Three Lectures on Aesthetic/Lecture 2
II
THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE IN ITS EMBODIMENTS — “NATURE” AND THE ARTS.
The natural order in which to approach
the problems of any enquiry is the order
of their difficulty. When you have solved
the simplest, its solution affords the basis
for an approach to the next simplest, and
so on.
Therefore we are not at all concerned with the historical order of things. What we want to do to-day is to form some idea of the rank taken by the different achievements of the aesthetic spirit, arranged in accordance with the difficulties which are overcome in each of them, or in other words, with the degree of aesthetic embodiment which they respectively achieve.
The simplest cases of aesthetic utterance, the easiest to apprehend and explain, are some which I should like to call, in a usage which I am aware is very lax, a priori embodiments of the aesthetic spirit. We spoke in the last lecture of the square and the cube, which carry their steadiness, and sturdiness, and equality in all directions, actually written on their faces. That’s all square, we say. We do not pledge ourselves to any one special meaning expressed in words. An aesthetic embodiment can be embodied in nothing but itself. But the constant application of expressions like those cited here and above suffice to show that these simple patterns are obvious or a priori embodiments of simple feelings. Along with them we may place simple rhythms, simple melodies, the pulsations of the dance, and the like. These are in fact simple patterns; and all of them have obvious analogies with each other. Hogarth described his enjoyment of the “stick and ribbon ornament” (the guilloche) as like that of watching a country dance. This reminds us of the theory of the rising mountain we referred to in the last lecture.
In all these objects of aesthetic feeling, whose pleasurableness I have ventured to call a priori, we have what might be called the simplest formal character. The three characteristics of aesthetic objects which we began by laying down in the last lecture, are here plain and obvious, stability, relevance, community, rooted in the character of the mere abstract pattern which we perceive or in which we are absorbed (as in the rhythm of the dance). Fast or slow, simple or intricate, self-completing or interrupted — all these characters seem to adhere immediately to the lines and movements, colours and sounds which fall into the simple arrangements. I am not asserting that this is the earliest origin of, say, the dance. We are not speaking historically; and it is quite possible that a representative meaning in, e.g., the dance, as the war dance, the bear dance, the Dionysus dance, may be older than the recognition of the simple aesthetic value of sound and rhythm. But that does not concern us to-day. We are concerned with aesthetic value, and with that alone.
The point, for aesthetic theory, is that so far, in such a priori expression, we have no element of representation or almost none. “Almost none,” because some one might urge that a cube drawn on paper can only have its peculiar character by being taken to represent an actual solid cube of wood or stone. And that would be so with the rising mountain, if we think of it as a mountain. But that is really not necessary at this primary level. The square drawn on paper is enough, and so are the systems of lines and shapes (such as the pattern from the ceiling at Orchomenus) and the simple living in the pulsations of the dance.
We get to a point beyond this in difficulty and complexity — whatever the historical relations may be — when we get two factors to deal with instead of one. You may have a drawing on paper which is a square pattern; and you may have one — the early draughtsmen were very fond of them — which not only is a pattern on paper or on gold, but which represents, say, a bull hunt.
This is a new factor, and it introduces not only quite a different motive in art, but the entire problem of what passes as the beauty of nature. Because obviously a drawing of a bull hunt recalls to us things rather than patterns. For a pattern, as a rule, you want the help of a draughtsman; but for things you can see all round you every day, you seem to want no help at all. Only they do not prima facie show you simple abstract patterns; and so, how do you bring them to act as an aesthetic embodiment of feeling?
And the same difficulty applies to a whole great branch of the activity of fine art. It may draw for you a bull hunt, or sculpture Phoebus Apollo, or sing to you the story of Troy. All this is on a quite different footing from what we called the a priori form of aesthetic expression. There is a tendency to bring in mere facts; to test the representation by your knowledge and to demand that it should by that test be adequate, and even to say that its aesthetic value lies in bringing these independent facts and beings completely and faithfully before you. In short, there is a vicious tendency to subordinate expression to knowledge, which means losing hold of the principle of aesthetic semblance. This is, as we saw, that for aesthetic value we need, and can use, nothing in the way of embodiment which is not an appearance moulded freely by the mind as a vehicle of aesthetic form, the soul of things, in which we live them.
The aesthetic problem at this point springs from an embarrassment of wealth. In place of a comparatively small range of simple and obvious expression, we have thrown upon our hands the whole abundance of the sensible and imaginable world as a claimant for aesthetic value. We seem forced in some way and degree to admit knowledge and fact as instruments of expression; to use our experience of the character and qualities which things have really and in actuality, to help our imagination in its exploration of the forms which respond satisfactorily to feeling.
It is plain that we are not to lose hold of what we have got; the simple pattern or rhythm which we ventured to call expressive a priori. Every work of art and every thing of beauty presents such a pattern, so to speak, on its surface. But we must contrive to understand how the same principle can extend into the sphere of the representation of things; of which things, prima facie, we know only what we have learned from experience, and can say, it would seem, little that is necessary or inevitable as to the connection of appearances with any character or quality which could help to embody feeling. For instance, a man’s laughing might be the expression of pain or anger, if we had not learned by experience that it is otherwise. Green trees might be the withering ones, and brown trees the flourishing ones; without special experience of human bodies you could not know how or when their appearance indicates vitality or character; without experience of animals you could not know that the drawing of the bull hunt indicates activity, courage, ferocity. You cannot read these things off from the patterns or the colour-combinations; you have ultimately to arrive at them from the knowledge of facts. When you come to human portraiture, the reading of the human countenance, geometrical properties of lines and shapes help you not at all, or hardly at all. You have to rely upon special lessons, learned in the school of life.
This is, I think, the difficulty as it presents itself. I have purposely overstated it a little.
The first thing that strikes us is that it is extraordinarily parallel to the difficulty as to how far necessary knowledge can be had in the sphere of natural science. You cannot see the chemical properties of substances in them, as you can see the properties of circles or triangles; you cannot ultimately establish even the law of gravitation except by finding that it seems to explain all facts of the kind it applies to. But yet there is such a thing as natural science, and it has its degrees of necessity; and some things are pretty fully and generally established and shed great clearness wherever they apply, and some again are mere observations for which no reason or general probability whatever can be adduced.
Well, this is the sort of way, I suppose, in which we must conceive the problem of making representation instrumental to expression. I see the statue of the Discobolos, and I see that it represents a man in act to hurl a disc. Now to live myself into this representation, I must consider what a man is, and I must have some knowledge how his body works and balances, and so on. I cannot read off anything at all from the statue merely as a pattern in marble, as I could if it were a marble cube or sphere. This is the difficulty of representation as I stated it.
But it was, as the comparison of natural science shows, a little overstated. Because, it is not a mere dead fact of my experience that a man’s body in a certain position indicates a certain sort or phase of vitality. It is true that I must know something about a man’s body before I can live myself into it at all; but when I can do so, the attitude of the disc-thrower’s body is after all necessary in relation to my feeling, and not a bare disconnected fact. It has, to use my former phrase, something of a priori expressiveness. When you know its structure, its position does become inevitable. It is hopeless, indeed, to reduce the expressiveness of representation, or of the contemplation of nature which raises the same problem, to the a priori expressiveness of a pattern like a square. True, the appearance which is the object will, in principle, fail to be a satisfactory embodiment of feeling, unless it is at least satisfactory as a mere pattern, or a priori expression; but also and additionally, in harmony with this satisfactoriness, it must be satisfactorily expressive through the concrete character of that which it represents. You must interpret the Discobolos through your experience of human bodies; and I suppose that your sense of the life in the abstract pattern is itself actually amplified and intensified by this deeper experience. As the necessity of science penetrates into and extends over the realm of fact, so, I imagine, the expressiveness of the abstract pattern penetrates, by experience used in the service of the imagination, into the realm of nature and man, and extends itself over and appropriates ground that is primarily representative and gains at the same time a deeper significance from it. The Greek treatment of drapery, which is both delightful in itself as a pattern, and deeply expressive, e.g. of movement, is a good example. It should be noted that we exclude mere association from the expressive connection which we demand. The expressiveness must be in some degree inherent in the form, or what I have called a priori. Mere association brings us down at once to the level of knowledge of fact, as when my old portmanteau reminds me of Florence.
And further, in the power which very successful representation undoubtedly exercises over our minds, there is active, I have no doubt, a principle which is really of high aesthetic value, although in enhancing the importance of skilful copying it is misconstrued and misapplied.
I will repeat myself so far as to give an example which I gave many years ago, and in which I admit that I take great enjoyment. It is — I am shamelessly quoting from myself — perhaps the earliest aesthetic judgment which Western literature contains. It is in the Homeric description of the metal-working deity’s craftsmanship in the shield of Achilles. He has made upon it the representation of a deep fallow field with the ploughmen driving their furrows on it; and the poet observes, “And behind the plough the earth went black, and looked like ploughed ground, though it was made of gold; that was a very miracle of his craft.”
Now what was the miracle here, that made Homer cry out at it with delight? It was not, surely, that when you have one bit of ploughed land you can make another like it. That goes on all day when a man ploughs a field. Or what made Dante say of the sculptures on the marble of Purgatory, that one who saw the reality would see no better than he did, and that the representation of some smoke set his eyes and nose at variance as to whether it was real?
Surely the miracle lies in what Homer accents when he says, “Though it was made of gold.” It lies here; that without the heavy matter and whole natural process of the reality, man’s mind possesses a magic by which it can extract the soul of the actual thing or event, and confer it on any medium which is convenient to him, the wall of a cave, or a plate of gold, or a scrap of paper. And when these great poets insist on the likeness of the imitation, I take it that the real underlying interest is in the conquest of the difference of the medium. So that really, in the naïve praise of successful imitation, we have, if we read it rightly, the germ of the fundamental doctrine of aesthetic semblance. That is to say, what matters is not the thing, but the appearance which you can carry off, and deal with apart from it, and recreate. And the real sting of even the crudest glorification of copying is this wonder that you can carry off with you a thing’s soul, and leave its body behind. It is quite natural to misconceive this miracle as if the merit lay in making the soul as near as possible a replica of the body. But if you treat the soul as the body at its very best, that is not a bad analogy for the problem of representation in dealing with the aesthetic semblance. See how pregnant this praise of copying is. Dante, in the same passage, says that the carvings put to shame “not only Polycleitus, but Nature herself.” It is the spirit of Whistler’s “Nature’s creeping up.” You can copy a thing so splendidly that your copy will be more beautiful than the thing.
Thus we are prepared to understand the place and value of representation, which has always been something of a theoretical difficulty in aesthetic. It introduces prima facie an enormously larger and deeper world than the world of non-representative pattern- designing, to be the instrument of the embodiment of feeling. But the difficulty is that qua a mere world of fact, it has no capacity for a priori expression; and the use of it for expressive purposes, the imaginative use of fact, is therefore subject to innumerable dangers, arising from unaesthetic interests, which attach themselves to actual reality and therefore also to its imitative reproduction. Why multiply, for example, scenes and stories of wickedness? Is there not enough of it in the world already? If you are simply copying what you find, revealing in it no new depth or passion, the question is unanswerable.
I promised not to be historical; but I may mention it here as an extraordinary piece of insight on Aristotle’s part, in which, essentially, he followed and summarised Plato, when he said that music was of all the arts the most imitative, meaning expressive, precisely on the ground that of all the arts it was the least representative. Its expression, that is to say, approached most nearly to what we have ventured to call a priori expressiveness. Its rhythms and combinations went directly to the heart of emotion. They are, Aristotle says, direct resemblances of emotions, that is, without making the circuit of reference to anything which had a name and existence in the external world. I suppose this is in general the doctrine of musical expression accepted to-day.
In speaking of the place of representation in aesthetic experience, we have said all that is important on the aesthetic position of the love of natural beauty. For nature in its utmost range, including artificial things, and man as an external object, is just the region of all the things which can be objects of representative reproduction. The only thing that need be added is that by nature we mean, for aesthetic purposes, the fulness of the soul or semblance of external things, that which imaginative perception freely apprehends, and remodels in the interest of feeling. There is no reason to cut down our meaning to the attenuated constructions of physical science. They are not nature as it appears, and nature as it appears is what we love and admire. It is the living external world, as we relive it in our fullest imaginative experience.
It is well known that this, in its fulness, is a point of view which takes time to develop. “The charm of Nature,” I believe, in the modern sense, is first mentioned by an Alexandrine poet of about the third century A.D. “In the house you have rest; out-of-doors the charm of nature.”[1]
And as we saw, though this imaginative experience is not within actual reality, and is not to be interpreted as theoretical truth, yet it may make a difference to our general theory of things, and our theory may make a difference to it. And so, for example, representation of nature and imitation and idealisation are very different things according as we hold that nature has in it a life and divinity which it is attempting to reveal, — so that idealisation is the positive effort to bring to apprehension the deeper beauty we feel to be there, — or as we hold that nature is at bottom a dead mechanical system, and idealisation therefore lies in some way of treating it which weakens or generalises its effect and makes it less and not more of what its fullest character would be. No doubt, theory seeking for truth does not accept imaginative expressions as logical conclusions, but it is bound to take account of the fact that imagination finds in experience the instrument of that immense embodiment of feeling which it constructs. Aesthetic imagination and logical theory are coordinate powers. Neither can do the work of the other. But both reveal something to us in their own way.
We have seen that what we may call pure or a priori expression is not merely the simplest and primary character of aesthetic embodiments, but recurs also at what is almost the climax of aesthetic achievement, that is, in the art of music. This leads us to observe how capriciously, as it would seem, this principle of representation asserts itself in the hierarchy of the arts. In architecture it is present hardly at all; in sculpture and painting it is predominant; in music, it has hardly any place as of right, or a very subordinate one; in poetry, it reasserts itself with almost predominant power. There seems to be in some degree a struggle between the two sides of the aesthetic attitude, the side of direct expression through rhythm and sensuous combinations, and the side which, though its contribution to expression is indirect, yet brings with it in the end the whole resources of the imaginable universe. As we saw, if we consider the problem accurately, it is impossible to dispense with either factor, and they have indeed no aesthetic existence apart. Yet the idea for example that in music we have the pure type of expressiveness, that towards which every art is bound to aspire, does appear to indicate an inherent impulse of the art-spirit towards a mode of utterance which is not loaded with the weight of representation.[2] We have only to say, that we have attempted to display the necessary root of this apparent conflict, and to explain how the representative factor, while having no independent justification, is nevertheless essential, in its place, to the full development of the aesthetic attitude.
After all, we can relive the character and conflicts of man, as we express them for instance in the drama, with a necessity which not only covers a wider and deeper world, but which also is more unmistakable and precise in its sequences, than the simple language of rhythm or the decorative pattern. For the mind of man is open to us as the extension of our own, and has its own necessity, which weaves its great patterns on the face of the whole world. And in these patterns — the patterns of life itself — the fullest feeling finds embodiment.
If we now proceed to say something of what is involved in the classification of the arts, it is not for the sake of advocating any particular arrangement. Mere classification is always an idle study, but the general condition and essence of the difference between kindred things usually throws a searching light on their inmost nature.
Why, then, are there different arts? The simple answer to this question takes us, I believe, to the precise root and source of the whole principle of aesthetic expressiveness, which we have already analysed in more general terms.
We should begin, I am convinced, from the very simplest facts. Why do artists make different patterns, or treat the same pattern differently, in wood-carving, say, and clay-modelling, and wrought-iron work? If you can answer this question thoroughly, then, I am convinced, you have the secret of the classification of the arts and of the passage of feeling into its aesthetic embodiment; that is, in a word, the secret of beauty.
Why, then, in general does a worker in clay make different decorative patterns from a worker in wrought-iron? I wish I could go into this question with illustrations and details, but I will admit at once that I am not really competent to do so, though I have taken very great interest in the problem. But in general there can surely be no doubt of the answer. You cannot make the same things in clay as you can in wrought-iron, except by a tour de force. The feeling of the work is, I suppose, altogether different. The metal challenges you, coaxes you, as William Morris said of the molten glass, to do a particular kind of thing with it, where its tenacity and ductility make themselves felt. The clay, again, is delightful, I take it, to handle, to those who have a talent for it; but it is delightful of course in quite different manipulations from those of the wrought-iron. I suppose its facility of surface, how it lends itself to modelling or to throwing on the wheel, must be its great charm. Now the decorative patterns which are carried out in one or the other may, of course, be suggested ab extra by a draughtsman, and have all sorts of properties and interests in themselves as mere lines on paper. But when you come to carry them out in the medium, then, if they are appropriate, or if you succeed in adapting them, they become each a special phase of the embodiment of your whole delight and interest of “body-and-mind” in handling the clay or metal or wood or molten glass. It is alive in your hands, and its life grows or rather magically springs into shapes which it, and you in it, seem to desire and feel inevitable. The feeling for the medium, the sense of what can rightly be done in it only or better than in anything else, and the charm and fascination of doing it so — these, I take it, are the real clue to the fundamental question of aesthetics, which is “how feeling and its body are created adequate to one another.” It is parallel to the question in general philosophy, “Why the soul has a body.” It is the same sort of thing as the theory of the rising mountain, but it is much less open to caprice, being absolute fact all through, and it explains not merely the interpretation of lines and shapes, but the whole range and working of the aesthetic imagination in the province of fine art, which is its special province.
To this doctrine belongs the very fruitful modern topic of the relation of beautiful handicraft with the workman’s life, as the outcome and expression of his body-and-mind, and amid all the disparagement which the most recent views of art are apt to throw upon Ruskin, we must remember that it was first and foremost to his inspired advocacy that this point of view owes its recognition to-day, and William Morris, for instance, recognised him, in this respect at least, as his master.
The differences of the great arts then are simply such differences as those between clay-modelling, wood-carving, and wrought-iron work, developed on an enormous scale, and with their inevitable consequences for whole provinces of aesthetic imagination.
For this is a fact of the highest importance. Every craftsman, we saw, feels the peculiar delight and enjoys the peculiar capacity of his own medium. This delight and sense of capacity are of course not confined to the moments when he is actually manipulating his work. His fascinated imagination lives in the powers of his medium; he thinks and feels in terms of it; it is the peculiar body of which his aesthetic imagination and no other is the peculiar soul.
Thus there grow up the distinct traditions, the whole distinctive worlds of imaginative thought and feeling, in which the great imaginative arts have their life and being.
And this leads to the important question, what is meant by the ideal in art. The essential point is, as we saw when speaking of the idealisation of nature, that the ideal should not be a tendency which is negatively related to the fullest aesthetic expression. The ideal has often indicated a generalisation and abstraction, ultimately depending on the notion that to get at the root and law of things is to get at a generalised common element in which they resemble one another. But we saw that if it means anything in application to nature, it means the heightened expression of character and individuality which come of a faith in the life and divinity with which the external world is instinct and inspired.
This same conception of the ideal is the lesson of our doctrine of art. The ideal of every art must be revealed, I take it, in terms of the art itself; and it must be what underlies the whole series of efforts which the artist’s imagination has made and is making, to create, in his own medium, an embodied feeling in which he can rest satisfied. It is the world as he has access to it through his art. It may seem to him more than any of his works; but it only has existence in them and in the effort which they imply when taken all together. The danger is to try and make a picture of this effort, apart from any of its achievements, which is really nothing. Then you get the enfeebled ideal, which means the omission of all character and individuality.
Now let us take a particular case. If our view of the distinction and connection of the arts is right, and it is simply a question of the medium adopted by each, and the capacities of that medium as proved by experience, what is to be said of the distinctive character of poetry? It seems in a sense to have almost no material element, to work directly with significant ideas in which the objects of the imagination are conveyed. Language is so transparent, that it disappears, so to speak, into its own meaning, and we are left with no characteristic medium at all.
I do not think there can be any doubt about the true attitude here. Poetry, like the other arts, has a physical or at least a sensuous medium, and this medium is sound. It is, however, significant sound, uniting inseparably in itself the factors of formal expression through an immediate pattern, and of representation through the meanings of language, exactly as sculpture and painting deal at once and in the same vision both with formal patterns and with significant shapes. That language is a physical fact with its own properties and qualities is easily seen by comparing different tongues, and noting the form which different patterns, such as sapphic or hexameter verse, necessarily receive in different languages, such as Greek and Latin. To make poetry in different languages, e.g. in French and German, is as different a task as to make decorative work in clay and iron. The sound metre and meaning are the same inseparable product in a poem as much as the colour, form, and embodied feeling in a picture. And it is only an illusion to suppose that because you have significant sentences in poetry, therefore you are dealing with meanings which remain the same outside the poem, any more than a tree or a person whom you think you recognise in a picture, is, as you know them at home so to speak, the tree or the person of the picture. Poetry no more keeps its meaning when turned into corresponding prose, than a picture or a sonata keeps its meaning in the little analyses they print in the catalogues or programmes.
Shelley, according to Professor Bradley, had a feeling of the kind referred to. Poetry seemed to him to deal with a perfectly apt and transparent medium, with no qualities of its own, and therefore approaching to being no medium at all, but created out of nothing by the imagination for the use of the imagination. While the media employed by the other arts, being gross and physical and having independent qualities of their own, seemed to him rather obstacles in the way of expression than apt instruments of it. The answer to such a view is what we have just given.
It is the qualities of the media which give them the capacity to serve as embodiments of feeling; and sonorous language, the medium of poetry, has its peculiarities and definite capacities precisely like the others.
Here, I cannot but think, we are obliged to part company, with some regret, from Benedetto Croce. He is possessed, as so often is the case with him, by a fundamental truth, so intensely that he seems incapable of apprehending what more is absolutely necessary to its realisation. Beauty, he sees, is for the mind and in the mind. A physical thing, supposed un-perceived and unfelt, cannot be said in the full sense to possess beauty. But he forgets throughout, I must think, that though feeling is necessary to its embodiment, yet also the embodiment is necessary to feeling. To say that because beauty implies a mind, therefore it is an internal state, and its physical embodiment is something secondary and incidental, and merely brought into being for the sake of permanence and communication — this seems to me a profound error of principle, a false idealism. It meets us, however, throughout Croce’s system, according to which “intuition” — the inward vision of the artist — is the only true expression. External media, he holds, are, strictly speaking, superfluous, so that there is no meaning in distinguishing between one mode of expression and another (as between paint and musical sound and language). Therefore there can be no classification of the arts, and no fruitful discussion of what can better be done by one art than by another. And aesthetic — the philosophy of expression — is set down as all one with linguistic — the philosophy of speech. For there is no meaning in distinguishing between language in the sense of speech, and other modes of expression. Of course, if he had said that speech is not the only form of language, but that every art speaks to us in a language of its own, that would have had much to be said for it. But I do not gather that that is his intention.
His notion is not a new one among theorists. It really is deeply rooted in a philosophical blunder. No doubt it seems obvious, when once pointed out, that things are not all there, not complete in all qualities, except when they are appreciated in a mind. And then, having rightly observed that this is so, we are apt to go on and say that you have them complete, and have all you want of them, if you have them before your mind and have not the things in bodily presence at all. But the blunder is, to think that you can have them completely before your mind without having their bodily presence at all. And because of this blunder, it seems fine and “ideal” to say that the artist operates in the bodiless medium of pure thought or fancy, and that the things of the bodily world are merely physical causes of sensation, which do not themselves enter into the effects he uses. It is rather a natural thing to say about poetry, because we discount the physical side of language. We glance at its words and do not sound them. And Shelley, as we saw, says something very like that.
But at the very beginning of all this notion, as we said, there is a blunder. Things, it is true, are not complete without minds, but minds, again, are not complete without things; not any more, we might say, than minds are complete without bodies. Our resources in the way of sensation, and our experiences in the way of satisfactory and unsatisfactory feeling, are all of them won out of our intercourse with things, and are thought and imagined by us as qualities and properties of the things. Especially we see this in music. Here we have an art entirely made up of a material — musical tone — which one may say does not exist at all in the natural world, and is altogether originated by our inventive and imaginative manipulation of physical things, pressing on in the line of creative discovery which something very like accident must at first have opened up to us.[3] Apart from this imaginative operation upon physical things, our fancy in the realm of music could have done as good as nothing.
And in principle it is the same with all the arts. All the material and the physical process which the artist uses — take our English language as used in poetry for an example — has been elaborated and re fined, and, so to speak, consecrated by ages of adaptation and application in which it has been fused and blended with feeling — and it carries the life-blood of all this endeavour in its veins; and that is how, as we have said over and over again, feelings get their embodiment, and embodiments get their feeling. If you try to cut the thought and fancy loose from the body of the stuff in which it moulds its pictures and poetic ideas and musical constructions, you impoverish your fancy, and arrest its growth, and reduce it to a bloodless shade. When I pronounce even a phrase so commonplace in itself as “Rule, Britannia!” the actual vibrations of the sound, the bodily experience I am aware of in saying it, is alive with the history of England which passed into the words in the usage and formation of the language. Up to a certain point, language is poetry ready-made for us.
And I suppose that a great painter, in his actual handling of his brush, has present with him a sense of meaning and fitness which is one with the joy of execution, both of which the experience of a lifetime has engrained in the co-operation of his hand and eye. I take it, there is a pleasure in the brush stroke, which is also a sense of success in the use of the medium, and of meaning in hitting the exact effect which he wants to get. We common people have something analogous to all this, when we enjoy the too-rare sensation of having found the right word. In such “finding” there is a creative element. A word is, quite strictly speaking, not used twice in the same sense.
Croce says, indeed, that the artist has every stroke of the brush in his mind as complete before he executes it as after. The suggestion is that using the brush adds nothing to his inward or mental work of art. I think that this is false idealism. The bodily thing adds immensely to the mere idea and fancy, in wealth of qualities and connections. If we try to cut out the bodily side of our world, we shall find that we have reduced the mental side to a mere nothing.
And so, when we said that you can carry away the soul of a thing and leave its body behind, we always added that you must in doing so confer its soul upon a new and spiritualised body. Your imagination must be an imagination of something, and if you refuse to give that something a definite structure, you pass from the aesthetic semblance to the region of abstract thought. I have spoken of sound as physical; if this is a difficulty it is enough to call it sensuous, and sensuous in immediate connection with other physical properties and experiences. This applies both to music and to language.
All this later argument of ours, starting from the importance of medium and technique, has aimed at exhibiting in detail the double process of creation and contemplation which is implied in the aesthetic attitude, and the impossibility of separating one factor of it from another. And it is the same question as that stated in other words, how a feeling can be got into an object. This is the central problem of the aesthetic attitude; and, as we have seen, the best material for solving it for us who are not great artists comes from any minor experience we may have at command in which we have been aware of the outgoing of feeling into expression. We must think not merely of the picture in the gallery or the statue in the museum, but of the song and the dance, the dramatic reading, the entering into music, or the feel of the material in the minor arts, or simply, of the creative discovery of the right word.
The festal or social view of art will help us here. Suppose a tribe or a nation has won a great victory; “they are feeling big, and they want to make something big,” as I have heard an expert say. That, I take it, is the rough account of the beginning of the aesthetic attitude. And according to their capacity and their stage of culture they may make a pile of their enemies’ skulls, or they may build the Parthenon. The point of the aesthetic attitude lies in the adequate fusion of body and soul, where the soul is a feeling, and the body its expression, without residue on either side.