Chapter 14

THE AIMS OF ART

WE have thus at last got to Art, which the Reader may have expected to be dealt with at the outset of a primer on the Beautiful.

Why this could not be the case, will be more and more apparent in my remaining chapters. And, in order to make those coming chapters easier to grasp, I may as well forestall and tabulate the views they embody upon the relation between the Beautiful and Art. These generalisations are as follows:

Although it is historically probable that the habit of avoiding ugliness and seeking beauty of shape may have been originally established by utilitarian attention to the non-imitative ("geometrical") shapes of weaving, pottery and implement-making, and transferred from these crafts to the shapes intended to represent or imitate natural objects, yet the distinction between _Beautiful_ and _Ugly_ does not belong either solely or necessarily to what we call _Art._ Therefore the satisfaction of the shape-perceptive or aesthetic preferences must not be confused with any of the many and various other aims and activities to which art is due and by which it is carried on. Conversely: although in its more developed phases, and after the attainment of technical facility, art has been differentiated from other human employment by its foreseeing the possibility of shape-contemplation and therefore submitting itself to what I have elsewhere called the _aesthetic imperative,_ yet art has invariably started from some desire other than that of affording satisfactory shape-contemplation, with the one exception of cases where it has been used to keep or reproduce opportunities of such shape contemplation already accidentally afforded by natural shapes, say, those of flowers or animals or landscapes, or even occasionally of human beings, which had already been enjoyed as beautiful. All art therefore, except that of children, savages, ignoramuses and extreme innovators, invariably avoids ugly shapes and seeks for beautiful ones; _but art does this while pursuing all manner of different aims._ These non-aesthetic aims of art may be roughly divided into (A) the making of useful objects ranging from clothes to weapons and from a pitcher to a temple; (B) the registering or transmitting of facts and their visualising, as in portraits, historical pictures or literature, and book illustration; and (C) the awakening, intensifying or maintaining of definite emotional states, as especially by music and literature, but also by painting and architecture when employed as "aids to devotion." And these large classes may again be subdivided and connected, if the Reader has a mind to, into utilitarian, social, ritual, sentimental, scientific and other aims, some of them not countenanced or not avowed by contemporary morality.

How the aesthetic imperative, i.e. the necessities of satisfactory shape-contemplation, qualifies and deflects the pursuit of such non-aesthetic aims of art can be shown by comparing, for instance, the mere audible devices for conveying conventional meaning and producing and keeping up emotional conditions, viz. the hootings and screechings of modern industrialism no less than the ritual noises of savages, with the arrangements of well constituted pitch, rythm, tonality and harmony in which military, religious or dance music has disguised its non-aesthetic functions of conveying signals or acting on the nerves. Whatever is unnecessary for either of these motives (or any others) for making a noise, can be put to the account of the desire to avoid ugliness and enjoy beauty. But the workings of the aesthetic imperative can best be studied in the Art of the visual-representative group, and especially in painting, which allows us to follow the interplay of the desire to be told (or tell) _facts about things_ with the desire to _contemplate shapes,_ and to contemplate them (otherwise we should _not_ contemplate!) with sensuous, intellectual and empathic satisfaction.

This brings us back to the Third Dimension, of which the possession is, as have we seen, the chief difference between _Things,_ which can alter their aspect in the course of their own and our actions, and _Shapes,_ which can only be contemplated by our bodily and mental eye, and neither altered nor thought of as altered without more or less jeopardising their identity.

I daresay the Reader may not have been satisfied with the reference to the locomotor nature of cubic perception as sufficient justification of my thus connecting cubic existence with Things rather than with Shapes, and my implying that aesthetic preference, due to the sensory, intellectual and empathic factors of perception, is applicable only to the two other dimensions. And the Reader's incredulity and surprise will have been all the greater, because recent art-criticism has sedulously inculcated that the suggestion of cubic existence is the chief function of pictorial genius, and the realisation of such cubic existence the highest delight which pictures can afford to their worthy beholder. This particular notion, entirely opposed to the facts of visual perception and visual empathy, will repay discussion, inasmuch as it accidentally affords an easy entrance into a subject which has hitherto presented inextricable confusion, namely the relations of _Form_ and _Subject,_ or, as I have accustomed the Reader to consider them, the _contemplated Shape_ and the _thought-of Thing._

Let us therefore examine why art-criticism should lay so great a stress on the suggestion and the acceptance of that suggestion, of three-dimensional existence in paintings. _In paintings._ For this alleged aesthetic desideratum ceases to be a criterion of merit when we come to sculpture, about which critics are more and more persistently teaching (and with a degree of reason) that one of the greatest merits of the artist, and of the greatest desiderata of the beholder, is precisely the reduction of real cubic existence by avoiding all projection beyond a unified level, that is to say by making a solid block of stone look as if it were a representation on a flat surface. This contradiction explains the origin of the theory giving supreme pictorial importance to the Third Dimension. For art criticism though at length (thanks especially to the sculptor Hildebrand) busying itself also with plastic art, has grown up mainly in connexion with painting. Now in painting the greatest scientific problem, and technical difficulty, has been the suggestion of three-dimensional existences by pigments applied to a two-dimensional surface; and this problem has naturally been most successfully handled by the artists possessing most energy and imagination, and equally naturally shirked or bungled or treated parrot-wise by the artists of less energy and imagination. And, as energy and imagination also show themselves in finer perception, more vivid empathy and more complex dealings with shapes which are only two-dimensional, it has come about that the efficient and original solutions of the cubic problem have coincided, _ceteris paribus,_ with the production of pictures whose two-dimensional qualities have called forth the adjective _beautiful,_ and _beautiful_ in the most intense and complicated manner. Hence successful treatment of cubic suggestion has become an habitual (and threatens to become a rule-of-thumb) criterion of pictorial merit; the more so that qualities of two-dimensional shape, being intrinsic and specific, are difficult to run to ground and describe; whereas the quality of three-dimensional suggestion is ascertainable by mere comparison between the shapes in the picture and the shapes afforded by real things when seen in the same perspective and lighting. Most people can judge whether an apple in a picture "looks as if" it were solid, round, heavy and likely to roll off a sideboard in the same picture; and some people may even, when the picture has no other claims on their interest, experience incipient muscular contractions such as would eventually interfere with a real apple rolling off a real sideboard. Apples and sideboards offer themselves to the meanest experience and can be dealt with adequately in everyday language, whereas the precise curves and angles, the precise relations of directions and impacts, of parts to whole, which together make up the identity of a two-dimensional shape, are indeed perceived and felt by the attentive beholder, but not habitually analysed or set forth in words. Moreover the creation of two-dimensional shapes satisfying to contemplation depends upon two very different factors: on traditional experience with regard to the more general arrangements of lines, and on individual energy and sensitiveness, i.e. on genius in carrying out, and ringing changes on, such traditional arrangements. And the possession of tradition or genius, although no doubt the most important advantage of an artist, happens not to be one to which he can apply himself as to a problem. On the other hand a problem to be solved is eternally being pressed upon every artist; pressed on him by his clients, by the fashion of his time and also by his own self inasmuch as he is a man interested not only in _shapes_ but in _things._ And thus we are back at the fact that the problem given to the painter to solve by means of lines and colours on a flat surface, is the problem of telling us something new or something important about _things:_ what things are made of, how they will react to our doings, how they move, what they feel and think; and above all, I repeat it, what amount of space they occupy with reference to the space similarly occupied, in present or future, by other things including ourselves.

Our enquiry into the excessive importance attributed by critics to pictorial suggestion of cubic existence has thus led us back to the conclusion contained in previous chapters, namely that beauty depending negatively on ease of visual perception, and positively upon emphatic corroboration of our dynamic habits, is a quality of _aspects,_ independent of cubic existence and every other possible quality of _things_; except in so far as the thought of three-dimensional, and other, qualities of things may interfere with the freedom and readiness of mind requisite for such highly active and sensitive processes as those of empathic form interpretation. But the following chapter will, I trust, make it clear that such interference of the _Thought about Things_ with the _Contemplation of Shapes_ is essential to the rythm of our mental life, and therefore a chief factor in all artistic production and appreciation.