Chapter 15

ATTENTION TO SHAPES

TO explain how art in general, and any art in particular, succeeds in reconciling these contradictory demands, I must remind the Reader of what I said (p. 93) about the satisfactory or unsatisfactory possibilities of shapes having begun to be noticed in the moments of slackened attention to the processes of manufacturing the objects embodying those shapes, and in the intervals between practical employment of these more or less _shapely_ objects. And I must ask him to connect with these remarks a previous passage (p. 44) concerning the intermittent nature of normal acts of attention, and their alternation as constituting _on-and-off beats._ The deduction from these two converging statements is that, contrary to the a-priori theories making aesthetic contemplation an exception, a kind of bank holiday, to daily life, it is in reality one-half of daily life's natural and healthy rythm. That the real state of affairs, as revealed by psychological experiment and observation, should have escaped the notice of so many aestheticians, is probably due to their theories starting from artistic production rather than from aesthetic appreciation, without which art would after all probably never have come into existence.

The production of the simplest work of art cannot indeed be thought of as one of the alternations of everyday attention, because it is a long, complex and repeatedly resumed process, a whole piece of life, including in itself hundreds and thousands of alternations of _doing_ and _looking,_ of discursive thinking of aims and ways and means and of contemplation of aesthetic results. For even the humblest artist has to think of whatever objects or processes his work aims at representing, conveying or facilitating; and to think also of the objects, marble, wood, paints, voices, and of the processes, drawing, cutting, harmonic combining, by which he attempts to compass one of the above-mentioned results. The artist is not only an aesthetically appreciative person; he is, in his own way, a man of science and a man of practical devices, an expert, a craftsman and an engineer. To produce a work of art is not an interlude in his life, but his life's main business; and he therefore stands apart, as every busy specialist must, from the business of other specialists, of those ministering to mankind's scientific and practical interests.

But while it takes days, months, sometimes years to produce a work of art, it may require (the process has been submitted to exact measurement by the stop-watch) not minutes but seconds, to take stock of that work of art in such manner as to carry away its every detail of shape, and to continue dealing with it in memory. The unsuspected part played by memory explains why aesthetic contemplation can be and normally is, an intermittent function alternating with practical doing and thinking. It is in memory, though memory dealing with what we call the present, that we gather up parts into wholes and turn consecutive measurements into simultaneous relations; and it is probably in memory that we deal empathically with shapes, investing their already perceived directions and relations with the remembered qualities of our own activities, aims and moods. And similarly it is thanks to memory that the brief and intermittent acts of aesthetic appreciation are combined into a network of contemplation which intermeshes with our other thoughts and doings, and yet remains different from them, as the restorative functions of life remain different from life's expenditure, although interwoven with them. Every Reader with any habit of self-observation knows how poignant an impression of beauty may be got, as through the window of an express train, in the intermittence of practical business or abstract thinking, nay even in what I have called the _off-beat_ of deepest personal emotion, the very stress of the practical, intellectual or personal instant (for the great happenings of life are measured in seconds!) apparently driving in by contrast, or conveying on its excitement, that irrelevant aesthetic contents of the _off-beat_ of attention. And while the practical or intellectual interest changes, while the personal emotion subsides, that aesthetic impression remains; remains or recurs, united, through every intermittence, by the feeling of identity, that identity which, like _the rising of the mountain,_ is due to the reiterative nature of shape-contemplation: the fragments of melody may be interrupted in our memory by all manner of other thoughts, but they will recur and coalesce, and recurring and coalescing, bring with them the particular mood which their rythms and intervals have awakened in us and awaken once more.

That diagrammatic Man on the Hill in reality _thought away_ from the landscape quite as much as his practical and scientific companions; what he did, and they did not, was to think _back_ to it; and think back to it always with the same references of lines and angles, the same relations of directions and impacts, of parts and wholes. And perhaps the restorative, the healing quality of aesthetic contemplation is due, in large part, to the fact that, in the perpetual flux of action and thought, it represents reiteration and therefore stability.

Be that as it may, the intermittent but recurrent character of shape contemplation, the fact that it is inconceivably brief and amazingly repetitive, that it has the essential quality of identity because of reiteration, all this explains also two chief points of our subject. First: how an aesthetic impression, intentionally or accidentally conveyed in the course of wholly different interests, can become a constant accompaniment to the shifting preoccupations of existence, like the remembered songs which sing themselves silently in our mind and the remembered landscapes becoming an intangible background to our ever-varying thoughts. And, secondly, it explains how art can fulfil the behests of our changing and discursive interest in things while satisfying the imperious unchanging demands of the contemplated preference for beautiful aspects. And thus we return to my starting-point in dealing with art: that art is conditioned by the desire for beauty while pursuing entirely different aims, and executing any one of a variety of wholly independent non-aesthetic tasks.