Part 31 (1/2)
”He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our G.o.d is marching on.”
EXPRESSION. The objects of art, as we have seen, are interesting and attractive in themselves, for the material of which they are formed, and for the form which the artist has given them. But they are interesting in another and possibly as important a way: they are instruments of expression.
That is, a painting is something more than an intrinsically interesting disposition of line and color, a statue something more than an exquisite or sublime chiseling of marble, a poem more than a rhythmic combination of the music of words.
All of these are expressive. Something in their form is a.s.sociated with something in our past experience. Thus, as James somewhere suggests, ”a bare figure by Michelangelo, with unduly flexed joints, may come somehow to suggest the moral tragedy of life.” Something in the face of an old man painted by Rembrandt may recall to us a similar outward evidence of inner seriousness, wistfulness, and resignation which we have ourselves beheld in living people. And we clearly value the poems of a Wordsworth, a Milton, a Matthew Arnold, not solely for the magnificent form and music of their words, but also for the sober beauty of their meaning.
We may come to appreciate even the highly immediate sensuous and formal pleasure of music for the reverie or rapture into which by suggestion it throws us. ”Expression may, therefore, make beautiful by suggestion, things in themselves indifferent, or it may come to heighten the beauty which they already possess.”
The objects of art may be appreciated chiefly either for their material and form, or for the values which they express.
In some cases the actual object may be beautiful; sometimes the beauty may lie almost wholly in the image, emotion, or idea evoked. ”Home, Sweet Home,” for example, may be plausibly held to win admiration rather for the sentimental a.s.sociations which it evokes in the singer or hearer than for its verbal or melodic beauty. The enjoyment which people without any musical gifts, out on a camping or canoeing trip, experience from singing a rather cheap and frayed repertory is obviously for sentimental rather than for aesthetic satisfaction.
Similarly, we may cherish the mementos of a lost friend or child, not for their intrinsic worth, but for the tenderness of the memories they arouse. The situation is delicately described in Eugene Field's ”Little Boy Blue”:
”The little toy dog is covered with dust, But st.u.r.dy and staunch he stands, And the little toy soldier is red with rust, And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new, And the soldier was pa.s.sing fair, And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue Kissed them and put them there.”
Some objects of art may indeed become beautiful almost completely through their expressiveness. There are certain poets whose music is raucous and who make little appeal through clarity of form. These survive almost completely by virtue of the persistent strength and enduring sublimity of the ideas which they express. Much of Whitman may be put in this cla.s.s, and also much of Browning. Similarly a sculptor may not captivate us by the fluent beauty of his marble, but by the power and pa.s.sion which his crude mighty figures express.
In such cases we may even come to regard what, from a purely formal point of view, is unlovely, as a thing of the most extreme beauty. Even the roughness in such direct revelations of strength, may come to be regarded as elements of the beautiful. And where ma.s.siveness of effect does not suffice to retrieve a work of art from its essential crudities, we may still come to accept it as beautiful, as it were, in intention, and for what comes to be regarded as its essence, namely, the idea or emotion it expresses. We forgive the imperfections of form as we forgive the stammerings and stutterings of persons whose broken sayings are yet full of wisdom.
Usually even where the object, emotion, or idea expressed is beautiful, we demand certain formal and material elements of beauty. A telegram may convey the very apex of felicity, yet be not at all felicitous in its form or in the music of its words. If in such cases, we speak of beauty, the term is altogether metaphorical and imputed; we are using it in the same a.n.a.logical sense as when we speak of a ”beautiful operation”
or a ”beautiful deed”; it is a moral rather than an aesthetic term. We may find the letter of a friend expressive of the gentleness, fidelity, and charm that have endeared him to us, but unless these have attained sufficiently clear and explicit form and determinate unmistakable music, the letter will have a meaningful beauty only in the light of the peculiar relation existing between us and the writer. From an impartial aesthetic point of view, the epistle can only by affectionate exaggeration be called beautiful.
But the arts, through their beauty of form, may present pleasingly objects, emotions, ideas, not in themselves beautiful or pleasing. The clearest case of this kind is tragedy, where we may enjoy at arm's length and through the medium of art, experiences which would in the near actualities of life be only unmitigated horror. Refracted through the medium of poetry and drama, they may appear beautiful pervasively and long.
We are enabled through the arts to survey sympathetically universal emotions, those by which our own lives have been touched, or to which they are liable; we are enabled to survey bitterness and frustration calmly because they are set in a perspective, a beautiful perspective, in which they s.h.i.+ne out clear and persuasive, purified of that bitter personal tang which makes sorrow in real life so different in tone from the beauty with which in tragedy it is halved. Any sensation, as Max Eastman justly remarks in his ”Enjoyment of Poetry,” may, if sufficiently mild, become pleasing. And there is hardly any human action or experience, however terrible, which cannot in the hands of a master be made appealing and sublime in its emotional effect.
The beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft, illumined by the flickering light of human comrades.h.i.+p, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 67-68.]
But emotions and experiences that in real life are displeasing can be made pleasing in art chiefly by virtue of the qualities of material and form already discussed. The disappointment, disillusion, or terror which tragedy so vividly reveals is made tolerable chiefly through the intrinsic beauty of the vehicle in which it is set forth. The high and breathless beauty of rhythm, the verve, the mystery, and music with which evils are set forth, may make them not only tolerable but tender and appealing. What would be as immediate experience altogether heartrending, for example the torturing remorse of a Macbeth, is made splendid and moving in the incisive majesty and penetration of his monologues. At the end of Hamlet, the utter wreck, unreason, and confusion is made bearable and beautiful by the tender finality of Hamlet's dying words to Horatio:
”Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.”
Greek tragedy had the additional accouterments of a chorus, of music, of production in a vast amphitheater to give an atmosphere of outward grandeur to the glory of its intent.
Tragedy often relieves the net horror which is its burden by the pomp and circ.u.mstance of the a.s.sociations it suggests:
We have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtues in our heroes, n.o.bility in their pa.s.sions and in their fate, and altogether a sort of glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in depth of pathos--since things so precious are destroyed--and in subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Sense of Beauty_, p. 228.]
Tragedy still more subtly attains the beauty of expressiveness by making the very evils and confusions and terrors it presents somehow the exemplifications of a serene eternal order. The function of the chorus in Greek tragedy was indeed chiefly to indicate in solemn strophe and antistrophe the ordered and harmonious verities of which these particular follies and frustrations were so tender and terrible an ill.u.s.tration. They catch up the present and particular evil into the calm and splendid interplay of cosmic forces. Thus at the end of Euripides's play _Medea_, when the heroine has slain the children she has borne to Jason and in her fury refuses to let him gather up their dead bodies, when Jason in utter inconsolable despair, casts himself upon the earth, out of all this wrack and torture the chorus raises the audience into a contemplation of the ordered eternity by which these things come to be. It sings:
”Great treasure halls hath Zeus in Heaven, From whence to man strange dooms be given, Past hope or fear; And the end men looked for cometh not, And a path is there where no man thought: So hath it fallen here.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Euripides: _Medea_ (Gilbert Murray translation).]
ART AS VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE. The drama, art, and painting are, in general, ways by which we can vicariously experience the emotions of others. All of the expressive arts are made possible by the fundamental psychological fact that human beings give certain instinctive and habitual signs of emotion and instinctively respond to them. In consequence, through art experience may be immeasurably broadened, deepened, and mellowed. Through the medium of art, modes of life long past away can leave their imperishable and living mementos.
Dante opens to the citizen of the twentieth century the mind and imagination of the Middle Ages. A Grecian urn can arouse, at least to a Keats, the whole stilled magic of the Greek spirit. And not only can we live through the life and emotion of times long dead, but the fiction and drama and poetry of our own day permit us to enter into realms of experience which in extent and variety would not be possible to one man. Indeed, the possibility of vicariously enlarging experience is one of the chief appeals of art. We cannot all be rovers, but we can have in reading Masefield a pungent sense of romantic open s.p.a.ces, the salt winds, the perilous motion or the broad calm of the sea. We feel something of the same urgency as that of the author when we read:
”I must go down to the seas again, the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall s.h.i.+p and a star to steer her by, And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking, And a gray mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking.”[2]
[Footnote 2: Masefield: _Sea-Fever_.]
Art opens up wide avenues of possibility; it releases us from the limitations to which a particular mode of life, an accidental niche in a business or profession has committed us. It enables us vividly to experience and sympathetically to appreciate the lives which are led by other men, and in which something in our own personalities could have found fulfillment.