The Beautiful, Vernon Lee [good ebook reader TXT] 📗

despair if his suggestion of the Madonna's sorrows or of Isolde's love-agonies had been so efficacious as to prevent anybody from looking twice at the fresco or listening to the end of the opera. This inversion of the question is worth inquiring into, because, like the analogous paradox about the pictorial "realisation" of cubic existence, it affords an illustration of some of the psychological intricacies of the relation between Art and the Beautiful. This is how I propose to explain it.

The task to which an artist is set varies from one work to another, while the shapes employed for the purpose are, as already said, limited by his powers and especially by the precise moment in artistic evolution. The artist therefore thinks of his available shapes as something given, as means, and the subject he is ordered to represent (or the emotion he is commissioned to elicit) as the all-important aim. Thus he thinks of himself (and makes the critic think of him) not as preventing the represented subject or expressed emotion from withdrawing the beholder from the artistic shapes, but, on the contrary, as employing these artistic shapes for the sole purpose of that representation or emotional expression. And this most explicable inversion of the real state of affairs ends by making the beholder believe that what he cares for in a masterpiece is not the beauty of shape which only a masterpiece could have, but the efficacy of bringing home a subject or expressing an emotion which could be just as efficaciously represented or elicited by the vilest daub or the wretchedest barrel organ! This inevitable, and I believe, salutary illusion of the artist, is further in creased by the fact that while the artist's ingenuity must be bent on avoiding irrelevance and diminishing opportunities for ugliness, the actual beauty of the shapes he is creating arises from the depths of his unreasoned, traditional and organised consciousness, from activities which might be called automatic if they were not accompanied by a critical feeling that what is produced thus spontaneously and inevitably is either turning out as it must and should, or, contrariwise, insists upon turning out exactly as it should not. The particular system of curves and angles, of directions and impacts of lines, the particular "whole-and-part" scheme of, let us say, Michelangelo, is due to his modes of aesthetic perceiving, feeling, living, added to those of all the other artists whose peculiarities have been averaged in what we call the school whence Michelangelo issued. He can no more depart from these shapes than he can paint Rembrandt's Pilgrims of Emmaus without Rembrandt's science of light and shade and Rembrandt's oil-and-canvas technique. There is no alternative, hence no choice, hence no feeling of a problem to resolve, in this question of shapes to employ. But there are dozens of alternatives and of acts of choice, there is a whole series of problems when Michelangelo sets to employing these inevitable shapes to telling the Parting of the Light from the Darkness, or the Creation of Adam on the Vault of the Sixtine, and to surrounding the stories from Genesis with Prophets and Sibyls and Ancestors of Christ. Is the ceiling to remain a unity, or be broken up into irrelevant compositions? Here comes in, alongside of his almost automatic genius for shapes, the man's superhuman constructive ingenuity. See how he divides that ceiling in such a way that the frames of the separate compositions combine into a huge structure of painted rafters and brackets, nay the Prophets and Sibyls, the Ancestors and Ancestresses themselves, and the naked antique genii, turn into architectural members, holding that imaginary roof together, securing its seeming stability, increasing, by their gesture its upspring and its weightiness, and at the same time determining the tracks along which the eye is forced to travel. Backwards and forwards the eye is driven by that living architecture, round and round in its search now for completion of visible pattern, now for symbolic and narrative meaning. And ever back to the tale of the Creation, so that the remote historic incidents of the Ancestors, the tremendous and tremendously present lyric excitement and despair of the prophetic men and women, the pagan suggestion of the athletic genii, all unite like the simultaneous and consecutive harmonies of a titanic symphony, round the recurrent and dominant phrases of those central stories of how the universe and man were made, so that the beholder has the emotion of hearing not one part of the Old Testament, but the whole of it. But meanwhile, and similarly interchanging and multiplying their imaginative and emotional appeal, the thought of those most memorable of all written stories unites with the perception and empathy of those marvellous systems of living lines and curves and angles, throbbing with their immortal impacts and speeds and directions in a great coordinated movement that always begins and never ends, until it seems to the beholder as if those painted shapes were themselves the crowning work of some eighth day of Creation, gathering up in reposeful visible synthesis the whole of Creation's ineffable energy and harmony and splendour.

This example of Michelangelo's ceiling shows how, thanks to the rythmical nature of perception, art fulfils the mission of making us think from Shapes to Things and from Things back to Shapes. And it allows us to see the workings of that psychological law, already manifest in the elementary relations of line to line and dot to dot, by which whatever can be thought and felt in continuous alternation tends to be turned into a whole by such reiteration of common activities. And this means that Art adds to its processes of selection and exclusion a process of inclusion, safeguarding aesthetic contemplation by drawing whatever is not wholly refractory into that contemplation's orbit. This turning of non-aesthetic interests from possible competitors and invaders into co-operating allies is an incomparable multiplying factor of aesthetic satisfaction, enlarging the sphere of aesthetic emotion and increasing that emotion's volume and stability by inclusion of just those elements which would have competed to diminish them. The typical instance of such a possible competitor turned into an ally, is that of the cubic element, which I have described (p. 85) as the first and most constant intruder from the thought of Things into the contemplation of Shapes. For the introduction into a picture of a suggested third dimension is what prevents our thinking away from a merely two-dimensional aspect by supplying subsidiary imaginary aspects susceptible of being co-ordinated to it. So perspective and modelling in light and shade satisfy our habit of locomotion by allowing us, as the phrase is, to go into a picture; and going into, we remain there and establish on its imaginary planes schemes of horizontals and verticals besides those already existing on the real two-dimensional surface. This addition of shapes due to perspective increases the already existing dramas of empathy, instead of interrupting them by our looking away from the picture, which we should infallibly do if our exploring and so to speak cubic-locomotor tendencies were not thus employed inside the picture's limits.

This alliance of aesthetic contemplation with our interest in cubic existence and our constant thought of locomotion, does more however than merely safeguard and multiply our chances of empathic activity. It also increases the sensory discrimination, and hence pleasureableness, of colour, inasmuch as colour becomes, considered as light and shade and values, a suggestion of three-dimensional Things instead of merely a constituent of two-dimensional Shapes. Moreover, one easily tires of "following" verticals and horizontals and their intermediate directions; while empathic imagination, with its dynamic feelings and frequent semi-mimetic accompaniments, requires sufficient intervals of repose; and such repose, such alternation of different mental functions, is precisely afforded by thinking in terms of cubic existence. Art-critics have often pointed out what may be called the thinness, the lack of staying power, of pictures deficient in the cubic element; they ought also to have drawn attention to the fatiguing, the almost hallucinatory excitement, resulting from uninterrupted attention to two-dimensional pattern and architectural outlines, which were, indeed, intended to be incidentally looked at in the course of taking stock of the cubic qualities of furniture and buildings.

And since the limits of this volume have restricted me to painting as a type of aesthetic contemplation, I must ask the Reader to accept on my authority and if possible verify for himself, the fact that what I have been saying applies, mutatis mutandis, to the other arts. As we have already noticed, something analogous to a third dimension exists also in music; and even, as I have elsewhere shown,[*] in literature. The harmonies accompanying a melody satisfy our tendency to think of other notes and particularly of other allied tonalities; while as to literature, the whole handling of words, indeed the whole of logical thinking, is but a cubic working backwards and forwards between what and how, a co-ordinating of items and themes, keeping the mind enclosed in one scheme of ideas by forestalling answers to the questions which would otherwise divert the attention. And if the realisation of the third dimension has come to be mistaken for the chief factor of aesthetic satisfaction, this error is due not merely to the already noticed coincidence between cubic imagination and artistic genius, but even more to the fact that cubic imagination is the type of the various multiplying factors by which the empathic, that is to say the essentially aesthetic, activity, can increase its sphere of operations, its staying power and its intensity.

[*] The Handling of Words, English Review, 1911-12.

CHAPTER XVIII

AESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS

OUR examination has thus proceeded from aesthetic contemplation to the work of Art, which seeks to secure and satisfy it while furthering some of life's various other claims. We must now go back to aesthetic contemplation and find out how the beholder meets these efforts made to secure and satisfy his contemplative attention. For the Reader will by this time have grasped that art can do nothing without the collaboration of the beholder or listener; and that this collaboration, so far from consisting in the passive "being impressed by beauty" which unscientific aestheticians imagined as analogous to "being impressed by sensuous qualities," by hot or cold or sweet or sour, is in reality a combination of higher activities, second in complexity and intensity only to that of the artist himself.

We have seen in the immediately preceding chapter that the most deliberate, though not the essential, part of the artist's business is to provide against any possible disturbance of the beholder's responsive activity, and of course also to increase by every means that output of responsive activity. But the sources of it are in the beholder, and beyond the control of the most ingenious artistic devices and the most violent artistic appeals. There is indeed no better proof of the active nature of aesthetic appreciation than the fact that such appreciation is so often not forthcoming. Even mere sensations, those impressions of single qualities to which we are most unresistingly passive, are not pleasurable without a favourable reaction of the body's chemistry: the same taste or smell will be attractive or repulsive according as we have recently eaten. And however indomitably colour- and sound-sensations force themselves upon us, our submission to them will not be accompanied by even the most "passive" pleasure if we are bodily or mentally out of sorts. How much more frequent must be lack of receptiveness when, instead of dealing with sensations whose intensity depends after all two thirds upon the strength of the outer stimulation, we deal with perceptions which include the bodily and mental activities of exploring a shape and establishing among its constituent sensations relationships both to each other and to ourselves; activities without which there would be for the beholder no shape at all, but mere ragbag chaos!—And in calculating the likelihood of a perceptive empathic response we must remember that such active shape-perception, however instantaneous as compared with the cumbrous processes of