The Life of Reason Part 44

[Sidenote: Transition to ill.u.s.tration.]

Ill.u.s.tration has nevertheless an intellectual function by which it diverges altogether from decoration and even, in the narrowest sense of the word, from art: for the essence of ill.u.s.tration lies neither in use nor in beauty. The ill.u.s.trator's impulse is to reproduce and describe given objects. He wishes in the first place to force observers--overlooking all logical scruples--to call his work by the name of its subject matter; and then he wishes to inform them further, through his representation, and to teach them to apprehend the real object as, in its natural existence, it might never have been apprehended. His first task is to translate the object faithfully into his special medium; his second task, somewhat more ambitious, is so to penetrate into the object during that process of translation that this translation may become at the same time a.n.a.lytic and imaginative, in that it signalises the object's structure and emphasises its ideal suggestions. In such reproduction both hand and mind are called upon to construct and build up a new apparition; but here construction has ceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in order to become representative. The aesthetic element in art has begun to recede before the intellectual; and sensuous effects, while of course retained and still studied, seem to be impressed into the service of ideas.

CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

[Sidenote: Psychology of imitation.]

Imitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seen that it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellow mind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interesting of plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but its prevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state of human biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In a motor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about to execute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea, apparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received some impulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what is seen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these two phenomena, separable logically and divided in Cartesian psychology by an artificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for natural history, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist for consciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involves motion nor const.i.tutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulterior events which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies it at the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. If the image involved no bodily att.i.tude and prophesied no action it would refer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Even if it _meant_ to refer to something ulterior it would, under those circ.u.mstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connected it with any object which could support or verify its a.s.severations. It might _feel_ significant, like a dream, but its significance would be vain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of events that logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all.

This needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebode is not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas in themselves a.s.sert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to the soil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. For the idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which the ulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; so that the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materially to the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally.

[Sidenote: Sustained sensation involves reproduction.]

In some such fas.h.i.+on we may come to conceive how imitative art is simply the perfection and fulfilment of sensation. The act of apperception in which a sensation is reflected upon and understood is already an internal reproduction. The object is retraced and gone over in the mind, not without quite perceptible movements in the limbs, which sway, as it were, in sympathy with the object's habit. Presumably this incipient imitation of the object is the physical basis for apperception itself; the stimulus, whatever devious courses it may pursue, reconst.i.tutes itself into an impulse to render the object again, as we acquire the accent which we often hear. This imitation sometimes has the happiest results, in that the animal fights with one that fights, and runs after one that runs away from him. All this happens initially, as we may still observe in ourselves, quite without thought of eventual profit; although if chase leads to contact, and contact stimulates hunger or l.u.s.t, movements important for preservation will quickly follow. Such eventual utilities, however, like all utilities, are supported by a prodigious gratuitous vitality, and long before a practical or scientific use of sensation is attained its artistic force is in full operation. If art be play, it is only because all life is play in the beginning. Rational adjustments to truth and to benefit supervene only occasionally and at a higher level.

[Sidenote: Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new material.]

Imitation cannot, of course, result in a literal repet.i.tion of the object that suggests it. The copy is secondary; it does not iterate the model by creating a second object on the same plane of reality, but reproduces the form in a new medium and gives it a different function.

In these latter circ.u.mstances lies the imitative essence of the second image: for one leaf does not imitate another nor is each twin the other's copy. Like sensibility, imitation remodels a given being so that it becomes, in certain formal respects, like another being in its environment. It is a response and an index, by which note is taken of a situation or of its possible developments. When a man involuntarily imitates other men, he does not become those other persons; he is simply modified by their presence in a manner that allows him to conceive their will and their independent existence, not without growing similar to them in some measure and framing a genuine representation of them in his soul. He enacts what he understands, and his understanding consists precisely in knowing that he is re-enacting something which has its collateral existence elsewhere in nature. An element in the percipient repeats the total movement and tendency of the person perceived. The imitation, though akin to what it imitates, and reproducing it, lies in a different medium, and accordingly has a specific individuality and specific effects. Imitation is far more than similarity, nor does its ideal function lie in bringing a flat and unmeaning similarity about. It has a representative and intellectual value because in reproducing the forms of things it reproduces them in a fresh substance to a new purpose.

If I imitate mankind by following their fas.h.i.+ons, I add one to the million and improve nothing: but if I imitate them under proper inhibitions and in the service of my own ends, I really understand them, and, by representing what I do not bodily become, I preserve and enlarge my own being and make it relevant ideally to what it physically depends upon. a.s.similation is a way of drifting through the flux or of letting it drift through oneself; representation, on the contrary, is a principle of progress. To grow by acc.u.mulating pa.s.sions and fancies is at best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra might be. But to make the accretions which time brings to your being representative of what you are not, and do not wish to be, is to grow in dignity. It is to be wise and prepared. It is to survey a universe without ceasing to be a mind.

[Sidenote: Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.]

A product of imitative sensibility is accordingly on a higher plane than the original existences it introduces to one another--the ignorant individual and the unknown world. Imitation in softening the body into physical adjustment stimulates the mind to ideal representation. This is the case even when the stimulus is a contagious influence or habit, though the response may then be slavish and the representation vague.

Sheep jumping a wall after their leader doubtless feel that they are not alone; and though their action may have no purpose it probably has a felt sanction and reward. Men also think they invoke an authority when they appeal to the _quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus_, and a conscious unanimity is a human if not a rational joy. When, however, the stimulus to imitation is not so pervasive and touches chiefly a single sense, when what it arouses is a movement of the hand or eye retracing the object, then the response becomes very definitely cognitive. It const.i.tutes an observation of fact, an acquaintance with a thing's structure amounting to technical knowledge; for such a survey leaves behind it a power to reconst.i.tute the process it involved. It leaves an efficacious idea. In an idle moment, when the information thus acquired need not be put to instant use, the new-born faculty may work itself out spontaneously. The sound heard is repeated, the thing observed is sketched, the event conceived is acted out in pantomime. Then imitation rounds itself out; an uninhibited sensation has become an instinct to keep that sensation alive, and plastic representation has begun.

[Sidenote: How the artist is inspired and irresponsible.]

The secret of representative genius is simple enough. All hangs on intense, exhaustive, rehea.r.s.ed sensation. To paint is a way of letting vision work; nor should the amateur imagine that while he lacks technical knowledge he can have in his possession all the ideal burden of an art. His reaction will be personal and advent.i.tious, and he will miss the artist's real inspiration and ignore his genuine successes. You may instruct a poet about literature, but his allegiance is to emotion.

You may offer the sculptor your comparative observations on style and taste; he may or may not care to listen, but what he knows and loves is the human body. Critics are in this way always one stage behind or beyond the artist; their operation is reflective and his is direct. In transferring to his special medium what he has before him his whole mind is lost in the object; as the marksman, to shoot straight, looks at the mark. How successful the result is, or how appealing to human nature, he judges afterwards, as an outsider might, and usually judges ill; since there is no life less apt to yield a broad understanding for human affairs or even for the residue of art itself, than the life of a man inspired, a man absorbed, as the genuine artist is, in his own travail.

But into this travail, into this digestion and reproduction of the thing seen, a critic can hardly enter. Having himself the ulterior office of judge, he must not hope to rival nature's children in their sportiveness and intuition.

In an age of moral confusion, these circ.u.mstances may lead to a strange s.h.i.+fting of roles. The critic, feeling that something in the artist has escaped him, may labour to put himself in the artist's place. If he succeeded, the result would only be to make him a biographer; he would be describing in words the very intuitions which the artist had rendered in some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is not criticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for.

Its function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder, to deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this most aesthetic element in a work's operation does not borrow its value from the possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions.

If he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; but his work's value would still consist entirely in its power to propagate such good effects, whether they were already present in him or not. All criticism is therefore moral, since it deals with benefits and their relative weight. Psychological penetration and reconstructed biography may be excellent sport; if they do not reach historic truth they may at least exercise dramatic talent. Criticism, on the other hand, is a serious and public function; it shows the race a.s.similating the individual, dividing the immortal from the mortal part of a soul.

[Sidenote: Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered.]

Representation naturally repeats those objects which are most interesting in themselves. Even the medium, when a choice is possible, is usually determined by the sort of objects to be reproduced.

Instruments lose their virtue with their use and a medium of representation, together with its manipulation, is nothing but a vehicle. It is fit if it makes possible a good rendition. All accordingly hangs on what life has made interesting to the senses, on what presents itself persuasively to the artist for imitation; and living arts exist only while well-known, much-loved things imperatively demand to be copied, so that their reproduction has some honest non-aesthetic interest for mankind. Although subject matter is often said to be indifferent to art, and an artist, when his art is secondary, may think of his technique only, nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. If any remnant of inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from a surviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literature that calls itself purely aesthetic is in truth prurient; without this half-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would have had nothing to marshall or to sustain them.

[Sidenote: Public interests determine the subject of art, and the subject the medium.]

A good way to understand schools and styles and to appreciate their respective functions and successes is to consider first what region of nature preoccupied the age in which they arose. Perception can cut the world up into many patterns, which it isolates and dignifies with the name of things. It must distinguish before it can reproduce and the objects which attention distinguishes are of many strange sorts. Thus the single man, the hero, in his acts of prowess or in his readiness, may be the unit and standard in discourse. It will then be his image that will preoccupy the arts. For such a task the most adequate art is evidently sculpture, for sculpture is the most complete of imitations.

In no other art can apprehension render itself so exhaustively and with such recuperative force. Sculpture retains form and colour, with all that both can suggest, and it retains them in their integrity, leaving the observer free to resurvey them from any point of view and drink in their quality exhaustively.

[Sidenote: Reproduction by acting ephemera.]

The movement and speech which are wanting, the stage may be called upon to supply; but it cannot supply them without a terrible sacrifice, for it cannot give permanence to it expression. Acting is for this reason an inferior art, not perhaps in difficulty and certainly not in effect, but inferior in dignity, since the effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal, and this ideal is half frustrated if the representation is itself fleeting and the rendering has no firmer subsistence than the inspiration that gave it birth. By making himself, almost in his entirety, the medium of his art, the actor is morally diminished, and as little of him remains in his work, when this is good, as of his work in history. He lends himself without interest, and after being Brutus at one moment and Falstaff at another, he is not more truly himself. He is abolished by his creations, which nevertheless cannot survive him.

[Sidenote: High demands of sculpture.]

Being so adequate a rendering of its object, sculpture demands a perfect mastery over it and is correspondingly difficult. It requires taste and training above every other art; for not only must the material form be reproduced, but its motor suggestions and moral expression must be rendered; things which in the model itself are at best transitory, and which may never be found there if a heroic or ideal theme is proposed.

The sculptor is obliged to have caught on the wing att.i.tudes momentarily achieved or vaguely imagined; yet these must grow firm and harmonious under his hand. Nor is this enough; for sculpture is more dependent than other arts on its model. If the statue is to be ideal, _i.e._, if it is to express the possible motions and vital character of its subject, the model must itself be refined. Training must have cut in the flesh those lines which are to make the language and eloquence of the marble.

Trivial and vulgar forms, such as modern sculpture abounds in, reflect an undisciplined race of men, one in which neither soul nor body has done anything well, because the two have done nothing together. The frame has remained gross or awkward, while the face has taken on a tense expression, betraying loose and undignified habits of mind. To carve such a creature is to perpetuate a caricature. The modern sculptor is stopped short at the first conception of a figure; if he gives it its costume, it is grotesque; if he strips it, it is unmeaning and pitiful.

[Sidenote: It is essentially obsolete.]

Greece was in all these respects a soil singularly favourable to sculpture. The success there achieved was so conspicuous that two thousand years of essential superfluity have not availed to extirpate the art. Plastic impulse is indeed immortal, and many a hand, even without cla.s.sic example, would have fallen to modelling. In the middle ages, while monumental sculpture was still rudely reminiscent, ornamental carving arose spontaneously. Yet at every step the experimental sculptor would run up against disaster. What could be seen in the streets, while it offered plenty of subjects, offered none that could stimulate his talent. His patrons asked only for ill.u.s.tration and applied ornament; his models offered only the smirk and sad humour of a stunted life. Here and there his statues might attain a certain sweetness and grace, such as painting might perfectly well have rendered; but on the whole sculpture remained decorative and infantile.

The Renaissance brought back technical freedom and a certain inspiration, unhappily a retrospective and exotic one. The art cut praiseworthy capers in the face of the public, but n.o.body could teach the public itself to dance. If several great temperaments, under the auspices of fas.h.i.+on, could then call up a magic world in which bodies still spoke a heroic language, that was a pa.s.sing dream. Society could not feed such an artificial pa.s.sion, nor the schools transmit an arbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in social conditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nude continued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetorical statues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroic sculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly and confesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails to rescue an art from laboured insignificance when it has no steadying function in the moral world, and must waver between caprice and convention. Where something modest and genuine peeped out was in portraiture, and also at times in that devotional sculpture in wood which still responded to a native interest and consequently kept its sincerity and colour. Pious images may be feeble in the extreme, but they have not the weakness of being merely aesthetic. The purveyor of church wares has a stated theme; he is employed for a purpose; and if he has enough technical resource his work may become truly beautiful: which is not to say that he will succeed if his conceptions are without dignity or his style without discretion. There are good _Mater dolorosas_; there is no good _Sacred Heart_.

[Sidenote: When men see groups and backgrounds they are natural painters.]

It may happen, however, that people are not interested in subjects that demand or allow reproduction in bulk. The isolated figure or simple group may seem cold apart from its natural setting. In rendering an action you may need to render its scene, if it is the circ.u.mstance that gives it value rather than the hero. You may also wish to trace out the action through a series of episodes with many figures. In the latter case you might have recourse to a bas-relief, which, although durable, is usually a thankless work; there is little in it that might not be conveyed in a drawing with distinctness. As some artists, like Michael Angelo, have carried the sculptor's spirit into painting, many more, when painting is the prevalent and natural art, have produced carved pictures. It may be said that any work is essentially a picture which is conceived from a single quarter and meant to be looked at only in one light. Objects in such a case need not be so truly apperceived and appropriated as they would have to be in true sculpture. One aspect suffices: the subject presented is not so much constructed as dreamt.

[Sidenote: Evolution of painting.]

The whole history of painting may be strung on this single thread--the effort to reconst.i.tute impressions, first the dramatic impression and then the sensuous. A summary and symbolic representation of things is all that at first is demanded; the point is to describe something pictorially and recall people's names and actions. It is characteristic of archaic painting to be quite discursive and symbolic; each figure is treated separately and stuck side by side with the others upon a golden ground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist; only those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual names or chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really more sensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision in suspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, and is employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorative splendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may later acquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; t.i.tians, Murillos, or Turners are _colourists in representation_, and their canvases would not be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing human or mystical or atmospheric. A stained-gla.s.s window or a wall of tiles can outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration, accordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may from time to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols with which it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what their object contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a group will be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separate figures may still be, their att.i.tudes and relations will reconst.i.tute the dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language; it will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symbolic crucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is; a plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a real crucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium and make dramatic truth sensuous truth also.

[Sidenote: Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.]

To work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its pa.s.sionate a.s.sociations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we call emotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant and prior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting we have not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of the sensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic painting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose of design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and technical feeling--that expression of candour and satisfaction which may pervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and dislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must proceed to acc.u.mulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the articulation which a thorough a.n.a.lysis had given it. Such painting as Tintoretto's or Paolo Veronese's records impressions as a cultivated sense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies the sensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligent expression of all those mechanisms, those situations and pa.s.sions, with which the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots, meant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience, meant to outs.h.i.+ne the reality.

In order to reconst.i.tute the image we may take an abstract representation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and its scope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their texture and atmosphere, and the s.p.a.ce in which they lie. From a representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures by furnis.h.i.+ng a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the artist pa.s.ses to considering his figures more and more as parts of a whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose their separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or trees in a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by their interplay, and s.h.i.+ning by a light which is mutually reflected.

[Sidenote: Essence of landscape-painting.]

When this transformation is complete the painting is essentially a landscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may even depict an interior, like Velasquez's Meninas. But the observer, even in the presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by the medium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens to hold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature puts before him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffused material substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits of substance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally and by virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. If this physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and morality involved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus a profound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours its objects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this active self-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, the sentiment of the landscape.

Perception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they are readily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first a certain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture, so that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still be distinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in them goes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individual over. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects threaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and profound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces, that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease to be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in nature.

[Sidenote: Its threatened dissolution.]

An artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a case units and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. A man, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, may well feel his mind's articulate grammar losing its authority, but that grammar must evidently be rea.s.serted if from the immediate he ever wishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists for the mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have not so far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animal within us to absolve us from human distinctions.

Moreover, it is not quite true that the immediate has no real diversity.

It evidently suggests the ideal terms into which we divide it, and it sustains our apprehension itself, with all the diversities this may create. To what I call right and left, light and darkness, a real opposition must correspond in any reality which is at all relevant to my experience; so that I should fail to integrate my impression, and to absorb the only reality that concerns me, if I obliterated those points of reference which originally made the world figured and visible. s.p.a.ce remains absolutely dark, for all the infinite light which we may declare to be radiating through it, until this light is concentrated in one body or reflected from another; and a landscape cannot be so much as vaporous unless mists are distinguishable in it, and through them some known object which they obscure. In a word, landscape is always, in spite of itself, a collection of particular representations. It is a ma.s.s of hieroglyphics, each the graphic symbol for some definite human sensation or reaction; only these symbols have been extraordinarily enriched and are fused in representation, so that, like instruments in an orchestra, they are merged in the voluminous sensation they const.i.tute together, a sensation in which, for attentive perception, they never cease to exist.

[Sidenote: Reversion to pure decorative design.]

Impatience of such control as reality must always exercise over representation may drive painting back to a simpler function. When a designer, following his own automatic impulse, conventionalises a form, he makes a legitimate exchange, subst.i.tuting fidelity to his apperceptive instincts for fidelity to his external impressions. When a landscape-painter, revolting against a tedious discursive style, studies only ma.s.ses of colour and abstract systems of lines, he retains something in itself beautiful, although no longer representative, perhaps, of anything in nature. A pure impression cannot be illegitimate; it cannot be false until it pretends to represent something, and then it will have ceased to be a simple feeling, since something in it will refer to an ulterior existence, to which it ought to conform. This ulterior existence (since intelligence is life understanding its own conditions) can be nothing in the end but what produced that impression. Sensuous life, however, has its value within itself; its pleasures are not significant. Representative art is accordingly in a sense secondary; beauty and expression begin farther back. They are present whenever the outer stimulus agreeably strikes an organ and thereby arouses a sustained image, in which the consciousness of both stimulation and reaction is embodied. An abstract design in outline and colour will amply fulfil these conditions, if sensuous and motor harmonies are preserved in it, and if a sufficient sweep and depth of reaction is secured. Stained-gla.s.s, tapestry, panelling, and in a measure all objects, by their mere presence and distribution, have a decorative function. When sculpture and painting cease to be representative they pa.s.s into the same category. Decoration in turn merges in construction; and so all art, like the whole Life of Reason, is joined together at its roots, and branches out from the vital processes of sensation and reaction. Diversity arises centrifugally, according to the provinces explored and the degree of mutual checking and control to which the various extensions are subjected.