Part 29 (2/2)
Nevertheless despite the absorption of a large proportion of contemporary society in activities pursued not for their own sakes, but for the goods which are their fruits, there is still, as it were, energy left over. This excess vitality may, as it does for most men, take the form of mere unorganized play or recreation. But not so for those born with a singular gift for realizing in color or form or sound the ideal values which they have imagined. For these ”play” is creative production.
The fine arts are, in a sense, the play of the race. They are the fruits of such energy as is, through some fortunate accident of temperament or circ.u.mstance, not caught up in the routine and mechanics of industry or the trivialities of sport or pleasure. They are human activities, freed from the limitations imposed by the exigencies of practical life, and controlled only by the artist's imagined visions. Creative activity is most explicit and most successful in the fine arts, because in these there are fewer obstacles to the material realization of imagined perfections. ”The liberal arts bring to spiritual fruition the matter which either nature or industry has prepared and rendered propitious.”
The industrial arts are, as already pointed out, man's transformation of natural resources to ideal uses. In the same way political and social organization are human arts, enterprises, at their best, in the moulding of men's natures to their highest possible realization. But in the world of action, whether political or industrial, there are incomparably greater hindrances to the realization in practice of imagined goods than there are, at least to the gifted, in the fine arts. Every ideal for which men attempt to find fulfillment in the world of action is subject to a thousand accidental deflections of circ.u.mstance.
Every enterprise involves conflicting wills; the larger the enterprise, the more various and probably the more conflicting the interests involved. Social movements have their courses determined by factors altogether beyond the control of their originators. Statesmen can start wars, but cannot define their eventual fruits. A man may found a political party, and live to see it wander far from the ideal which he had framed. But in the fine arts, to the imaginatively and technically endowed, the materials are prepared and controllable.
In the hands of a master, action does not wander from intent. Language to the poet, for example, is an immediate and responsive instrument; he can mould it precisely to his ideal intention. The enterprise of poetry is less dependent almost than any other undertaking on the accidents of circ.u.mstance, outside the poet's initial imaginative resources.
In music, even so simple an instrument as a flute can yield perfection of sound. The composer of a symphony can invent a perpetual uncorroded beauty; the sculptor an immortality of irrefutably persuasive form. This explains in part why so many artists, of a reflective turn of mind, are pessimists in practical affairs. The world of action with its perpetual and pitiful frustrations, failures, and compromises, seems incomparably poor, paltry, and sordid, in comparison with the perfection that is attainable in art.
Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty s.h.i.+nes and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantment of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fas.h.i.+on to our needs whatever is capable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 65-66.]
The creative artist gives such form to the miscellaneous materials at his disposal that they give satisfaction not only to the senses or the intellect, but to the imagination. What const.i.tute some of the chief elements in the aesthetic experience, we shall presently examine. It must first be pointed out that in general in the fine arts creative genius has found ways of imaginatively attaining perfections not usually accorded in the experiences of the senses, in the life of society, or in the life of the mind.
The region called imagination has pleasures more airy and luminous than those of sense, more ma.s.sive and rapturous than those of intelligence. The values inherent in imagination, in instant intuition, in sense endowed with form, are called aesthetic values; they are found mainly in nature and in living beings, but also in man's artificial works, in images evoked by language, and in the realm of sound.[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 15.]
The painter imagines and seeks to realize hues and intensities of color more satisfying and more suggestive than those commonly experienced in nature, save in the occasional grace of sunset on a mountain lake, or the miracle of moonlight on the ocean. The artist takes his hints from nature, but clothes the suggestions of sense with the values and motives which exist only in his own mind and imagination. A Turner sunset is, as Oscar Wilde points out, in a sense incomparably superior to one provided by nature. It not only gives the beautiful sensations to be had in a landscape suffused with the sunset glow; it infuses into this experience the pa.s.sionate and penetrating insight of a genius. The artist, to an extent, imitates nature. But, if that were all he did, he would be no more than a photographer. He pictures nature, but gives it ”tint and melody and breath”; he gives it a value and significance derived from his own imaginative vision. The musician combines sounds more significant, ordered, and rhythmical than those miscellaneous noises which, in ordinary experience, beat indifferently or painfully upon our ears.
The poet selects words whose specific music, rhythmical combinations, and lyrical context produce a something more evocative, compelling, and euphonic than the casual and raucous instrument of communication which const.i.tutes ordinary speech.
Not only do poets give imaginative and ideal extensions to sense experience; they do as much with and for social life.
In the dreaming of Utopias, in the building of the Perfect City, men have found compensations for the imperfect cities which have been their experiences on earth. They build themselves in imagination a world where all injustices are erased, where beauty is perennial, where truth, courage, kindliness, and merriment are the pervasive colors of life.
In the activity of creative art, man's imagination has reached out beyond the confines of nature and of history, and built itself, in marble and in music, in lyrics and in legends, hints of that enchanting possible, of which the impoverished actual gives tentative and tenuous hints.
In some men sensitivity to the imaginative possibilities of the materials of Nature is so high, that they can find satisfactory activity nowhere else than in one or another of the fine arts. These are the poets, the musicians, and the sculptors, who seek to give realization in the arts in the technique of which they are especially gifted, to that imagined beauty by the intimate experience of which they live. In one way or another the creative artist seeks to give form and dimension to
”The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream.”
This creative impulse may find its realization, as already pointed out, in industry, though, with the highly routine character of most men's occupations in present-day industrial life, there is not much opportunity for imaginative activity.
That both work and happiness would be promoted by the encouragement of the craftsman ideal goes without saying.
Whether or not it is possible to utilize the creative impulses in the processes of industry as now organized, there are instances where the joy of craftsmans.h.i.+p may be exploited both for the happiness of the worker and the good of the work.
The William Morris ideal of the artist-worker may be hard to attain, but it is none the less desirable, both for the sake of the worker and his work.
In science the uses of the imagination have been frequently commented on, not least by scientists. The patient collection of facts, the digging and measurement and inquiry that characterize so much of scientific investigation are not the whole of it. Inference, the forming of a generalization, is frequently described ”as a leap from the known to the unknown,” and this discovery of a binding principle that brings together a wide variety of disconnected facts is not unlike the process of the creative artist. The same unconscious method by which a poet hits upon an appropriate epithet, a musician upon a melody, a painter upon an effect of color or line is displayed in that sudden vivid flash of insight by which a scientist sees a ma.s.s of facts that have long seemed bafflingly contradictory, gathered up under a single luminous law. In his famous essay on ”The Scientific Uses of the Imagination,” Tyndall writes:
We are gifted with the power of Imagination, ... and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses. There are tories even in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed. They had observed its action in weak vessels and were unduly impressed by its disasters. But they might with equal justice point to exploded boilers as an argument against the use of steam. Bounded and conditioned by cooperant Reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's pa.s.sage from a falling apple to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the imagination. When William Thomson tries to place the ultimate particles of matter between his compa.s.s points, and to apply to them a scale of millimetres, he is powerfully aided by this faculty. And in much that has been recently said about protoplasm and life, we have the outgoings of the imagination guided and controlled by the known a.n.a.logies of science. In fact, without this power, our knowledge of Nature would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and sequences. We should still believe in the succession of day and night, of summer and winter; but the soul of Force would be dislodged from our universe; causal relations would disappear, and with them that science which is now binding the parts of nature into an organic whole.[1]
[Footnote 1: Tyndall: _Fragments of Science_, pp. 130-31.]
As we shall presently see, this imaginative leap is guarded and controlled, so that no flash of insight, however attractive, is uncritically accepted. But the origin of every eventually accepted hypothesis lies in the upshoot of irresponsible fancy, differing not at all from the images in the mind of a poet or painter or the melodies that unpredictably occur to a musician.
THE aeSTHETIC EXPERIENCE. Art is, on its creative side, as we have seen, the control of Nature in the practical or imaginative realization of ideals. The industrial arts are pursued out of necessity, because man must find himself ways of living in a world which he must inhabit, though it is not _a prior_ arranged for his habitation. The fine arts are pursued as ends in themselves.[1] The genuinely gifted sing, paint, write poetry, apart from fame and reward, for the sheer pleasure of creation. But the products of these creative activities themselves become satisfactions on a par with other natural goods.
The objects of art--poems, paintings, statues, symphonies--are themselves prized and sought after. They afford satisfaction to that large number of persons who are sensitive to the beautiful without having a gift for its creation.
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