hand, prose may have a symphonic effect when articulation is carried down into every particular. The more definition of parts contributes to the whole, the more it is important in itself.
To look at a work of art in order to see how well certain rules are observed and canons conformed to impoverishes perception, But to strive to note the ways in which certain conditions are fulfilled, such as the organic means by which the media is made to express and carry definite parts, or how the problem of adequate individualization is solved, sharpens esthetic perception and enriches its content. For every artist accomplishes the operation in his own way and never exactly repeats himself in any two of his works. He is entitled to every and any technical means by which he can effect the result, while to apprehend his characteristic method of doing so is to get an initiation into esthetic comprehension. One painter gives individuality in detail by fluid lines, by mergings, more than another artist does with the most sharply outlined profile. One does with chiaroscuro what another brings about by highlights. It is not uncommon to find in Rembrandt's drawings, lines within a figure that are stronger than those which bound it externally — and yet there is gain rather than sacrifice of individuality. In a general way there are two opposite methods; that of contrast, of the staccato, the abrupt, and that of the fluid, the merging, the subtle gradation. From that we can proceed to discovery of ever-increasing refinements. As instances of the two methods in the large, we may take instances cited by Leo Stein. "Compare," he says, "the line of Shakespeare 'in cradle of rude imperious surge' with the line 'When icicles hang by the wall.' " In the first, there are contrasts like cradle-surge, imperious-rude, contrasts of vowels and also of pace. In the other, he says: "Each line is like a loop in a lightly hung chain, or even like a cantilever, easily in touch with its fellows." The fact that the method of abruptness lends itself most directly to definition and that of continuity to establishing of relations is perhaps a reason why artists have liked to reverse the process and thus increase the amount of energy elicited.
It is possible for both perceiver and artist to carry their predilection for a particular method of attaining individualization to such a point that they confuse the method with the end, and deny the latter exists when they are repelled by the means used to achieve it. From the side of the audience, this fact is illustrated on a large scale by the reception given to paintings when artists ceased to employ obvious shading to delimit figures, using a relation of colors instead. It is peculiarly evident from the side of art, in one who is significant in painting (but especially in drawing) and preeminently great in poetry, Blake. He denied esthetic merit to Rubens, Rembrandt, and the Venetian and Flemish schools generally because they worked with "broken lines, broken masses and broken colors" — the very factors that characterize the great revival of painting toward the end of the nineteenth century. He added: "The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art, and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imagination, plagiarism and bungling. . . . The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the want of idea in the artist's mind, and the pretense of plagiary in all its branches." The passage deserves quotation for its emphatic recognition of the necessity of determinateness of individualization of the members of a work of art. But it also indicates the limitation that may accompany a particular mode of vision when it is intense.
There is another matter that is common to the substance of all works of art. Space and time — or rather space-time — are found in the matter of every art product. In the arts, they are neither the empty containers nor the formal relations that schools of philosophy have sometimes represented them to be. They are substantial; they are properties of every kind of material employed in artistic expression and esthetic realization. Imagine in reading Macbeth an attempt to separate the witches from the heath, or in the matter of Keats' "Ode on the Grecian Urn," a separation of the bodily figures of priest, maidens, and heifer from something called soul or spirit. In painting, space certainly relates; it helps constitute form. But it is directly felt, sensed, as quality also. If it were not, a picture would be so full of holes as to disorganize perceptual experience. Psychologists, until William James taught better, were accustomed to find only temporal quality in sounds, and some of them made even this a matter of intellectual relationship instead of a quality as distinctive as any other trait of sound. James showed that sounds were spatially voluminous as well — a fact which every musician had practically employed and exhibited whether he had theoretically formulated it or not. As with the other properties of substance of which we have spoken, the fine arts seek out and elicit this quality of all the things we experience and express it more energetically and clearly than do the things from which they extract it. As science takes qualitative space and time and reduces them to relations that enter into equations, so art makes them abound in their own sense as significant values of the very substance of all things.
Movement in direct experience is alteration in the qualities of objects, and space as experienced is an aspect of this qualitative change. Up and down, back and front, to and fro, this side and that — or right and left — here and there, feel differently. The reason they do is that they are not static points in something itself static, but are objects in movement, qualitative changes of value. For "back" is short for backwards and front for forwards. So with velocity. Mathematically there are no such things as fast and slow. They mark simply greater and less on a number scale. As experienced they are qualitatively as unlike as are noise and silence, heat and cold, black and white. To be forced to wait a long time for an important event to happen is a length very different from that measured by the movements of the hands of a clock. It is something qualitative.
There is another significant involution of time and movement in space. It is constituted not only by directional tendencies — up and down, for example — but by mutual approaches and retreatings. Near and far, close and distant, are qualities of pregnant, often tragic, import — that is, as they are experienced, not just stated by measurement in science. They signify loosening and tightening, expanding and contracting, separating and compacting, soaring and drooping, rising and falling; the dispersive, scattering, and the hovering and brooding, unsubstantial lightness and massive blow. Such actions and reaction are the very stuff out of which the objects and events we experience are made. They can be described in science because they are there reduced to relations that differ only mathematically, as science is concerned about the remote and identical or repeated things that are conditions of actual experience and not with experience in its own right. But in experience they are infinitely diversified and cannot be described, while in works of art they are expressed. For art is a selection of what is significant, with rejection by the very same impulse of what is irrelevant, and thereby the significant is compressed and intensified.
Music, for example, gives us the very essence of the dropping down and the exalted rising, the surging and retreating, the acceleration and retardation, the tightening and loosening, the sudden thrust and the gradual insinuation of things. The expression is abstract in that it is freed from attachment to this and that, while at the same time it is intensely direct and concrete. It would be possible, I think, to make out a plausible case for the assertion that, without the arts, the experience of volumes, masses, figures, distances and directions of qualitative change would have remained rudimentary, something dimly apprehended and hardly capable of articulate communication.
While the emphasis of the plastic arts is upon the spatial aspects of change and that of music and the literary arts upon the temporal, the difference is only one of emphasis within a common substance. Each possesses what the other actively exploits, and its possession is a background without which the properties brought to the front by emphasis would explode into the void, evaporate into imperceptible homogeneity. An almost point for point correspondence can be instituted between, say, the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony and the serial order of weights, of ponderous volumes, in Cezanne's "Card Players." In consequence of the voluminous quality belonging to them both, both the symphony and the painting have power, strength, and solidity — like a massive, well-constructed bridge of stone. They both express the enduring, that which is structurally resistant. Two artists by different media put the essential quality of a rock into things as unlike as a picture and a series of complex sounds. One does his work by color plus space, the other by a sound plus time, which in this case has the massive volume of space.
For space and time as experienced are not only qualitative but infinitely diversified in qualities. We can reduce the diversification to three general themes: Room, Extent, Position — Spaciousness, Spatiality, Spacing — or in terms of time — transition, endurance and date. In experience, these traits qualify one another in a single effect. One usually predominates over the others, however, and while they have no separate existence they can be distinguished in thought.
Space is room, Raum, and room is roominess, a chance to be, live and move. The very word "breathing-space" suggests the choking, the oppression that results when things are constricted. Anger appears to be a reaction in protest against fixed limitation of movement. Lack of room is denial of life, and openness of space is affirmation of its potentiality. Overcrowding, even when it does not impede life, is irritating. What is true of space is true of time. We need a "space of time" in which to accomplish anything significant. Undue haste forced upon us by pressure of circumstances is hateful. Our constant cry when pushed from without is Give us time! The master, it is true, shows himself within limitations, and a literally infinite room within which to act would signify complete dispersion. But the limitations must bear a definite ratio to power; they involve cooperative choice; they cannot be imposed.
Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action. It is a matter of proportions qualitatively felt. A lyric ode may have it when a would-be epic misses it. Small pictures manifest it when acres of paint leave us with a sense of being cribbed and cabined. Emphasis upon spaciousness is a characteristic of Chinese paintings. Instead of being centralized so as to require frames, they move outwards, while panoramic scroll paintings present a world in which ordinary boundaries are transformed into invitations to proceed. Yet by different means, western paintings that are highly centralized create the sense of the extensive whole that encloses a scene that is carefully defined. Even an interior, like Van Eyck's "Jean Arnolfini and Wife," may convey within a defined compass the explicit sense of the outdoors beyond the walls. Titian paints the background in the portrait of an individual so that infinite space, not just the canvas, is behind the figure.
Mere room, opportunity and possibility wholly indeterminate, would be, however, blank and empty. Space and time in experience are also occupancy, filling — not merely something externally filled. Spatiality is mass and volume, as temporality is endurance, not just abstract duration. Sounds as well as colors shrink and expand and colors like sounds rise and fall. As I have noted before, William James made evident the voluminous quality of sounds, and it is no metaphor when tones are denominated high and low, long and short, thin and massive. In music, sounds return as well as proceed; they display intervals as well as progression. The reason is like that already noted regarding the splendor or dinginess of colors in painting. They belong to objects; they are not floating and isolated, and the objects to which they belong exist in a world possessed of extent and volume.
Murmuring is of brooks, whispering, and rustling of leaves, rippling of waves, roar of surf and thunder, moaning and whistling of wind . . . and so on indefinitely. By this statement I do not mean that the thinness of the flute's note and the massive peal of the organ are directly associated by us with particular natural objects. But I do mean that these tones express qualities of extension because only intellectual abstraction can separate an event in time from an extended object that initiates or undergoes change. Time as empty does not exist; time as an entity does not exist. What exists are things acting and changing, and a constant quality of their behavior is temporal.
Volume, like roominess, is a quality independent of mere size and bulk. There are small landscapes that convey the abundance of nature. A still life of Cezanne's, with a composition of pears and apples, conveys the very essence of volume in dynamic equilibrium both to another and to surrounding space as well. The frail, the fragile, need not be examples of esthetic weakness; they, too, may be embodiments of volume. Novels, poems, dramas, statues, buildings, characters, social movements, arguments, as well as pictures and sonatas, are marked by solidity, massiveness, and the reverse.
Without the third property, spacing, occupancy would be a jumble. Place, position, determined by distribution of intervals through spacing, is a great factor in effecting the individualization of parts already spoken of. But a position taken has an immediate qualitative value and as such is an inherent part of substance. The feeling of energy and especially not just of energy in general but of this or that power in the concrete is closely connected with rightness in placing. For there is an energy of position as well as of motion. And while the former is sometimes called potential energy in physics in distinction from kinetic energy, as directly felt it is as actual as is the latter. Indeed in the plastic arts, it is the means by which movement is expressed. Some intervals (determined in all directions, not merely laterally) are favorable to the manifestation of energy; others frustrate its operation — boxing and wrestling are obvious examples.
Things may be too far apart, too near together, or disposed at the wrong angle in relation to one another, to allow of energy of action. Awkwardness of composition whether a human being or in architecture, prose, or painting is the result. Meter in poetry owes its more subtle effects to what it does in securing a just position for various elements — an obvious instance being its frequent inversion of the order of prose. There are ideas that would be destroyed if they were spaced by means of spondees instead of trochees. Too much distance or too undefined an interval in novel and drama sets attention wandering or puts it to sleep, while incidents and characters treading on one another's heels detract from the force of them all. Certain effects that distinguish some painters depend upon their fine feeling for spacing — a matter quite distinct from use of planes to convey volumes and backgrounds. As Cezanne is a master of the latter, Corot has unerring tact for the former — especially in portraits and so-called Italian paintings as compared with his popular but relatively weak silvery landscapes. We think of transposition particularly in connection with music, but in terms of media it characterizes equally painting and architecture. The recurrence of relations — not of elements — in different contexts, which constitutes transposition is qualitative and hence is directly experienced in perception.
The progress — which is not necessarily an advance and, practically never an advance in all respects — of the arts display a transition from more obvious to subtler means of expressing position. In earlier literature position was in accord (as we have already noted in another connection) with social convention and economic and political class. It was position in the sense of social status that fixed the force of place in the older tragedy. Distance was already determined outside the drama. In modern drama, with Ibsen as the outstanding example, relations of husband and wife, politician and democratic citizenship, old age and encroaching youth (whether by way of competition or of seductive attraction), contrasts of external convention and personal impulse, forcibly express energy of position.
The bustle and ado of modern life render nicety of placing the feature most difficult for artists to achieve. Tempo is too rapid and incidents too crowded to permit of decisiveness — a defect found in architecture, drama, and fiction alike. The very profusion of materials and the mechanical force of activities get in the way of effective distribution. There is more of vehemence than of the intensity that is constituted by emphasis. When attention lacks the remission that is indispensable to its operations, it becomes numb as protection against its recurrent overstimulation. Only occasionally do we find the problem solved — as it is in fiction in Mann's Magic Mountain and in architecture in the Bush Building in New York City.
I have said that the three qualities of space and time reciprocally affect and qualify one another in experience. Space is inane save as occupied with active volumes. Pauses are holes when they do not accentuate masses and define figures as individuals. Extension sprawls and finally benumbs if it does not interact with place so as to assume intelligible distribution. Mass is nothing fixed. It contracts and expands, asserts itself and yields, according to its relations to other spatial and enduring things. While we may view these traits from the standpoint of form, of rhythm, balance and organization, the relations which thought grasps as ideas are present as qualities in perception and they inhere in the very substance of art.
There are then common properties of the matter of arts because there are general conditions without which an experience is not possible. As we saw earlier, the basic condition is felt relationship between doing and undergoing as the organism and environment interact. Position expresses the poised readiness of the live creature to meet the impact of surrounding forces, to meet so as to endure and to persist, to extend or expand through undergoing the very forces that, apart from its response, are indifferent and hostile. Through going out into the environment, position unfolds into volume; through the pressure of environment, mass is retracted into energy of position, and space remains, when matter is contracted, as an opportunity for further action. Distinction of elements and consistency of members in a whole are the functions that define intelligence; the intelligibility of a work of art depends upon the presence to the meaning that renders individuality of parts and their relationship in the whole directly present to the eye and ear trained in perception.
*I take this opportunity to mention again the essay on Qualitative Thought, previously referred to (p. 125).
*The explanation of the fact that things ugly in themselves may contribute to the esthetic effect of a whole is doubtless often due to the fact that they are so used as to contribute to individualization of parts within a whole.