_THE mountain rises._ What do we mean when we employ this form of words? Some mountains, we are told, have originated in an _upheaval._ But even if this particular mountain did, we never saw it and geologists are still disputing about HOW and WHETHER. So the _rising_ we are talking about is evidently not that probable or improbable _upheaval._ On the other hand all geologists tell us that every mountain is undergoing a steady _lowering_ through its particles being weathered away and washed down; and our knowledge of landslips and avalanches shows us that the mountain, so far from rising, is _descending._ Of course we all know that, objects the Reader, and of course n.o.body imagines that the rock and the earth of the mountain is rising, or that the mountain is getting up or growing taller! All we mean is that the mountain _looks_ as if it were rising.
The mountain _looks!_ Surely here is a case of putting the cart before the horse. No; we cannot explain the mountain _rising_ by the mountain _looking,_ for the only _looking_ in the business is _our_ looking _at_ the mountain. And if the Reader objects again that these are all _figures of speech,_ I shall answer that _Empathy_ is what explains why we employ figures of speech at all, and occasionally employ them, as in the case of this rising mountain, when we know perfectly well that the figure we have chosen expresses the exact reverse of the objective truth. Very well; then, (says the Reader) we will avoid all figures of speech and say merely: when we look at the mountain _we somehow or other think of the action of rising._ Is that sufficiently literal and indisputable?
So literal and indisputable a statement of the case, I answer, that it explains, when we come to examine it, why we have said that the mountain rises. For if the Reader remembers my chapter on shape-perception, he will have no difficulty in answering why we should have a thought of rising when we look at the mountain, since we cannot look at the mountain, nor at a tree, a tower or anything of which we similarly say that it _rises,_ without lifting our glance, raising our eye and probably raising our head and neck, all of which raising and lifting unites into a general awareness of something _rising._ The rising of which we are aware is going on in us. But, as the Reader will remember also, when we are engrossed by something outside ourselves, as we are engrossed in looking at the shape (for we can _look_ at only the shape, not the _substance)_ of that mountain we cease thinking about ourselves, and cease thinking about ourselves exactly in proportion as we are thinking of the mountain"s shape. What becomes therefore of our awareness of raising or lifting or _rising?_ What can become of it (so long as it continues to be there!) except that it coalesces with the shape we are looking at; in short that the _rising_ continuing to be thought, but no longer to be thought of with reference to ourselves (since we aren"t thinking of ourselves), is thought of in reference to what we _are_ thinking about, namely the mountain, or rather the mountain"s shape, which is, so to speak, responsible for any thought of rising, since it obliges us to lift, raise or rise ourselves in order to take stock of it. It is a case exactly a.n.a.logous to our transferring the measuring done by our eye to the line of which we say that it _extends_ from A to B, when in reality the only _extending_ has been the extending of our glance. It is a case of what I have called the tendency to merge the _activities_ of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object. Indeed if I insisted so much upon this tendency of our mind, I did so largely because of its being at the bottom of the phenomenon of _Empathy,_ as we have just seen it exemplified in the _mountain which rises._
If this is Empathy, says the Reader (relieved and rea.s.sured), am I to understand that Empathy is nothing beyond _attributing what goes on in us when we look at a shape to the shape itself?_
I am sorry that the matter is by no means so simple! If what we attributed to each single shape was only the precise action which we happen to be accomplishing in the process of looking at it, Empathy would indeed be a simple business, but it would also be a comparatively poor one. No. The _rising_ of the mountain is an idea started by the awareness of our own lifting or raising of our eyes, head or neck, and it is an idea containing the awareness of that lifting or raising. But it is far more than the idea merely of that lifting or raising which we are doing at this particular present moment and in connexion with this particular mountain. That present and particular raising and lifting is merely the nucleus to which gravitates our remembrance of all similar acts of raising, or _rising._ which we have ever accomplished or seen accomplished, _raising_ or _rising_ not only of our eyes and head, but of every other part of our body, and of every part of every other body which we ever perceived to be rising. And not merely the thought of past _rising_ but the thought also of future rising. All these risings, done by ourselves or watched in others, actually experienced or merely imagined, have long since united together in our mind, const.i.tuting a sort of composite photograph whence all differences are eliminated and wherein all similarities are fused and intensified: the general idea of _rising,_ not "I rise, rose, will rise, it rises, has risen or will rise" but merely _rising as_ such, _rising_ as it is expressed not in any particular tense or person of the verb _to rise,_ but in that verb"s infinitive. It is this universally applicable notion of rising, which is started in our mind by the awareness of the particular present acts of raising or rising involved in our looking at that mountain, and it is this general idea of rising, _i.e._ of _upward movement,_ which gets transferred to the mountain along with our own particular present activity of raising some part of us, and which thickens and enriches and marks that poor little thought of a definite raising with the interest, the emotional fullness gathered and stored up in its long manifold existence. In other words: what we are transferring (owing to that tendency to merge the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object) from ourselves to the looked at shape of the mountain, is not merely the thought of the rising which is really being done by us at that moment, but the thought and emotion, the _idea of rising as such_ which had been acc.u.mulating in our mind long before we ever came into the presence of that particular mountain. And it is this complex mental process, by which we (all unsuspectingly) invest that inert mountain, that bodiless shape, with the stored up and averaged and essential modes of our activity--it is this process whereby we make the mountain _raise itself,_ which const.i.tutes what, accepting Prof.
t.i.tchener"s translation[*] of the German word _Einfuhlung,_ I have called Empathy.
[*] From _en_ and _pascho, epathon_.
The German word _Einfuhlung_ "feeling into"--derived from a _verb to feel oneself into something_ ("sich in Etwas ein fuhlen") was in current use even before Lotze and Viscber applied it to aesthetics, and some years before Lipps (1897) and Wundt (1903) adopted it into psychological terminology; and as it is now consecrated, and no better occurs to me, I have had to adopt it, although the literal connotations of the German word have surrounded its central meaning (as I have just defined it) with several mischievous misinterpretations. Against two of these I think it worth while to warn the Reader, especially as, while so doing, I can, in showing what it is not, make it even clearer what Empathy really is. The first of these two main misinterpretations is based upon the reflexive form of the German verb "_sich einfuhlen_" (to feel _oneself_ into) and it defines, or rather does not define, Empathy as a metaphysical and quasi-mythological projection of the ego into the object or shape under observation; a notion incompatible with the fact that Empathy, being only another of those various mergings of the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the perceived object wherewith we have already dealt, depends upon a comparative or momentary abeyance of all thought of an ego; if we became aware that it is _we_ who are thinking the rising, we who are _feeling_ the rising, we should not think or feel that the mountain did the rising. The other (and as we shall later see) more justifiable misinterpretation of the word Empathy is based on its a.n.a.logy with _sympathy,_ and turns it into a kind of sympathetic, or as it has been called, _inner, i.e._ merely _felt, mimicry_ of, for instance, the mountain"s _rising._ Such mimicry, not only _inner_ and _felt,_ but outwardly manifold, does undoubtedly often result from very lively _empathic_ imagination. But as it is the mimicking, inner or outer, of movements and actions which, like the _rising_ of the mountain, take place only in our imagination, it presupposes such previous animation of the inanimate, and cannot therefore be taken either as const.i.tuting or explaining Empathy itself.
Such as I have defined and exemplified it in our Rising Mountain, Empathy is, together with mere Sensation, probably the chief factor of preference, that is of an alternative of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, in aesthetic contemplation, the muscular adjustments and the measuring, comparing and coordinating activities by which Empathy is started, being indeed occasionally difficult and distressing, but giving in themselves little more than a negative satisfaction, at the most that of difficulty overcome and suspense relieved. But although nowhere so fostered as in the contemplation of shapes, Empathy exists or tends to exist throughout our mental life. It is, indeed, one of our simpler, though far from absolutely elementary, psychological processes, entering into what is called imagination, sympathy, and also into that inference from our own inner experience which has shaped all our conceptions of an outer world, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous sensations received from without the framework of our constant and highly unified inner experience, that is to say, of our own activities and aims. Empathy can be traced in all of modes of speech and thought, particularly in the universal attribution of _doing_ and _having_ and _tending_ where all we can really a.s.sert is successive and varied _being._ Science has indeed explained away the anthropomorphic implications of _Force_ and _Energy, Attraction_ and _Repulsion_; and philosophy has reduced _Cause_ and _Effect_ from implying intention and effort to meaning mere constant succession. But Empathy still helps us to many valuable a.n.a.logies; and it is possible that without its constantly checked but constantly renewed action, human thought would be without logical cogency, as it certainly would be without poetical charm. Indeed if Empathy is so recent a discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our thinking; so that we are surprised to learn its existence, as Moliere"s good man was to hear that be talked prose.
CHAPTER X
THE MOVEMENT OF LINES
ANY tendency to Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need for practical thinking. We are made to think in the most summary fashion from one to another of those grouped possibilities, past, present and future, which we call a Thing; and in such discursive thinking we not only leave far behind the _aspect,_ the shape, which has started a given scheme of Empathy, a given _movement of lines,_ but we are often faced by facts which utterly contradict it.
When, instead of looking at a particular _aspect_ of that mountain, we set to climbing it ourselves, the mountain ceases to "rise"; it becomes pa.s.sive to the activity which our muscular sensations and our difficulty of breathing locate most unmistakably in ourselves.
Besides which, in thus dealing with the mountain as a _thing,_ we are presented with a series of totally different aspects or shapes, some of which suggest empathic activities totally different from that of rising. And the mountain in question, seen from one double its height, will suggest the empathic activity of _spreading itself out._ Moreover practical life hustles us into a succession of more and more summary perceptions; we do not actually see more than is necessary for the bare recognition of whatever we are dealing with and the adjustment of our actions not so much to what it already is, as to what it is likely to become. And this which is true of seeing with the bodily eye, is even more so of seeing, or rather _not_ seeing but _recognising,_ with the eye of the spirit. The practical man on the hill, and his scientific companion, (who is merely, so to speak, a man _unpractically_ concerned with practical causes and changes) do not thoroughly see the shapes of the landscape before them; and still less do they see the precise shape of the funiculars, tramways, offices, cheques, volcanoes, ice-caps and prehistoric inhabitants of their thoughts. There is not much chance of Empathy and Empathy"s pleasures and pains in their lightning-speed, touch-and-go visions!
But now let us put ourselves in the place of their aesthetically contemplative fellow-traveller. And, for simplicity"s sake, let us imagine him contemplating more especially one shape in that landscape, the shape of that distant mountain, the one whose "rising"--came to an end as soon as we set to climbing it. The mountain is so far off that its detail is entirely lost; all we can see is a narrow and pointed cone, perhaps a little _toppling_ to one side, of uniform hyacinth blue _detaching_ itself from the clear evening sky, into which, from the paler misty blue of the plain, it _rises,_ a mere bodiless shape. It _rises._ There is at present no doubt about its _rising._ It rises and keeps on rising, never stopping unless _we_ stop looking at it. It rises and never _has_ risen. Its drama of two lines _striving_ (one with more suddenness of energy and purpose than the other) to _arrive_ at a particular imaginary point in the sky, _arresting_ each other"s _progress_ as they _meet_ in their _endeavour,_ this simplest empathic action of an irregular and by no means rectilinear triangle, goes on repeating itself, like the parabola of a steadily spirting fountain: for ever accomplishing itself anew and for ever accompanied by the same effect on the feelings of the beholder.
It is this reiterative nature which, joined to its schematic definiteness, gives Empathy its extraordinary power over us. Empathy, as I have tried to make clear to the Reader, is due not only to the movements which we are actually making in the course of shape-perception, to present movements with their various modes of speed, intensity and facility and their accompanying intentions; it is due at least as much to our acc.u.mulated and averaged past experience of movements of the same kind, also with _their_ cognate various modes of speed, intensity, facility, and _their_ accompanying intentions. And being thus residual averaged, and essential, this empathic movement, this movement attributed to the lines of a shape, is not clogged and inhibited by whatever clogs and inhibits each separate concrete experience of the kind; still less is it overshadowed in our awareness by the _result_ which we foresee as goal of our real active proceedings. For unless they involve bodily or mental strain, our real and therefore transient movements do not affect us as pleasant or unpleasant, because our attention is always outrunning them to some momentary goal; and the faint awareness of them is usually mixed up with other items, sensations and perceptions, of wholly different characters. Thus, in themselves and apart from their aims, our bodily movements are never interesting except inasmuch as requiring new and difficult adjustments, or again as producing perceptible repercussions in our circulatory, breathing and balancing apparatus: a waltz, or a dive or a gallop may indeed be highly exciting, thanks to its resultant organic perturbations and its concomitants of overcome difficulty and danger, but even a dancing dervish"s intoxicating rotations cannot afford him much of the specific interest of movement as movement. Yet every movement which we accomplish implies a change in our debit and credit of vital economy, a change in our balance of bodily and mental expenditure and replenishment; and this, if brought to our awareness, is not only interesting, but interesting in the sense either of pleasure or displeasure, since it implies the more or less furtherance or hindrance of our life-processes. Now it is this complete awareness, this brimfull interest in our own dynamic changes, in our various and variously combined facts of movement inasmuch as _energy_ and _intention,_ it is this sense of the _values of movement_ which Empathy, by its schematic simplicity and its reiteration, is able to reinstate. The contemplation, that is to say the _isolating and reiterating perception,_ of shapes and in so far of the qualities and relations of movement which Empathy invests them with, therefore shields our dynamic sense from all competing interests, clears it from all varying and irrelevant concomitants, gives it, as Faust would have done to the instant of happiness, a sufficient duration; and reinstating it in the centre of our consciousness, allows it to add the utmost it can to our satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Hence the mysterious importance, the attraction or repulsion, possessed by shapes, audible as well as visible, according to their empathic character; movement and energy, all that we feel as being life, is furnished by them in its essence and allowed to fill our consciousness. This fact explains also another phenomenon, which in its turn greatly adds to the power of that very Empathy of which it is a result. I am speaking once more of that phenomenon called _Inner Mimicry_ which certain observers, themselves highly subject to it, have indeed considered as Empathy"s explanation, rather than its result. In the light of all I have said about the latter, it becomes intelligible that when empathic imagination (itself varying from individual to individual) happens to be united to a high degree of (also individually very varying) muscular responsiveness, there may be set up reactions, actual or incipient, _e.g._ alterations of bodily att.i.tude or muscular tension which (unless indeed they withdraw attention from the contemplated object to our own body) will necessarily add to the sum of activity empathically attributed to the contemplated object. There are moreover individuals in whom such "mimetic" accompaniment consists (as is so frequently the case in listening to music) in changes of the bodily balance, the breathing and heart-beats, in which cases additional doses of satisfaction or dissatisfaction result from the partic.i.p.ation of bodily functions themselves so provocative of comfort or discomfort. Now it is obvious that such mimetic accompaniments, and every other a.s.sociative repercussion into the seat of what our fathers correctly called "animal spirits," would be impossible unless reiteration, the reiteration of repeated acts of attention, had allowed the various empathic significance, the various _dynamic values,_ of given shapes to sink so deeply into us, to become so habitual, that even a rapid glance (as when we perceive the upspringing lines of a mountain from the window of an express train) may suffice to evoke their familiar dynamic a.s.sociations. Thus contemplation explains, so to speak, why contemplation may be so brief as to seem no contemplation at all: past repet.i.tion has made present repet.i.tion unnecessary, and the empathic, the dynamic scheme of any particular shape may go on working long after the eye is fixed on something else, or be started by what is scarcely a perception at all; we feel joy at the mere foot-fall of some beloved person, but we do so because he is already beloved. Thus does the reiterative character essential to Empathy explain how our contemplative satisfaction in shapes, our pleasure in the variously combined _movements of lines,_ irradiates even the most practical, the apparently least contemplative, moments and occupations of our existence.
But this is not all. This reiterative character of Empathy, this fact that the mountain is always rising without ever beginning to sink or adding a single cubit to its stature, joined to the abstract (the _infinitive of the verb)_ nature of the suggested activity, together account for art"s high impersonality and its existing, in a manner, _sub specie aeternitatis._ The drama of lines and curves presented by the humblest design on bowl or mat partakes indeed of the strange immortality of the youths and maidens on the _Grecian Urn,_ to whom Keats, as you remember, says:--
"Fond lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal. Yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade; though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair."
And thus, in considering the process of Aesthetic Empathy, we find ourselves suddenly back at our original formula: Beautiful means satisfactory in contemplation, and contemplation not of Things but of Shapes which are only Aspects of them.
CHAPTER XI
THE CHARACTER OF SHAPES
IN my example of the Rising Mountain, I have been speaking as if Empathy invested the shapes we look at with only one mode of activity at a time. This, which I have a.s.sumed for the simplicity of exposition, is undoubtedly true in the case either of extremely simple shapes requiring _few_ and h.o.m.ogeneous perceptive activities. It is true also in the case of shapes of which familiarity (as explained on p. 76) has made the actual perception very summary; for instance when, walking quickly among trees, we notice only what I may call their dominant empathic gesture of _thrusting_ or _drooping_ their branches, because habit allows us to pick out the most characteristic outlines. But, except in these and similar cases, the _movement_ with which Empathy invests shapes is a great deal more complex, indeed we should speak more correctly of movements than of movement of lines. Thus the mountain rises, and does nothing but rise so long as we are taking stock only of the relation of its top with the plain, referring its lines solely to real or imaginary horizontals. But if, instead of our glance making a single swish upwards, we look at the two sides of the mountain successively and compare each with the other as well as with the plain, our impression (and our verbal description) will be that _one slope goes up while the other goes down._ When the empathic scheme of the mountain thus ceases to be mere _rising_ and becomes _rising plus descending,_ the two _movements_ with which we have thus invested that shape will be felt as being interdependent; one side _goes down_ because the other has _gone up,_ or the movement rises _in order to_ descend. And if we look at a mountain chain we get a still more complex and co-ordinated empathic scheme, the peaks and valleys (as in my description of what the Man saw from his Hillside) appearing to us as a sequence of risings and sinkings with correlated intensities; a slope _springing up_ in proportion as the previously seen one _rushed down_; the movements of the eye, slight and sketchy in themselves, awakening the composite dynamic memory of all our experience of the impetus gained by switch-back descent. Moreover this sequence, being a sequence, will awaken expectation of repet.i.tion, hence sense of rythm; the long chain of peaks will seem to perform a dance, they will furl and unfurl like waves. Thus as soon as we get a combination of empathic _forces_ (for that is how they affect us) these will henceforth be in definite relation to one another. But the relation need not be that of mere give and take and rythmical cooperation. Lines meeting one another may conflict, check, deflect one another; or again resist each other"s effort as the steady determination of a circ.u.mference resists, opposes a "Quos ego!" to the rushing impact of the spokes of a wheel-pattern. And, along with the empathic suggestion of the mechanical forces experienced in ourselves, will come the empathic suggestion of spiritual characteristics: the lines will have aims, intentions, desires, moods; their various little dramas of endeavour, victory, defeat or peacemaking, will, according to their dominant empathic suggestion, be lighthearted or languid, serious or futile, gentle or brutal; inexorable, forgiving, hopeful, despairing, plaintive or proud, vulgar or dignified; in fact patterns of visible lines will possess all the chief dynamic modes which determine the expressiveness of music. But on the other hand there will remain innumerable emphatic combinations whose poignant significance escapes verbal cla.s.sification because, as must be clearly understood, Empathy deals not directly with mood and emotion, but with dynamic conditions which enter into moods and emotions and take their names from them. Be this as it may, and definable or not in terms of human feeling, these various and variously combined (into coordinate scenes and acts) dramas enacted by lines and curves and angles, take place not in the marble or pigment embodying those contemplated shapes, but solely in ourselves, in what we call our memory, imagination and feeling. Ours are the energy, the effort, the victory or the peace and cooperation; and all the manifold modes of swiftness or gravity, arduousness or ease, with which their every minutest dynamic detail is fraught. And since we are their only real actors, these empathic dramas of lines are bound to affect us, either as corroborating or as thwarting our vital needs and habits; either as making our felt life easier or more difficult, that is to say as bringing us peace and joy, or depression and exasperation.
Quite apart therefore from the convenience or not of the adjustments requisite for their ocular measurement, and apart even from the facility or difficulty of comparing and coordinating these measurements, certain shapes and elements of shape are made welcome to us, and other ones made unwelcome, by the sole working of Empathy, which identifies the modes of being and moving of lines with our own. For this reason meetings of lines which affect us as neither victory nor honourable submission nor willing cooperation are felt to be ineffectual and foolish. Lines also (like those of insufficiently tapered Doric columns) which do not _rise with enough impetus_ because they do not seem _to start with sufficient pressure at the base;_ oblique lines (as in certain imitation Gothic) which _lose their balance_ for lack of a countervailing _thrust_ against them, all these, and alas many hundreds of other possible combinations, are detestable to our feelings. And similarly we are fussed and bored by the tentative lines, the uncoordinated directions and impacts, of inferior, even if technically expert and realistically learned draughtsmen, of artists whose work may charm at first glance by some vivid likeness or poetic suggestion, but reveal with every additional day their complete insignificance as movement, their utter empathic nullity. Indeed, if we a.n.a.lyse the censure ostensibly based upon engineering considerations of material instability, or on wrong perspective or anatomical "out of drawing" we shall find that much of this hostile criticism is really that of empathic un-satisfactoriness, which escapes verbal detection but is revealed by the finger _following,_ as we say (and that is itself an instance of empathy) the movement, the development of, boring or fussing lines.
Empathy explains not only the universally existing preferences with regard to shape, but also those particular degrees of liking which are matters of personal temperament and even of momentary mood (_cf_. p. 131). Thus Mantegna, with his preponderance of horizontals and verticals will appeal to one beholder as grave and rea.s.suring, but repel another beholder (or the same in a different mood) as dull and lifeless; while the unstable equilibrium and syncopated rythm of Botticelli may either fascinate or repel as morbidly excited. And Leonardo"s systems of whirling interlaced circles will merely baffle (the "enigmatic" quality we hear so much of) the perfunctory beholder, while rewarding more adequate empathic imagination by allowing us to live, for a while, in the modes of the intensest and most purposeful and most harmonious energy.
Intensity and purposefulness and harmony. These are what everyday life affords but rarely to our longings. And this is what, thanks to this strange process of Empathy, a few inches of painted canvas, will sometimes allow us to realise completely and uninterruptedly. And it is no poetical metaphor or metaphysical figment, but mere psychological fact, to say that if the interlacing circles and pentacles of a Byzantine floor-pattern absorb us in satisfied contemplation, this is because the modes of being which we are obliged to invest them with are such as we vainly seek, or experience only to lose, in our scattered or hustled existence.
CHAPTER XII
FROM THE SHAPE TO THE THING
SUCH are the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, impersonal and unpractical, we can receive, or in reality, give ourselves, in the contemplation of shape.
But life has little leisure for contemplation; it demands _recognition,_ inference and readiness for active adaptation. Or rather life forces us to deal with shapes mainly inasmuch as they indicate the actual or possible existence of other groups of qualities which may help or hurt us. Life hurries us into recognising _Things._
Now the first peculiarity distinguishing _things_ from _shapes_ is _that they can occupy more or less cubic s.p.a.ce:_ we can hit up against them, displace them or be displaced by them, and in such process of displacing or resisting displacement, we become aware of two other peculiarities distinguishing things from shapes: they have _weight_ in varying degrees and _texture_ of various sorts.
Otherwise expressed, things have _body,_ they exist in three dimensional s.p.a.ce; while _shapes_ although they are often aspects of things (say statues or vases) having body and cubic existence, shapes _as_ shapes are two dimensional and bodiless.
So many of the critical applications of aesthetic, as well as of the historical problems of art-evolution are connected with this fact or rather the continued misunderstanding of it, that it is well to remind the Reader of what general Psychology can teach us of the perception of the Third Dimension. A very slight knowledge of cubic existence, in the sense of _relief,_ is undoubtedly furnished as the stereoscope furnishes it, by the inevitable slight divergence between the two eyes; an even more infinitesimal dose of such knowledge is claimed for the surfaces of each eye separately. But whatever notions of three-dimensional s.p.a.ce might have been developed from such rudiments, the perception of cubic existence which we actually possess and employ, is undeniably based upon the incomparably more important data afforded by locomotion, under which term I include even the tiny pressure of a finger against a surface, and the exploration of a hollow tooth by the tip of the tongue. The muscular adjustments made in such locomotion become a.s.sociated by repet.i.tion with the two-dimensional arrangements of colour and light revealed by the eye, the two-dimensional being thus turned into the three-dimensional in our everyday experience. But the mistakes we occasionally make, for instance taking a road seen from above for a church-tower projecting out of the plain, or the perspective of a mountain range for its cubic shape, occasionally reveal that we do not really _see_ three-dimensional objects, but merely _infer_ them by connecting visual data with the result of locomotor experience. The truth of this commonplace of psychology can be tested by the experiment of making now one, now the other, colour of a floor pattern seem convex or concave according as we think of it as a light flower on a dark ground, or as a white cavity banked in by a dark ridge. And when the philistine (who may be you or me!) exclaims against the "out of drawing" and false perspective of unfamiliar styles of painting, he is, nine times out of ten, merely expressing his inability to identify two-dimensional shapes as "representing" three-dimensional things; so far proving that we do not decipher the cubic relations of a picture until we have guessed what that picture is supposed to stand for. And this is my reason for saying that visible shapes, though they may be aspects of cubic objects, have no body; and that the thought of their volume, their weight and their texture, is due to an interruption of our contemplation of shape by an excursion among the recollections of qualities which shapes, _as_ shapes, cannot possess.
And here I would forestall the Reader"s objection that the feeling of effort and resistance, essential to all our empathic dealings with two-dimensional shapes, must, after all, be due to _weight,_ which we have just described as a quality shapes cannot possess. My answer is that Empathy has extracted and schematised effort and resistance by the elimination of the thought of weight, as by the elimination of the awareness of our bodily tensions; and that it is just this elimination of all incompatible qualities which allows us to attribute activities to those two-dimensional shapes, and to feel these activities, with a vividness undiminished by the thought of any other circ.u.mstances.
With cubic existence (and its correlative three-dimensional s.p.a.ce), with weight and texture we have therefore got from the contemplated shape to a thought alien to that shape and its contemplation. The thought, to which life and its needs and dangers has given precedence over every other: What _Thing_ is behind this shape, what qualities must be inferred from this _aspect?_ After the possibility of occupying so much s.p.a.ce, the most important quality which things can have for our hopes and fears, is _the possibility of altering their occupation of s.p.a.ce;_ not our locomotion, but _theirs._ I call it _locomotion_ rather than _movement,_ because we have _direct_ experience only of our own movements, and _infer_ similar movement in other beings and objects because of their change of place either across our motionless eye or across some other object whose relation to our motionless eye remains unchanged. I call it _locomotion_ also to accentuate its difference from the _movement_ attributed to the shape of the Rising Mountain, movement _felt_ by us to be going on but not expected to result in any change of the mountain"s s.p.a.ce relations, which are precisely what would be altered by the mountain"s _locomotion._
The _practical_ question about a shape is therefore: Does it warrant the inference of a _thing_ able to change its position in three-dimensional s.p.a.ce? to advance or recede from us? And if so in what manner? Will it, like a loose stone, fall upon us? like flame, rise towards us? like water, spread over us? Or will it change its place only if _we_ supply the necessary _locomotion?_ Briefly: is the thing of which we see the shape inert or active? And if this shape belongs to a thing possessing activity of its own, is its locomotion of that slow regular kind we call the growth and spreading of plants?
Or of the sudden, wilful kind we know in animals and men? What does this shape tell us of such more formidable locomotion? Are these details of curve and colour to be interpreted into jointed limbs, can the _thing_ fling out laterally, run after us, can it catch and swallow us? Or is it such that _we_ can do thus by it? Does this shape suggest the thing"s possession of desires and purposes which we can deal with? And if so, _why is it where it is?_ Whence does it come? What is it going to do? What is it _thinking_ of (if it can think)? How will it _feel_ towards us (if it can feel)? What would it say (if it could speak)? What will be its future and what may have been its past? To sum all up: What does the presence of this shape lead us to think and do and feel?
Such are a few of the thoughts started by that shape and the possibility of its belonging to a thing. And even when, as we shall sometimes find, they continually return back to the shape and play round and round it in centrifugal and centripetal alternations, yet all these thoughts are excursions, however brief, from the world of definite unchanging shapes into that of various and ever varying things; interruptions, even if (as we shall later see) intensifying interruptions, of that concentrated and coordinated contemplation of shapes, with which we have hitherto dealt. And these excursions, and a great many more, from the world of shapes into that of things, are what we shall deal with, when we come to Art, under the heading of _representation_ and _suggestion,_ or, as is usually said, of _subject_ and _expression_ as opposed to _form._
CHAPTER XIII
FROM THE THING TO THE SHAPE
THE necessities of a.n.a.lysis and exposition have led us from the Shape to the Thing, from aesthetic contemplation to discursive and practical thinking. But, as the foregoing chapter itself suggests, the real order of precedence, both for the individual and the race, is inevitably the reverse, since without a primary and dominant interest in things no creatures would have survived to develop an interest in shapes.
Indeed, considering the imperative need for an ever abbreviated and often automatic system of human reactions to sense data, it is by no means easy to understand (and the problem has therefore been utterly neglected) how mankind ever came to evolve any process as lengthy and complicated as that form-contemplation upon which all aesthetic preference depends. I will hazard the suggestion that familiarity with shapes took its original evolutional utility, as well as its origin, from the dangers of over rapid and uncritical inference concerning the qualities of things and man"s proper reactions towards them. It was necessary, no doubt, that the roughest suggestion of a bear"s growl and a bear"s outline should send our earliest ancestors into their sheltering caves. But the occasional discovery that the bear was not a bear but some more harmless and edible animal must have brought about a comparison, a discrimination between the visible aspects of the two beasts, and a mental storage of their difference in shape, gait and colour.
Similarly the deluding resemblance between poisonous and nutritious fruits and roots, would result, as the resemblance between the nurse"s finger and nipple results with the infant, in attention to visible details, until the acquisition of vivid mental images became the chief item of the savage man"s education, as it still is of the self-education of the modern child. This evolution of interest in visible aspects would of course increase tenfold as soon as mankind took to making things whose usefulness (_i.e._ their still non-existent qualities) might be jeopardised by a mistake concerning their shape.
For long after _over_ and _under, straight_ and _oblique, right_ and _left,_ had become habitual perceptions in dealing with food and fuel, the effective aim of a stone, the satisfactory flight of an arrow, would be discovered to depend upon more or less of what we call horizontals and perpendiculars, curves and angles; and the stability of a fibrous tissue upon the intervals of crossing and recrossing, the rythmical or symmetrical arrangements revealed by the hand or eye.
In short, _making,_ being inevitably _shaping,_ would have developed a more and more accurate perception and recollection of every detail of shape. And not only would there arise a comparison between one shape and another shape, but between the shape actually under one"s eyes and the shape no longer present, between the shape as it really was and the shape as it ought to be. Thus in the very course of practical making of things there would come to be little interludes, recognised as useful, first of more and more careful looking and comparing, and then of real contemplation: contemplation of the arrow-head you were chipping, of the mat you were weaving, of the pot you were rubbing into shape; contemplation also of the _other_ arrow-head or mat or pot existing only in your wishes; of the shape you were trying to obtain with a premonitory emotion of the effect which its peculiarities would produce when once made visible to your eye! For the man cutting the arrow-head, the woman plaiting the mat, becoming familiar with the appropriate shapes of each and thinking of the various individual arrow-heads or mats of the same type, _would become aware of the different effect which such shapes had on the person who looked at them._ Some of these shapes would be so dull, increasing the tediousness of chipping and filing or of laying strand over strand; others so alert, entertaining and likeable, as if they were helping in the work; others, although equally compatible with utility, fussing or distressing one, never doing what one expected their lines and curves to do. To these suppositions I would add a few more suggestions regarding the evolution of shape-contemplation out of man"s perfunctory and semi-automatic seeing of "Things." The handicraftsman, armourer, weaver, or potter, benefits by his own and his forerunners" practical experience of which shape is the more adapted for use and wear, and which way to set about producing it; his technical skill becomes half automatic, so that his eye and mind, acting as mere overseers to his muscles, have plenty of time for contemplation so long as everything goes right and no new moves have to be made. And once the handicraftsman contemplates the shape as it issues from his fingers, his mind will be gripped by that liking or disliking expressed by the words "beautiful" and "ugly."
Neither is this all. The owner of a weapon or a vessel or piece of tissue, is not always intent upon employing it; in proportion to its usefulness and durability and to the amount of time, good luck, skill or strength required to make or to obtain it, this chattel will turn from a slave into a comrade. It is furbished or mended, displayed to others, boasted over, perhaps sung over as Alan Breck sang over his sword. The owner"s eye (and not less that of the man envious of the owner!) caresses its shape; and its shape, all its well-known ins-and-outs and ups-and-downs, haunts the memory, ready to start into vividness whenever similar objects come under comparison. Now what holds good of primaeval and savage man holds good also of civilized, perhaps even of ourselves among our machine made and easily replaced properties. The shape of the things we make and use offers itself for contemplation in those interludes of inattention which are half of the rythm of all healthful work. And it is this normal rythm of attention swinging from effort to ease, which explains how art has come to be a part of life, how mere aspects have acquired for our feelings an importance rivalling that of things.
I therefore commend to the Reader the now somewhat unfashionable hypothesis of Semper and his school, according to which the first preference for beauty of shape must be sought for in those arts like stone and metal work, pottery and weaving, which give opportunities for repet.i.tion, reduplication, hence rythm and symmetry, and whose material and technique produce what are called geometric patterns, meaning such as exist in two dimensions and do not imitate the shapes of real objects. This theory has been discredited by the discovery that very primitive and savage mankind possessed a kind of art of totally different nature, and which a.n.a.logy with that of children suggests as earlier than that of pattern: the art which the ingenious hypothesis of Mr Henry Balfour derives from recognition of accidental resemblances between the shapes and stains of wood or stone and such creatures and objects as happen to be uppermost in the mind of the observer, who cuts or paints whatever may be needed to complete the likeness and enable others to perceive the suggestion. Whether or not this was its origin, there seems to have existed in earliest times such an art of a strictly representative kind, serving (like the spontaneous art of children) to evoke the idea of whatever was interesting to the craftsman and his clients, and doubtless practically to have some desirable magic effect upon the realities of things. But (to return to the hypothesis of the aesthetic primacy of geometric and non-representative art) it is certain that although such early representations occasionally attain marvellous life-likeness and anatomical correctness, yet they do not at first show any corresponding care for symmetrical and rythmical arrangement. The bisons and wild boars, for instance, of the Altamira cave frescoes, do indeed display vigour and beauty in the lines const.i.tuting them, proving that successful dealing with shape, even if appealing only to practical interest, inevitably calls forth the empathic imagination of the more gifted artists; but these marvellously drawn figures are all huddled together or scattered as out of a rag-bag; and, what is still more significant, they lack that insistence on the feet which not only suggests ground beneath them but, in so doing, furnishes a horizontal by which to start, measure and take the bearings of all other lines. These astonishing palaeolithic artists (and indeed the very earliest Egyptian and Greek ones) seem to have thought only of the living models and their present and future movements, and to have cared as little for lines and angles as the modern children whose drawings have been instructively compared with theirs by Levinstein and others. I therefore venture to suggest that such aesthetically essential attention to direction and composition must have been applied to representative art when its realistic figures were gradually incorporated into the patterns of the weaver and the potter. Such "stylisation" is still described by art historians as a "degeneration"
due to unintelligent repet.i.tion; but it was on the contrary the integrating process by which the representative element was subjected to such aesthetic preferences as had been established in the manufacture of objects whose usefulness or whose production involved accurate measurement and equilibrium as in the case of pottery or weapons, or rythmical reduplication as in that of textiles.
Be this question as it may (and the increasing study of the origin and evolution of human faculties will some day settle it!) we already know enough to affirm that while in the very earliest art the shape-element and the element of representation are usually separate, the two get gradually combined as civilisation advances, and the shapes originally interesting only inasmuch as suggestions (hence as magical equivalents) or things, and employed for religious, recording, or self-expressive purposes, become subjected to selection and rearrangement by the habit of avoiding disagreeable perceptive and empathic activities and the desire of giving scope to agreeable ones. Nay the whole subsequent history of painting and sculpture could be formulated as the perpetual starting up of new representative interests, new interests in _things,_ their spatial existence, locomotion, anatomy, their reaction to light, and also their psychological and dramatic possibilities; and the subordination of these ever-changing interests in things to the unchanging habit of arranging visible shapes so as to diminish opportunities for the contemplative dissatisfaction and increase opportunities for the contemplative satisfaction to which we attach the respective names of "ugly" and "beautiful."
CHAPTER XIV