CHAPTER X.. The æsthetic Sentiment.

THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT.

Its origin: the theory of play, and its variants—Æsthetic activity is the play of the creative imagination in its disinterested form. Its instinctive nature—Transition from simple play to æsthetic play: primitive art of pantomimic dancing—Derivation of the arts in motion; of the arts at rest—Why was æsthetic activity evolved?—Art had, in the beginning, a social utility—Evolution of the æsthetic sentiment—Its sociological aspect: progression from the strictly social character towards individualism in the different arts—Its anthropological aspect: progress from strictly human character towards beings and things as a whole—The feeling for nature—The feeling for the sublime only partially belongs to æsthetics—Its evolution: it is not æsthetic in its origin, but becomes so—Why there are not two æsthetic senses—The sense of the comic—Psychology of laughter—It has more than one cause—Theory of superiority. Theory of discord—These correspond to two distinct stages, one of which is foreign to æsthetics—Physiology of laughter. Theory of nervous derivation—Theory of tickling—Pathology. Are there cases of complete æsthetic insensibility? Difficulties and transpositions of the subject—Pathological function of emotion: pessimistic tendencies, megalomania, influence of unconscious activity—Pathological aspects of the creative imagination; its degrees—Reason why the intense image, in artists, does not pass into action; ways in which it is modified—Cause of this deviation; its advantages.

While all the emotions hitherto enumerated have their origin and their raison d’être in the preservation of the individual as an individual, or as a social being, the æsthetic feeling, as we know, differs from the rest by the fact that the activity which produces it, aims, not at the accomplishment of a vital or social function, but at the mere pleasure of exercising itself. The more directly a tendency is connected with life, the more necessary, urgent, and serious it is, and the less it paves the way for the æsthetic feeling, which must always have a surplus to expend. However, its inutility, which is only relative, has been exaggerated; for it tends in some measure to the conservation of the individual and the race, being, and especially having been in the past, a social factor, though an incidental and subordinate one, as we shall see afterwards.

In conformity with the plan adopted, we shall remain strictly within the bounds of psychology, avoiding any excursions into the history or theory of art, except for the purpose of seeking facts and illustrations. We shall thus have to study the origin of æsthetic emotion, the law of its development, and, subsequently, two forms of emotional life, rightly or wrongly, considered as related to it: the sense of the sublime and that of the comic; and we shall conclude by some remarks on its morbid manifestations.

On the origin of æsthetic feeling, and consequently on the character peculiar to it among all other emotions, writers belonging to all schools of philosophy are in agreement to an extent rarely found elsewhere. It has its source in a superfluity of life—a luxury of activity; in fact it is a form of play. Schiller is supposed to have been the first to state its formula: “Supreme art is that in which play reaches its highest point, when we play, so to speak, from the depths of our being. Such is poetry, and especially dramatic poetry.... As the gods of Olympus, free from all wants, knowing nothing of work or of duty, which are limitations of being, occupied themselves in taking mortal forms in order to play at human passions, so, in the drama, we play with the achievements, crimes, virtues, vices, which are not our own.” Kant referred the beautiful to the free play of the intellect and the imagination, and his immediate disciples follow him on this point. Schopenhauer says the same thing in other words, “Art is a momentary liberation.” Finally, Herbert Spencer develops this thesis, from the experimental point of view, by connecting it with biological conditions.

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Footnote 203:

This theory of play, however, appears, from recent researches, to be of English origin, and due to Home (1696-1782), so that, when taken up again by Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, vol. ii., last chapter), it would seem only to have returned to its original home.

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The primary activity of our physical and mental faculties relates to proximate ends: the conservation of the individual, and his adaptation to his environment. The secondary activity is its own end, and is of somewhat late appearance in the animal kingdom. The lower animals are shut up in a narrow circle: they feed, defend themselves, sleep, and propagate their species. On a higher level appears “a useless activity of unused organs” (Spencer, op. cit., ii. p. 630); as in the rat with incisors growing continuously in adaptation to the excessive wear they undergo; the cat, exercising her claws on the bark of a tree or the covering of a chair, etc. Higher still appears the true play-impulse; dogs pretending to hunt or fight, cats running after a ball which they catch, push away, catch again, and pursue, bounding as if after their prey. In children, we know the pre-eminent function of play, and how it differs according to sex, disposition, and age: it has its individual characteristics, and is often a creation.

Play is, however, a genus of which æsthetic activity is only a species, and in determining the peculiarities of this species, the authorities are somewhat vague. The most definite, Grant Allen, in his Physiological Æsthetics, has attempted a solution. For him play is the disinterested exercise of the active functions, as in racing, hunting, etc.; art, that of the receptive functions, as in the contemplation of a picture or a monument, the reading of a poem, listening to music, etc. This is definite, but quite inadmissible; for it is clear that æsthetic emotion requires a certain mental activity in the spectator, not to mention the creator.

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Footnote 204:

In a recent book, very rich in observations on the play of animals (Die Spiele der Thiere, 1896, the only existing monograph on the subject), Groos substitutes for the thesis of a superabundance of energy that of a primary instinct, of which play, in all its forms, is the expression. I cannot see that the two theses exclude one another. Some base their argument on external manifestations. Groos connects them with an instinct—i.e., a motor disposition sui generis. I am inclined to take Groos’s view, the more so as the fundamental idea of the present work is that of finally reducing the affective life to the sum of a set of tendencies fixed in the organisation.

For the rest, the psychology of play is still awaiting treatment in its totality. The word, in fact, denotes several entirely different psychical manifestations. In its first stage, it is unconscious in its origin, spontaneous, an expenditure for the mere pleasure of spending; but, however disinterested in its source and its aim, it is useful; in children, play is often a form of imitation, often a form of experimentation, an attempt at easy and unconstrained exploration of beings and things. In the second stage, it has become reflective; pleasure is sought for its own sake, and with full consciousness of the reason; it is a complex state formed by the fusion of variable elements. In a special study, which, however, is merely tentative (Die Reize des Spieles, 1883), Lazarus adopts the following classification: (a) games connected with physical activity, (b) the attraction of all kinds of spectacles, (c) intellectual games, (d) games of chance. This last item alone might well prove a tempting one to a psychologist. It has a quasi-passive, somewhat blunted form, being what Pascal called a diversion (that which turns aside, distracts), a way of pretending to work, or filling up the blanks of existence, of “killing time.” It has an active form, the gambling passion, whose tragedy is as old as humanity, and which is made up of attraction towards the unknown and the hazardous, of daring, of emulation, of the desire of victory, the love of gain, and the fascination of acquiring wealth wholesale, instantaneously, without effort. These and other elements show that, in play as in love, it is complexity which produces intensity. The absence of any complete first-hand studies on this subject shows once more the scarcity of monographs relating to the psychology of the feelings.

Footnote 205:

For a detailed criticism of this view, see Guyau’s Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine, p. 12. This writer, afraid of dilettantism, substituted for the theory of play that of life, as a source of art. I do not see what is to be gained by substituting a vague formula for a definite one. Moreover, are not all emotions connected with life?

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The peculiar characteristic of this superfluous activity, this form of play, is the fact of its spending itself in a combination of images and ending in a creation which has its aim in itself; for creative imagination sometimes has practical utility as its aim. It differs from the other forms of play only in the materials employed and the direction followed. We may say, more briefly, that it is the play of the creative imagination in its disinterested form.

This is not the place for a dissertation on the creative imagination, which seems to have been somewhat neglected by contemporary psychology, so lavish in studies of what used to be called the passive imagination (i.e., visual, auditory, motor, etc., images). I wish only to indicate, as belonging to our subject, its relations to instinctive activity.

When we have said that images, their association and dissociation, reflection, and emotion are the constituent elements of the creative imagination, it will be found that we have omitted an irreducible factor, the principal element, the proprium quid of this mental operation, that which gives the first impulse, which is the cause of creative work, and constitutes its unity. This x, which, for want of a better term, we may call spontaneity, is of the nature of an instinct. It is a craving to create, equivalent, in the intellectual order, to the generative craving in the physiological order. It shows itself at first, modestly, in the invention of childish games; later, and more brilliantly, in the budding of myths, that collective and anonymous work of primitive humanity; later still, in art properly so called. There always remains the craving for superimposing on the world of sense another world, having its origin in man, who believes in it, at least for the moment. If it should seem a mistake to compare instinct, which is fixed, with the æsthetic activity, which passes for absolute liberty, we must remember that we are dealing, not with their development, but with their origin; and in that point they coincide. True creative activity has the innateness of instinct, an innateness in this case to be rendered by the word precocity. This is proved by innumerable facts; at some unforeseen moment the spark flashes out; experience has hardly anything to do with it. It has its necessity and its fatality; the creator has his task to accomplish; he is fitted for one kind of work only; even when he has some adaptability, he is imprisoned within his own manner, and keeps his own individual style; if he leaves it, he fails altogether, or becomes a bad imitator of others. It has its impersonality; creation is not the child of the will, but of that unconscious impulse which we call inspiration; it seems to the creator as if another acted in him and through him, transcended his personality and made him a mere mouth-piece. What further is needed to show, as far as origin is concerned, the characteristics of instinct? In physiological creation the fertilised ovule assimilates to itself, according to its nature, the materials of its environment, and, following the laws of an inexorable determinism, becomes, in the end, a healthy individual or a monster. In the case of instinct, an external or internal excitation brings into play a pre-established mechanism, and the act goes straight to its end, or turns to a gross error. In æsthetic creation the process is identical; we know by means of numerous biographical documents, which I cannot here reproduce, that the creative moment with artists presents itself under one or other of two forms: either a rapid intuition, in which the generating idea appears as a whole, or a fragmentary, partial view, which gradually completes itself; unity established beforehand or arrived at afterwards; the intuition or the fragment. The intellectual ovule, too, is forced to this dilemma—revelation or abortion.

I do not insist on a subject which would require to be dwelt on at length, and which I propose to treat in another work where it will be more in place; but it was necessary to point out that under this superabundance of strength, this vaguely described useless activity, there is something more definite, an active tendency utilising this superfluous energy, and giving to it various directions, among others that of intellectual creation, with images for materials—a creative instinct having its type in primitive animism, the common source of myths and arts.

Let it not be objected that all this concerns the creator only, and that he alone feels this craving, this tendency, this inclination to act, which is the root of æsthetic emotion. He who experiences it in any degree, however coarse or however subtle—spectator, listener, dilettante—must perform over again, in a measure proportioned to his powers, the creator’s work. Without some analogy between their natures, however slight, the spectator will feel nothing; he must live the artist’s life and play his game, incapable of producing by himself, but capable of being, and even forced to be, an echo.

Now let us lay aside these theoretic considerations for a question of fact. Can we find the transition between play under its simple form of movement, expended for the sake of pleasure, and æsthetic activity, i.e., creation-play? This transition must represent the origin and primitive form of art. This primordial art, now impoverished, dried up, like an old tree which has emptied all its sap into its suckers, is dancing, or rather the pantomime-dance forming an inseparable whole. In its origin it is “an expression of muscular force simulating the acts of life.” No commentary is needed to show that here the junction between superfluous motor activity and æsthetic creation takes place: dancing includes both. Since we are at the source, it is as well to insist on this, all the more so, as the importance of this primordial art has in general either been forgotten or insufficiently emphasised by psychology. Let us note its principal characteristics.

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Footnote 206:

We must except Sergi, from whom I have borrowed the above definition. In his Psychologie Physiologique, Bk. IV., chap. vi., sec. 374, he gives some interesting historical details.

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First of all, the artist finds his material in himself: a possibility of movements useful neither for seeking food, nor for defending himself, nor for attacking others, nor for his preservation, or that of his species, in any form whatever.

This art is primordial. We find it in the early stages of all peoples and tribes, even the most savage. The documents collected by ethnologists leave us in no doubt on this point, except, perhaps, with regard to the Arabs and the Fuegians; and, even in their case, there is nothing to prove that it is not our insufficient information that is at fault. We may therefore call it the natural art par excellence.

It is universal. It is found in all latitudes, all ages, all races, as much among the utilitarian Chinese and the grave Romans of the early ages, as among nations reputed artistic or frivolous.

It is symbolical, it means something, it expresses a feeling, a state of mind; that is to say, it has the essential and fundamental character of æsthetic creation. Originally, dancing had a sexual, warlike, or religious significance; it was appropriated to all the solemn acts of public and private life. Among the natives of North America there were dances for war, for peace, for diplomatic negotiations, for hunting expeditions in common; others, again, for each of the gods, for harvests, deaths, births, marriages. The negroes have a passion for it which almost reaches delirium. The ancient Chinese judged of the manners of a people from their dances; they had themselves a great number, bearing different names. This enumeration would be endless; it is simpler to say that dancing marks a phase of symbolism which all races of mankind have passed through.

Indubitably, in the genesis of the æsthetic sentiment, we have here the first stage, semi-physiological, semi-artistic, play becoming art. Let us further remark that primitive dancing is a composite manifestation, including the rudimentary form of two acts destined, later on, to separate in the course of their evolution—music and poetry. Poor music indeed, consisting sometimes of three notes only, but remarkable for the strictness of rhythm and measure, and poor poetry, consisting in a short sentence incessantly repeated, or even in monosyllables without precise signification.

Such is the original form of the arts aiming at motion. As for the arts whose result is repose, they are, with the exception of architecture, indirectly derived from the same source. Dancing, being a pantomime, has plastic qualities; it is living plasticity. Furthermore, as a social and ceremonial act, it requires ornaments which at first were applied to the human body: drawings, tattooings, or colours simply smeared on. Later on, the representation of forms and colours is externalised, passes from men to things, in order to fashion or modify them, becoming ornamentation, sculpture, painting.

We have just seen how æsthetic activity arose, and how humble was its origin. Another question still remains in debate: Why was it evolved? In fact, by its nature, by its definition, it seems to have had no utility as a stimulant, since it springs from superfluous activity and is not bound to the conditions of individual existence. The persistence and development of the individual social, moral, and religious emotions explain themselves through utility. The intellectual or scientific emotion, also, was at first entirely practical, and therefore useful: knowledge is power. The case of æsthetic emotion stands alone. How, amid the rough struggle for life in which humanity was involved, was it able, not merely to blossom, but to live and prosper? It is no answer to say that it resisted and grew, because rooted in an instinct, a craving; for this instinct, by reason of its biological uselessness, might have become atrophied, or disappeared, like functionless organs, and it is the contrary that has happened. Darwin’s well-known explanation based on sexual selection, the preference of the females for the most skilful, the most graceful, the most brilliantly coloured, or the best singers among the males, is only partial, available for certain species of animals, not for all. More than this, the tendency dominant of late years to deny absolutely the heredity of acquired modifications cuts us off from the hypothesis of the transmission, consolidation, and increase of the æsthetic instinct in the course of generations. Hence the great embarrassment in which Weismann, Wallace, and all others who take this negative view, find themselves. They admit variation and selection only—not the fixing of variations by heredity. The first factor is sufficient to explain the appearance of the æsthetic activity, but the other two, selection and transmission, have nothing to do with it; so that, however frequently we may suppose this creative instinct to appear, it would always have to begin again at the beginning. The two above-mentioned writers have been much exercised on this point. How could the aptitudes for mathematics, music, and art in general, so rudimentary in primitive man, take so marvellous a flight? “In the struggle for life these mental gifts may very possibly have proved serviceable from time to time, and even of decisive importance; but in most cases they are not so, and no one will pretend that a gift for music or poetry, ever, in primitive times, increased the chances of founding a family.... These are not qualities which favour the preservation of the species; they could not, therefore, have been formed by natural selection.”

Footnote 207:

Weismann, Essais sur l’hérédité (French ed., p. 475); Wallace, Darwinism, chap. xv. Before these, Schneider (Freud und Leid, pp. 28, 29), an adherent of the English theory of the inherent uselessness of the æsthetic activity, has tried to connect it with the conservation of the individual and the species by an extremely bold and problematical hypothesis resting on heredity. If we experience different feelings before a stormy sea, or a calm, blue lake, covered with boats, or a vast plain, or snow-covered mountains, “it is because our feelings are those of primitive man, when he lived really in the midst of nature and had to wrest his daily bread from it. Through countless generations our ancestors, on finishing their daily task, in the evening have thought with satisfaction of the work accomplished; it was in this frame of mind that they looked on the approach of evening and the sunset. Why does a landscape representing it produce on us an impression of repose and peace? We have no other answer than this: for countless generations past the evening sky has been associated with the consciousness of work finished and a feeling of rest and satisfaction.” Apart from its extreme flimsiness, this hypothesis would not be applicable to all the arts.

There is only one possible answer: æsthetic activity, at its origin, had some indirect utility as regards conservation, being based on directly useful forms of activity to which it was auxiliary. Besides, to connect art with play, itself connected with an excess of nervous and muscular energy, is to place it in mediate relation with the vital functions. We have still to define the nature and the measure of its utility.

The arts which aim at motion, at their first appearance consisted entirely of dancing, accompanied by song. Weismann tells us that the musical sound is the complement of the sense of hearing, which itself is connected with natural selection, because it is not a matter of indifference, either for animals or men, that they should clearly hear and rightly distinguish the sounds of inanimate or animate nature, so as to act accordingly. This, however, explains nothing, acuteness of hearing and musical ear being two entirely distinct mental states, each requiring distinct cerebral and psychic conditions. It is in the dance accompanied by song and gesture that we must seek for the explanation; it had a social utility, it favoured concerted movements and common action, it gives unity, and the consciousness and visual perception of unity, to an assemblage of men; it is a discipline, a preparation for corporate attack or defence, a school of war. Hence the capital importance of time. The Kaffirs, in immense numbers, sing and dance with such precision as to resemble a huge machine in motion. Among several tribes the rhythm must be perfect, and any one who makes a mistake is punished with death.

Footnote 208:

Wallaschek, Primitive Music, chap. x., which may be consulted for details.

In the case of the arts whose result is repose, the explanation is more difficult. We have seen that there is a possible transition from one group to the other,—dancing being a living picture,—but what utility is there in the ornamentation of utensils, in drawing, in sculpture? Wallaschek (op. cit.) supposes that savages drew or carved horrible figures on their weapons in order to frighten the enemy, as is still seen among the Dyaks. I prefer Grosse’s explanation, as being at the same time more positive and more general. In the first place, ornaments are signs, and have as such a social value. Besides, and more especially, primitive plastic art supposes two factors whose development must be favoured among savages by the struggle for existence: good visual memory and great manual skill. They are, like children, very acute observers; they do not pass beyond the narrow limit of their sensations; but within that limit they see, hear, feel, and smell with extreme precision; their existence depends on it. They have (as can be proved by numerous instances) an excellent memory for forms and figures. Lastly, they have few tools, but they know how to use them; they are skilful because their life also depends on their skill. The distance, therefore, between the practice of arts serviceable to life and the primitive practice of art is not so very great after all.

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Footnote 209:

Die Anfänge der Kunst (1894). This book, extremely lucid and interesting, full of ethnographic documents and general considerations, may be consulted with great advantage on the question of the beginnings of art. On the special point which occupies us, see pp. 191 et seq.

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In the beginning, art is dependent on and auxiliary to the useful; the æsthetic activity is too wide to subsist by its own strength; but it will be emancipated later on. We shall return to the old question of the “relations between the beautiful and the useful,” which cannot be cleared up unless we turn our attention from civilised ages and countries—where the divorce is already accomplished—to the remote epoch of their origin.

II.

Let us now, starting from its source, see how the æsthetic sentiment has, in the course of ages, come to specialise and differentiate itself. Its evolution presents two aspects—one sociological, the other anthropomorphic—which in the nature of things are inseparable, but which, for the sake of clearness in exposition, we shall study separately.

1. The æsthetic feeling, of a strictly social character in its origin, tends progressively towards individualism. A division of labour takes place in it, rendering its manifestations more numerous and more complex.

2. The æsthetic sentiment, of a strictly human character at its origin, gradually loses this in order to embrace the whole of nature. It passes from human beauty in its organic form to abstract beauty, loved for its own sake.

Let us consider its developmental progress under this double aspect:

I. In recent times, especially in France, many writers have occupied themselves with the relations between the æsthetic feeling and social conditions. It is sufficient to mention the names of Taine, Hennequin, Guyau, but all are studying the question under its contemporary, or at least its civilised form; they place themselves at an epoch when art has already to a great extent lost its social value. For Hennequin, a form of art expresses a nation, because, having adopted it, the nation recognises itself therein as in a mirror. The famous theory (Taine’s) of the work of art as the necessary product of race, time, and environment is much contested and very vague. Still more vague is Guyau’s view: “Art is, through the medium of feeling, an extension of society to all natural beings and even to beings conceived as transcending the limits of nature, or, in fact, to fictitious beings, created by human imagination.” It is an abuse to words to apply the name of society in this way: a society implies solidarity; every other use of the word is merely arbitrary. The question is, therefore, Has art been a co-operative factor in the establishment of solidarity among men? It is in this sense only that it has or has had a social character. Now, to find in it this characteristic in a clear, positive, incontestable form, we must go back to the beginning, to an epoch when æsthetic needs collaborated in social unity and served a social end. This characteristic is, as we have already said, so evident—at least as far as the arts resulting in movement are concerned—that it seems preferable briefly to recapitulate how differentiation and individualism gradually came about.

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Footnote 210:

For a historical survey of the question see Grosse, Anfänge der Kunst, pp. 12 et seq.

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We have seen that, in the beginning, dancing is everywhere and always a collective manifestation, regulated and safeguarded by tradition, later on by laws, as in the Greek republics, and later still subject to the influence of fancy and individual caprice—to the great scandal of the conservatives. But the evolution of this art has been poor enough when compared with its two acolytes, poetry and music. Poetry, even when separated from dancing, long remains inseparable from music; it is sung and accompanied by the playing of an instrument. It is at first anonymous; whoever the author may be, it is common property; it belongs to the clan, the group, as if it were the work of all. Later,—the first social differentiation,—there are found corporations of poet-singers: the ἀοιδοὶ, rhapsodists, jongleurs, minstrels, bards; among the higher Negro races of the Upper Nile these corporations are held inviolable, even in time of war. Afterwards the poet’s individualism, freed from its association with music, accentuates and asserts itself, and becomes the definitive form among civilised nations. It would not be rash to say that, in our day, poetry is tending more and more in the direction of pure subjectivity and absolute individualism. Stuart Mill even ventured to say, “All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy”; and according to him, “the peculiarity of poetry appears to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener”; which proves how little he understood of its true origin. I do not inquire whether this sort of isolation in an ivory tower is a gain or a loss for poetry; but I observe its growing frequency as civilisation advances; the complete antithesis to its collective character in the earliest ages.

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Footnote 211:

Letourneau, L’évolution littéraire chez les différents peuples, p. 66, a work which may be consulted for documentary evidence.

Footnote 212:

Quoted by Grosse (p. 48), who gives an acute criticism of this view, rightly pointing out that a strictly individualistic art is “neither thinkable nor discoverable.”

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Indissolubly associated at first with dancing and poetry, music shares the common destiny; it is subject to inflexible rules, it is a State function, an instrument of education and order. Its function among the Greeks, especially the Dorians, is well known, as also its importance to philosophers who, like Plato, wished to reform or reconstruct society. In two other widely separated parts of the world, among absolutely different people, we find, in China, 2000 years before our era, a Minister of Music, whose importance is continually insisted on by the philosophers; and in Mexico, before the conquest, an official academy of music, regulating both that art and poetry. It is therefore regarded as being, in the first place, of social utility. It thus passes through a process of evolution similar to that already described in the case of poetry, slowly separates from it, and still more slowly takes its great flight to become the least imperfect mode of expressing the most refined and intimate feelings, and to admit of no rule outside itself. The separation which took place at the Renaissance between religious music, which is in its essence collective, and secular music, which tends towards individualism, would, if need were, supply other proofs in support of the regular march of æsthetic evolution.

In the group of plastic arts, the relation between æsthetic activity and individual or social utility shows itself less clearly, and rather under the form of a parasitical superfetation. Here the evolution has started from two quite distinct sources: the one, leading to no great results, is the ornamentation of the human body, which, however, has, as we have seen, a certain social value as a sign. The other, architecture, is for this group the equivalent of dancing, i.e., the primordial and synthetic form whence differentiation started. As soon as man had passed the period of caverns and such shelters, and had learnt to construct durable buildings, he worked at first for gods and kings, who embodied the social order and were alone worthy of so great an effort, or for the assemblies and deliberations of the clan, as is seen even at the present day in the case of many savages, whose rudimentary architecture is only shown in the construction of the communal house. The work is at once architecture, sculpture, and painting, forming an inseparable whole, as do dancing, poetry, and music. Then the association was gradually dissolved, the independence of each art asserted itself, and each of these arts, at first exclusively reserved for kings or the community at large, afterwards entered the service of the rich and great, and, in time, of every one, thus becoming more and more individualised.

In short, the relation between disinterested æsthetic feeling, and practical, utilitarian ways of thinking, would be scarcely intelligible if we confined our attention to civilised ages. It has varied greatly, and in these variations we can distinguish three principal stages.

The first stage is that of close relation. Æsthetic pleasure, in its rudimentary form, co-exists with the useful, or rather, is involved with it in a common state of consciousness—the agreeable. To be felt, it must possess some individual or social utility. This mental state is still, at this very hour, that of many human beings, probably of the majority.

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Footnote 213:

Grant Allen (Mind, xx., Oct. 1880) points out that Homer describes beautiful districts as “fertile,” “rich in wheat,” “horse-feeding,” etc. He heard a peasant in the neighbourhood of Hyères praising the magnificence of a cultivated plain covered with vegetables, while showing the greatest contempt for a picturesque bit of woodland. An American visiting England said, “Your country, sir, is very beautiful. In many parts you may go for miles together and never see a tree except in a hedge.” Any one who has had much to do with the peasantry could quote hundreds of remarks similar to the above.

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The second stage is that of loose relation. Emerson’s saying, that what Nature at one time provides for use she afterwards turns to ornament, is the formula which sums up this period. The æsthetic feeling has no fixed connection with the conservation of the individual; it is called up by occurrences which give its distant, disinterested echo, serving the purpose of pleasure only. The legends, the genii, fairies, mythological beings who have become mere material for poems, pictures, operas, were once a belief, a reality, a terror, of which we retain only the similitude in the shape of a game. There are many reasons why the serf of the Middle Ages was not inspired with any sort of poetry by the Gothic castles or the donjons built on high rocks whose ruins we admire. It is possible that one day, under some entirely different civilisation, our factories, with their tall chimneys, may become material for art by calling up memories of a vanished past.

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Footnote 214:

See Spencer, Essays, i. 434, 435.

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The third stage is that of complete liberation, which has its expression in the thesis of art for art’s sake. My object is neither to defend it, nor to attack it, nor to pronounce judgment on it, but simply to ascertain its existence in theory and practice, and that it only makes its appearance at a late age and in mature civilisation.

To sum up: there is no more an innate and infused notion of the beautiful than there is an innate and infused notion of the good, but a system of æsthetics which comes into being just as morality does; and the history of the æsthetic feeling is that of its fluctuations during the process of coming into being.

II. The second aspect of its evolution consists in the progressive movement which sets it free from strict anthropomorphism, gradually withdrawing it from the purely human and extending it so as to embrace everything. The best way to follow this movement of extension is to put the question in a concrete form, as Grant Allen has done. What objects did man at first consider beautiful, and in what order did he extend this judgment? In so doing we avoid the disadvantages of an a priori proceeding and the risk of confusion.

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Footnote 215:

Mind, 1880, p. 445.

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Human beings began by thinking that beautiful which resembled themselves; the Australian woman admired the Australian man, and the Fuegian man the Fuegian woman. Primitive æsthetics have a strictly specific character, and their relations with the sexual instinct are evident. At this stage they can scarcely be distinguished from animal æsthetics, if—which is a disputed point—animals are susceptible to the æsthetic sentiment. In any case their dances, their music, their tournaments, their ornaments, are only addressed to individuals of their own species, and have generation as their object. There is no fact to indicate that, for any species whatever, there has been any change or progress in this direction.

Man, on the other hand, rose out of this state, in the first instance, by ornaments added to his person. This addition may seem futile enough, but in reality it was the first step outside nature. It has been attempted to define man as a rational, or a religious animal; he might just as well be defined as an æsthetic animal. In the colours and designs applied directly on the body, and at a later period fixed by the operation of tattooing, we already note a choice, a symmetry, a certain artistic arrangement.

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Footnote 216:

I shall be pardoned for introducing the following passage from Théophile Gautier; it is, under its humorous form, so just from a psychological point of view: “Ideals torment even the coarsest natures. The savage, when he tattooes himself, or smears his body with red and blue, or sticks a fish-bone through his nose, is only obeying a confused sense of the beautiful. He is seeking for something beyond what exists; he is trying to perfect his type, guided by a dim notion of art. The taste for ornament distinguishes man from brute more clearly than any other peculiarity. No dog ever thought of putting rings into his ears; and the stupid Papuans, who eat clay and earthworms, make themselves earrings of shells and coloured berries.”

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From the human body the artistic instinct then extends to whatever comes in contact with it; it externalises itself, and is applied to weapons, shields, garments, vases, utensils. From the polished stone age onward we find a whole arsenal of ornament. In caverns and tumuli of a date anterior to the use of metals we find necklaces, bracelets, pins, and rings of pleasing shapes. There exist numerous and correct representations of various animals drawn or carved at a time when the reindeer was still living in Central Europe.

We may pass over architecture, an art which was useful from the first, and of which I have already spoken. It might, if necessary, be classed as an extension of clothing. Let us only note that, as far back as the epoch of the lake-dwellings, we observe the taste for symmetry; it is natural and innate, and probably derived from an organic source in the arrangement of the human body, the two halves of which exactly resemble one another.

The poetry of the earliest ages is as yet undifferentiated; being at once epic, dramatic, and lyric. The generic division was established later on, but all are characterised by the common trait of being exclusively human, being concerned with man, with human actions and human feelings only. Nature is absent, or nearly so, from the Iliad, the Nibelungenlied, the Song of Roland, etc. The poet is moved only by those whom Nietzsche calls Uebermenschen, gods or deified men, kings, heroes; and it is only gradually that art descends to the middle classes or the populace, to the humblest representatives of humanity.

We need not discuss the origin of music, which has given rise to various hypotheses; but we find it associated with dancing, at first in vocal form, i.e., translating human emotions by means of the human organ. Very soon it objectivises itself in instruments of percussion, extremely rough, but sufficient to mark time or rhythm accurately, and also to produce a certain physical exaltation of the senses. Then comes the imitation of the human voice by means of the flute, and other wind or stringed instruments; and the ever-growing desire to give utterance by means of music to the most delicate shades of emotion has brought into existence instruments of increasing flexibility, number, and complexity, from the invention of the organ (in the Alexandrian age) up to our own day when instrumentation plays the preponderant part.

At an early stage the æsthetic activity was exerted to bring animals into its domain, especially the domestic animals, companions or servants of man, as is proved by the paintings or sculptures of India, Egypt, Assyria. The horses of warriors became characters in heroic poems; so do the dog of Ulysses and that of the Pandavas in the Hindu epic. They take their place in art by reason of their moral virtues—bravery, fidelity, etc.

At last we come to the stage where the æsthetic feeling is quite dehumanised; it is no longer attached to men or animals, but to the vegetable and inorganic world: it is the appearance of the “feeling for nature.” Its late appearance is a recognised fact, and I think it needless to accumulate citations in proof. In primitive poetry, as we have just said, man occupies the foreground; nature is only an accessory. Very little description suffices in the beginning—a few lines, or a few epithets merely. Even at a later date, the Greeks, says Schiller, “artistic as they were, and blessed with so genial a climate, have some accuracy in the description of a landscape, but only as they might describe a weapon, a shield, or a garment. Nature appears to have interested their understanding rather than their feelings.” The Greco-Roman period became conscious of some artistic communion with nature only in the so-called decadent epoch—i.e., that of advanced civilisation (Euripides, the Alexandrians, the Augustan age, and especially the age of Hadrian). Landscape painting seems to have been almost unknown among the ancients. Humboldt, in his Cosmos, points out that, in the long catalogue left to us by Philostratus of the pictures of his time, we find, quite by way of exception, the description of a volcano. In the time of the Roman Empire mural paintings became a fashion, but they depicted only a tame and cultivated nature.

Without insisting on well-known facts, we may say that the æsthetic conquest of nature has passed through two very definite stages. During the first, art reproduces a smiling, cultivated, fertile nature, close to man, fashioned by him, bent to his needs, humanised. Such are the Pompeian paintings, and those found in the villas of the Roman Campagna or the shore of Pozzuoli. During the second, the taste for primitive, wild, untamed nature is developed, for the stormy sea, the boundless deserts, glaciers, inaccessible peaks. The taste for scenery of an abrupt or violent character only dates, it is said, from the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; certainly, in the eyes of the ancients, and for centuries afterwards, such scenery consisted merely of horrible spectacles, to be avoided if possible. The Romans, who so often passed through Switzerland, found no beauty there; and it will be remembered that Cæsar, when crossing the Alps, composed a treatise on grammar to beguile the tedium of the journey. Even in modern times the revelation of tropical countries and their terrible grandeur has had but a tardy effect on poetry and art. In the present age, an immense majority of people feel only repelled by the wildness of nature. It is, therefore, only for the pleasure of the minority and within the last century that the relative positions have been inverted; the human dramatis personæ becoming accessories, and nature furnishing the main subject of the picture.

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Footnote 217:

Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 144.

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This lateness in the appearance of the feeling for nature has been accounted for in a variety of contradictory ways. Some consider that this feeling is awakened by contrast; the satiety of civilisation and disgust at its refinements drive man from it, at least in imagination, and lead him to seek another ideal elsewhere. Others (Schneider, Sergi) appeal to ancestral influences; primitive man feared nature more than he enjoyed her charms (as is still the case with peasants and children), wild nature, especially, inspiring him with a superstitious terror, and being, as he believed, full of maleficent spirits. This terror lasted for a long time, even after the conception of the world had been changed by the increased knowledge of physical phenomena, like an echo from ancient times. Grant Allen points out that facility of communication implies an advanced state of civilisation; however practical the explanation may appear, it is not without value; the traveller who has to make his way across unexplored glaciers, or through virgin forest, is engaged in unceasing effort and struggle for mere life, which is incompatible with the disinterested character of æsthetic contemplation. One needs a certain security to be able to admire.

These explanations seem to me only partial. The true psychological reason lies in the natural extension of sympathy. We have elsewhere seen that it implies two principal conditions: an emotional temperament and a comprehensive power of representation. These conditions are most likely to be met with in a highly civilised generation, whose sensibilities are exceedingly acute and subtle, and their faculty of comprehension greatly extended.

The conquest of nature by intellect and emotion takes place through a process identical in both cases. There is an ascending movement of the intellect, which, by way of abstraction and generalisation, goes on to seek resemblances less and less obvious, and increasingly difficult to grasp. Certain races stop at the lowest stages: some ages never pass beyond a certain average of knowledge—e.g., the first centuries of the Middle Ages. In the same way, there is a progressive movement of feeling towards analogies in nature of ever greater tenuity, and the same remark applies to races and epochs.

It has been said that the pantheistic tendencies peculiar to certain peoples, such as those of India, are favourable to a more rapid development of the feeling for nature. This is, in fact, the thesis of sympathy under another form, since the assumed community of nature among all beings involves a community of feeling.

Let us note, in conclusion, that this extension of the æsthetic feeling to inanimate nature is produced by a process analogous to that which explains the genesis of benevolence. The pleasures and pains belong to us, but we attach them to the objects which occasion them; what we call the soul of things is our own soul projected outside ourselves and imparted to the things which have been associated with our feelings.

By a few facts, chosen out of a vast number at our disposal, I have tried to show that the æsthetic feeling has progressed by evolution from the social form to that of individualism, and from man to nature. This mode of objective exposition has seemed to me preferable, because it allows us to seize in a concrete and verifiable shape the law of its development and increase in complexity.

III.

It is usual to include under the same heading as the æsthetic sentiment two other emotions, that of the sublime and that of the comic, though I can only perceive a somewhat vague analogy and partial affinities between them. We shall attempt to see wherein these three states approximate to and differ from one another.

"The feeling of sublimity is that peculiar emotion which is excited by the presentation or ideal suggestion of vastness, whether in space or time (Kant’s ‘mathematical’ sublime), or physical or moral power (Kant’s ‘dynamical’ sublime)." The distinction generally drawn between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime appears to me quite secondary, as the two cases reduce themselves to the idea of a force in action. Current opinion asserts that the emotion of the sublime is simpler than the æsthetic emotion properly so called. If we understand by this that the latter is richer in its development, much more complex, much more varied in aspect, comprehending the pretty, the graceful, the purely beautiful, the pathetic, etc., the opinion cannot be disputed; but if we mean that the sense of sublimity is simpler as regards its origin, we cannot admit it. I have already given the emotion of the sublime as an example of a binary combination (Part II., Chap. VII.) formed by synthesis of (a) a painful feeling of oppression, dejection, lowered vitality, reducible to one primary emotion—fear; (b) the consciousness of a rush, of violent energy in action, of a heightening of vitality, reducible to one primary emotion—the sense of personal power, “self-feeling” under its positive form. Moreover, one negative condition is necessary: the conscious or unconscious feeling of our security in the presence of some formidable power. Without this last all æsthetic feeling disappears.

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Footnote 218:

Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 146.

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The sentiment of the sublime loses the egoism which lies at its root by extending, through sympathy, to men and things. In participating, through the imagination, in the grandeur of a real or fictitious personage,—the Napoleon of history, the Moses of Michael Angelo, the Satan of Milton,—the ego is objectivised and alienated. It is the history of this development that we must now follow.

“Human might,” says Bain, “is the true and literal sublime, and the point of departure for the sublimity of other things.” This is, in fact, the starting-point. Grant Allen has brilliantly illustrated this view, by trying to demonstrate that the feeling of the sublime has been evolved from a narrow anthropomorphism—the admiration for man’s physical strength—towards the sublimity of moral and intellectual qualities, and that of mass and time in nature. This conception deserves to be given in a condensed form, though it is somewhat of an outline, and not without lacunæ: neither is it certain, whatever this writer may say, that the terror with which man was inspired by natural phenomena did not show itself at a very early period, in a form approaching to the emotion of sublimity.

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Footnote 219:

Mind, October 1878.

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According to Grant Allen, the earliest object of human admiration—i.e., of a feeling of respect mingled with fear—is the strong man, the invincible warrior, whom none can resist. This feeling shows itself even among the higher animals, with regard to each other, and still more unmistakably among children: they admire physical strength. In the course of social progress, the chief or despotic king, with power of life and death over all, becomes the incarnation of power—the sublime object—and so the feeling is specialised. After his death, it is believed that his surviving “double,” or ghost, is invested with the same, or even greater privileges. Thus the feeling hitherto enclosed within the world of experience is transferred to a supersensuous region.

The author might have shown that, at this stage of evolution, the idea of an intellectual power, proved by superior knowledge and foresight, and that of a great moral power, proved by courage and energy in effort, must have inspired the same feeling.

As, at this period, everything in nature is conceived as alive, man has necessarily assimilated natural forces to human power: as with thunderstorms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Looking at mountains, he seems to see a superhuman power which has raised them. Finally, the movement of thought, continually going on, leads to the idea of a paramount or sole deity, considered as absolute and unlimited power, and the maker of all.

As for the sublimity of mass, it was probably first felt in presence of great monuments, temples, palaces, pyramids, tombs, constructed by the pride of kings, and suggesting the idea of their vast power and the enormous amount of human strength expended. As for sublimity in the immensity of time, it is not attached to the conception of empty and abstract time: it moves us because it appears to us as peopled by a myriad of past or possible events, of activities succeeding each other with unfailing prodigality.

Thus all these cases are reduced to an overwhelming force, conceived by analogy and felt by sympathy. Taking this evolution in its main lines, it has passed through two principal periods, one of predominant terror, which is not and cannot be æsthetic, and one of predominant admiration and sympathy, where the consciousness of personal safety gives the feeling a disinterested character: here emotion has become æsthetic. It is probable, says Sully, that this feeling passed from a disagreeable into an agreeable one, and became æsthetic “through the elimination of the gross element of personal fear.”

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Footnote 220:

The Human Mind, ii. p. 148.

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Attempts have been made to reduce the emotion of the sublime to a contrast; it rests rather on a harmony, a synthesis of contradictories (in the Hegelian sense); it is a case of combination, as we have tried to show in another part of this work. It is neither fear nor pride (consciousness of strength) felt directly or by sympathy, but a product of their coexistence in consciousness, and their fusion in a special state which can never be completely dissociated by analysis. In short, it is far more closely related to the two primary feelings already named than to the æsthetic feeling, to which it approximates, not by nature, but by accident.

Footnote 221:

Æsthetic activity is that form of play which uses images as its creative materials. It is generally admitted that visual and auditory perceptions or representations are the only ones which provoke æsthetic emotion; yet Guyau (followed perhaps by others) has maintained that we must attribute this power to all external sensations, without exception (Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine, chap. vi.), heat, cold, contacts, tastes, and odours; but the facts he enumerates are in most cases referable to association, especially where odours are concerned. The so-called lower sensations do not act directly, they only revive the representations of sight and hearing. A delicious coolness, a soft contact, an intoxicating odour produce an agreeable state—i.e., a physical pleasure, and nothing more, if there is no association. Besides, without entering into an idle and hair-splitting discussion, it is sufficient to observe that, as a matter of fact, there exists no art, in the æsthetic sense, based on any other sensations than those of sight and hearing, unless we are to look on perfumery and cookery as such.

Why is this privilege exclusively confined to two species of sensations? Various reasons have been given: because they are more remote from the life-serving functions with which the sensations of touch, taste, and smell are closely connected (II. Spencer); or because their pleasures and pains have, in general, a moderate character, and their special nerves are rarely subjected to a violent shock (Gurney); or, according to Grant Allen, because the nerves of the lower senses are excited in mass, and those of the higher by isolated fibres (? ?). It appears to me that one of the principal reasons has been forgotten. If we refer back to the inquiries detailed in Chap. IX. (Part I.) as to the olfactory and gustatory images, we shall see that they have their own peculiar characters. For visual and auditory images, revival and association are easy, whether simultaneously, in groups, or successively, in series. For images of smell and taste, it is quite the contrary; their revivability is feeble or nil, their power of association with each other nil. (The tactile-motor images form an intermediate group, but nearer to the lower senses.) These psychological conditions render them quite unsuitable for a place in a constructive scheme. Called up with great difficulty by the memory, incapable of being grouped, either in simultaneities or in series, they can supply neither an art in rest nor an art in movement.

IV.

It is also through an abuse of language that the emotional state designated by the various names of a sense of the laughable, of the ridiculous, of the comic, is considered as a department of æsthetic emotion, for no other reason, as it seems, than because the comic enters into all the arts and produces a disinterested pleasure. Its domain, however, extends far beyond this. It has been closely studied in the general and special works of Darwin, Piderit, Spencer, L. Dumont, Hecker, Kräpelin, and others; and I do not propose to dwell on it at length, having very little to offer in the way of personal opinion on the subject. Yet this manifestation of the affective life, with its peculiar mode of expression, laughter, cannot be omitted from a complete treatise on the feelings.

This subject presents two aspects, one internal, subjective, psychological, the other external, objective, physiological. The latter presents no difficulties, being susceptible of an exact description; but to connect it with an internal cause, to say why one laughs, is a very difficult problem, which has been solved in various manners. In my opinion the error lies in thinking that laughter has a cause. It has very distinct causes which, seemingly, can be reduced no further, or, at least, their unity has not hitherto been discovered. If we were to recount only a few of the numerous definitions of laughter current in books, we should find none that was not in some way open to criticism, because there is none which embraces the question in all its manifold aspects. Thus L. Dumont, in a special work on Laughter, says, “It is an assemblage of muscular movements, corresponding to a feeling of pleasure.” Is the laughter caused by tickling, by cold, or by the ingestion of certain substances, the hysteric laughter alternating with tears, the nervous laughter of soldiers in action, after the moment of danger is over—are all these to be put down to the account of pleasure? Even if we class these and analogous facts by themselves, as purely reflex actions, there still remain difficulties.

1. Considered from the purely psychological point of view, the mental state which shows itself in laughter consists, according to some, in the consciousness of incongruity, of a certain kind of contradiction; according to others, in a consciousness of superiority in relation to men and things on the part of the laugher.

The first view seems to number most adherents. It assumes as a fundamental fact the grasping of a contrast between two perceptions, images, or ideas. Yet all contradictory contrasts do not make us laugh; if they are to do so, they must fulfil certain conditions. In the first place, the two contradictory elements must be given simultaneously as belonging to the same object, so as to induce us to think that a thing both is and is not at the same time. A monkey makes us laugh, because he reminds us of, but is not, a man; he makes us laugh still more if dressed in human clothes, because the contradiction is more striking. Next, the two states of consciousness must be very nearly of the same mass and intensity—a broken-down old man carrying a heavy burden does not make us laugh. “The two contradictory forces brought into play in laughter, being unable to attain to the unity of a conception, are forced to escape outwards by an expenditure of muscular energy” (L. Dumont).

The second theory, first formulated by Hobbes, but perhaps of still earlier date, is as follows: “The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others or with our own formerly.” The partisans of this view have severely criticised the theory of incongruity, or discordance in things. “An instrument out of tune, a fly in ointment, snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege; ... everything of the nature of disorder; ... and whatever is unnatural; the entire catalogue of the vanities given by Solomon—are all incongruous, but they cause feelings of pain, anger, sadness, loathing, rather than mirth.” This view is quite as open to criticism as the preceding; and we might enumerate a long list of cases where the feeling of superiority, whether justifiable or not, does not make us laugh. In my opinion, both views ought to be admitted, as being partially true, and meeting distinct cases.

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Footnote 222:

Hobbes, Human Nature (2nd ed.), 1650.

Footnote 223:

Bain, The Emotions, p. 257.

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The second theory is suited to the primitive and lower form of that emotional state which shows itself in laughter. In the case before us, this state is directly derived from the sense of strength or power, or, as Hobbes calls it, glory; the contradictory contrast, if perceived at all, is in the background. The coarsest and most brutal, almost physiological, expression of this mental state, is the laugh of the savage after a victory, when treading his vanquished enemy under foot.

“It appears to be fairly certain, not only that laughter is a concomitant of brutality and cruelty among uncivilised races, and children, but that even in the cases of the more refined and benevolent, it is apt to accompany the recognition of any slight loss of dignity in another, when this loss does not evoke other and painful feelings.” It is a matter of common observation, that many people have a tendency immediately to burst out laughing at any accident, even if serious, happening to others; and this instinctive laughter certainly does not spring from the good side of human nature. It is clear that, under this form, laughter has nothing to do with æsthetics.

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Footnote 224:

Sully, Sensation and Intuition, p. 262; The Human Mind, i. p. 148.

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The theory of discord suits well with the secondary and superior forms: the feeling of superiority becomes effaced and passes into the background. It is an intellectualised manifestation, which has or may have an æsthetic value, the mental development permitting those fugitive and subtle contradictions which constitute the principal element of the comic to be caught on the wing. It takes on an almost disinterested character, though never, perhaps, completely losing its original blemish.

Finally, laughter may take a still more elevated form in the humorous spirit we have already mentioned (Part II., Chap V., 3), in which the feeling of superiority is mitigated by a large proportion of sympathy.

2. The nature of laughter would be very incompletely known were we to confine ourselves to pure psychology, but the physiological study of this phenomenon has not been neglected. The description will be found in special works on the expression of the emotions, especially in Darwin (chap. viii.). Laughter is a strengthened expiratory movement; when prolonged, the excess of the expirations over the inspirations necessitates deep sighs in order to restore the equilibrium; there is a drawing back and raising of the corners of the mouth, the eyes become brighter through the quickening of the circulation. According to Darwin, the uninterrupted gradation from violent laughter (which in all human races is accompanied by tears) to moderate laughter, a broad smile and a gentle smile, proves their common nature; but is laughter the complete development of the smile, or the smile a modified form of the noisy laughter of the first period? Evolutionists are, in general, inclined to consider noisy laughter as the primary form, connected with the brutal sense of superiority. Yet the early appearance of the smile in infants, at about two months, while laughter is not observed, as a rule, till the fourth month, seems, on this theory, to contradict the principle that the evolution of the individual reproduces, in an abridged and accelerated form, the evolutionary process of the species. On the other hand, animals do not give us any information on this point. Certain monkeys smile or laugh—i.e., the corners of the mouth are drawn back, their eyes become brilliant, and they emit a certain sound approximating to a chuckle (Darwin, Wallace, Mantegazza, etc.).

But the important point is to know why this collection of physiological facts is connected with certain mental dispositions. If laughter were the constant and exclusive expression of joy and pleasure, the answer would be easy; as in addition to this it is sometimes morbid, sometimes futile and simply physiological, the explanation ought to be framed to include all these cases.

Herbert Spencer has proposed one, which, though published some time ago (1863), still remains one of the most satisfactory. In his view laughter is due to a sudden diversion of nervous energy into a new path—an overflow-channel. The excitation of the nervous system existing at any given moment, especially if intense, can only be expended in three ways—either by transmission to some other part of the cerebro-spinal organism, exciting other feelings or thoughts; or by acting on the viscera, the heart, lungs, and digestive organs; or else by producing muscular movements; and, as the nervous discharge, especially if moderate, follows the line of least resistance, and the most easily moved muscles are the first to be shaken, it acts on the vocal organs, on the mouth, and on the face. Laughter is connected with this last line of action.

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Footnote 225:

“Physiology of Laughter,” Essays, vol. i. (1883) pp. 194 et seq.

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It may result from purely physical excitants: tickling, cold, toxic action, sudden relaxation after a long period of constraint.

It may be connected with representations—i.e., have a psychical cause. Spencer admits the theory of incongruity, and defines it more precisely. He distinguishes the ascending incongruity, which goes from the less to the greater, and the descending incongruity between the greater and the less. The latter alone provokes laughter. There must be a sudden transition from one intense state of consciousness to one which is much less intense, while forming a complete contrast to it. Thus, while we are listening to a symphony, a sneeze on the part of one of the spectators may make us laugh. During a reconciliation scene, on the stage, between two lovers, after a long estrangement, a goat begins to bleat, and so introduces a comic element. The heightened attention of the first moment is suddenly transferred to a trifling incident which does not supply it with sufficient matter on which to expend itself; the surplus has to find an outlet, and this produces laughter.

The excess of emotion, when it does not give a shock to the whole frame, and is not the result of a contrast, takes another direction—e.g., the automatic actions of certain barristers or other public speakers, of the embarrassed schoolboy twisting his pen between his fingers, etc.

Hecker, in a special work, propounds another hypothesis. He connects everything with a typical fact—tickling, which explains the laughter arising from physical, and that arising from mental causes.

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Footnote 226:

Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen (1873). For criticisms, see Léon Dumont, Theorie scientifique de la sensibilité, p. 211; Piderit, Mimik, pp. 138 et seq.

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In tickling, there is, first, the effect produced by each cutaneous sensation: excitement of the vaso-motor and the great sympathetic nerves, dilatation of the pupil, brightness of the eyes, constriction of the vessels, as may be verified experimentally in the application of a mustard plaster or a sudden effusion of hot water. There is another necessary condition: intermittence; for tickling, there must be change in the rate or direction of the movements, or interruption.

The expiration corresponds to the moment of contact, the expiration to that of interruption; in the first case the diaphragm is raised, in the second lowered. To sum up, tickling is an intermittent excitation of the skin producing an intermittent excitement of the vaso-motor nerves and the respiration, and an alternation of pleasurable and uncomfortable states. But what is the use of laughter in this occurrence? Its function is protective, it compensates for the diminished pressure of the blood on the brain; the frequent expirations which compress the thorax, and consequently the heart, the larger vessels and the lungs, prevent the blood-vessels from emptying themselves.

As to intellectually-caused laughter, Hecker, who borrows his psychology from the æsthetician Fischer, and seems to fuse together the two theories of contrast and superiority, traces all manifestations of this kind to the comic. Now, in the comic there are two simultaneous states: one, pleasurable, the sense of our own superiority; the other unpleasant, the contradiction in the object. Hence a rapid alternation of pleasure and pain. The comic is an intermittent impression, which acts like tickling; it is a psychical titillation which, like the other, shows itself in laughter, and for the same cause. Such is Hecker’s theory in its main outlines.

In conclusion, laughter manifests itself in circumstances so numerous and heterogeneous—physical sensations, joy, contrast, surprise, oddity, strangeness, baseness, etc.—that the reduction of all these causes to a single one is very problematical. In spite of all the work devoted to so trivial a matter, the question is far from being completely elucidated.

The pathology of the æsthetic sentiment would require a work to itself. We must here confine ourselves to some remarks on the most general physiological conditions producing it, and on the natural causes nearly always at work to produce deviation.

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Footnote 227:

The only attempt in this direction I am acquainted with is Nordau’s book, Degeneration (Entartung), which is limited to the present day, and, moreover, treats of other questions as well.

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Can the faculty of artistic feeling be absolutely wanting? Are there cases of complete insensibility to every artistic manifestation, however humble? I do not think it in any wise rash to affirm this. A priori since the existence of moral blindness and religious indifference is certain, it is improbable that a superfluous emotion should have, in all men without exception, an indelible character. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to supply the proof; the insensibility passes unnoticed, having no injurious consequences to the individual or to society. However, partial cases, at least, may be observed. Total insensibility to music is not rare, and if this is a known fact, it is because it is the most easily verified. Many people declare that the reading or hearing of poetry bores and wearies them to an extreme degree, and they cannot understand why poets take so much trouble, when it would be so much easier to express themselves in prose.

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Footnote 228:

There is, with regard to this point, a very complete observation of Grant Allen’s (“Note Deafness,” in Mind, iii. 1878). The subject, a young man of great intellectual cultivation, had studied music during his childhood without result. It was discovered, later on, that he was incapable of distinguishing one note from another, except at intervals which were sometimes as much as an octave, or even more. He was quite unconscious of harmonies and discords, or the timbre of instruments. The distinctive features of the latter were, for him, only clearly perceived noises of different kinds—a sound of wire-work for the piano, a scraping for the violin, a puff of air for the organ. He was very sensitive to the rhythm of poetry. It is not known whether anomalies of this kind originate in Corti’s organs or in the cerebral centres.

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Leaving these extreme cases in order to consider pathology proper, we may first ask ourselves whether we really have here a subject for study, or whether we are pursuing a mere chimera. The question is not here put quite in the same form as elsewhere. Pathology signifies disorder, deviation, anomaly; now, in æsthetic activity, where is the rule? It has often been repeated that the essence of art is absolute liberty. I see no objection to this statement; art has its end in itself, and is subject to no other requirement than that of creating works able to live, accepted by contemporaries, and, if possible, by posterity also. By what method, then, can we decide that any given æsthetic manifestation is normal or abnormal? Such a decision can be merely arbitrary. We have not even the resource of saying that everything belonging to beauty is healthy, and everything belonging to ugliness unhealthy; for—not to mention that the line of demarcation between the two is frequently very vague—the ugly is admitted into all the arts by way of ingredient or foil, and one author (Rosenkranz) has even written on the “Æsthetics of the Ugly.” I see only one way of escaping from the difficulty, viz., transposing the subject, studying, not the pathology of the æsthetic feeling itself, but that of the source whence it emanates; in other words, considering it merely as a symptom. This requires some explanation.

Every failure of harmony between the tendencies which constitute a healthy human being shows itself in a disturbance of equilibrium, an anomaly in the affective life. This deviation from normal life may be considered under two aspects: one general, the other special; one human, the other professional.

If we consider it under its general form—i.e., as simply inherent in the human constitution—the want of equilibrium expresses itself in many ways, following different directions according to temperament, character, and circumstances, such as melancholia, phobias, sexual aberrations, irresistible impulses, etc.

If we consider it under its special, particular form, as peculiar to a given individual carrying on a given occupation and having given habits of life—an artisan, a labourer, a tradesman, a lawyer, a physician, etc.—the disturbed balance will appear to us as setting its mark on the individual’s professional activity and its products. The artisan will pass from a fury of work to excesses of idleness or drink; the merchant from exaggerated caution to a reckless daring in his enterprises; and the same in every trade or profession. Now art is a profession like any other, and the artistic product must bear the mark of the craftsman—a mark of disequilibrium in the present case. Consequently the anomalies of the æsthetic sentiment may be studied by comparison, not with an imaginary norm, not with any alleged regulative principles of art with which we are unacquainted, but with a psychological criterion; they may be studied as the effects and the revelation of a morbid diathesis. To speak more simply, we have to deal, not with æsthetics, but with psycho-pathology in connection with æsthetics.

Even thus transposed, the subject still presents inevitable difficulties, the principal being as follows. With regard to the psycho-physiological constitution of the creative artist, there are two theories. (We must not forget that, in the amateur, or mere taster of works of art, the same psychological conditions are required, though in a less degree, being more strongly accentuated in proportion as he feels more acutely.)

One of these theories, set forth in many well-known works, maintains that æsthetic superiority is incompatible with health of mind and body. The facts in support of it have often been very uncritically collected, and among the characters mentioned as typical we find all sorts. Among creative artists there are vigorous men and puny ones, tall and short, handsome and deformed, weak-willed and enterprising, slowly-developed and precocious, misanthropists and men of pleasure, the morose and the cheerful. In short, we can only conclude, at most, that they have a tendency to depart from the average—whether to rise above it or fall below it.

According to the other theory, all this is secondary, accessory, physical and psychical defects being by no means a necessary condition of genius. It grows equally well on a sound stem or a rotten one; it bears the marks of its origin, but this is quite a matter of accident. There are also facts in support of this view, though it must be acknowledged that they are less numerous than those on the other side.

We may also generalise the question, and ask whether æsthetic activity is not always a deviation. Nordau has maintained the affirmative: “Art is the slight beginning of a deviation from complete health.” Thus presented, the question is equivocal. If we understand by mental health the ataraxia of the ancient philosophers, it is clear that creative and even æsthetic enjoyments are incompatible with it. To demand that we shall create or enjoy without excitement, remaining all the time in the level, prosaic calm of every-day life, is to expect the impossible. On this showing we might say as much of any emotion whatever and allege it to be a deviation from health. Some intellectualists, Kant among others, have ventured to make this claim, which is as much as to say that man is, by nature, an exclusively reasonable being—so enormous a psychological error that we need not discuss it. Besides, even supposing this to be the ideal, the mission of psychology is not to study an ideal man, but the real one.

After this somewhat lengthy preamble, rendered necessary by the ambiguity of our subject, let us investigate the part played by the two essential factors, emotion and imagination, when their activity is pathological, and in clearly-defined cases.

I. The necessity for vividness and sincerity of feeling in the artist is so obvious that I need not insist on it. This disposition, however, is not in all cases identical. Acute emotion may be intermittent, appearing only at moments of inspiration and creation, and then, the crisis over, disappearing to let the emotional life take its normal course. This is the characteristic of healthy genius or talent, which, descending from the heights, returns and adapts itself to the groove of ordinary life. A more frequent case, if we may judge by biographical documents, especially as we approach our own day, is the state of permanent excitement or hyper-excitability. Artists and dilettanti are exceedingly delicate instruments vibrating continually to every sound. Here our triple criterion of pathological activity comes again into use: we find (apparent) disproportion between cause and effect, violent and prolonged shock to the system, chronicity. This physiological state is one of continual loss; not a combustion, but a series of explosions; not a life, but a fever. Hence the craving for artificial excitement so frequent in emotional natures of this kind; they seek it under all its forms, and the remedy aggravates the evil. It is needless to multiply examples, we need only recall the great contingent of melancholiacs, hypochondriacs, alcoholics—persons subject to hallucinations, insane, or merely déséquilibrés—furnished by artists or passionate lovers of art. Besides these general characteristics, we may note as particular pathological symptoms of æsthetic emotion:

1. An obstinate tendency to pessimism—the persistent and exclusive taste for gloom in art predominating in certain epochs of history, especially in our own. Its contagion is not sufficiently explained by imitation and fashion; it springs from deeper causes—from a general state of depression, enervation, and debility. Art is the expression of this secret uneasiness, both among those who create and those who enjoy. This pessimism is not a disease of art, but of the individual and the age, which can bring forth no other fruit. We know that the nature of the ground modifies the flowers of plants and gives to their fruits a peculiar taste—the flavour of the soil; the human soil is subject to the same necessity, and at certain stages of civilisation it can produce nothing save a melancholy crop of flowers with strange and acrid odour. The constant love and complacent enjoyment of the mournful and morbid, of all connected with death, is the æsthetic form of the luxury of pain which I have already (Part I., chap. iv.) tried to analyse, and to determine its pathological causes.

2. The tendency to megalomania under the form of pride, and still more of excessive vanity. The remark on the genus irritabile vatum is of old date; but at various epochs the insanity of greatness has raged like an epidemic in the domain of art. It has found its supreme expression in this century in the doctrine of “the divinity of art” proclaimed by the school of Schelling, and surviving among contemporary “æsthetes.” “The beginning of all poetry,” said Schlegel, “is to suspend the march and the laws of reason, to plunge us once more into the beautiful maze of fantasy, the primitive chaos of human nature. The good pleasure of the poet suffers no law above him.” We have gone still farther since then, and an interesting collection might be made of the folly written on this subject. When, sincerely and without prepossessions, we ask ourselves what are the grounds of these high pretensions, of this apotheosis, they are not very evident. Is it because art yields enjoyments far superior to those of the senses? But scientific research, and the love of travelling and exploration, do the same thing. Is it because of its creative function? But we find creation everywhere—in science, mechanic art, politics, commerce, industry: artistic creation is only one form among many others. Is it because it adds an ideal world to the real? Religions do as much, with the advantage that they do not work for the few, the elect, but for the whole world. Malherbe used to say that a good poet is no more useful to the State than a good skittle-player. This is an extreme statement on the other side, for the poet, after all, has a social value; he can foresee, instruct, express the confused feelings of the mass of human beings who arrive through him at the consciousness of life.

If, accepting this form of megalomania as a fact, without discussing its legitimacy, we seek for its psychological causes, we shall find two principal ones.

The first is in the character of the individual, the hypertrophy of his ego. The self-feeling breaks out under an æsthetic mask, as it might do under any other. “Egotist” art is the sincerest expression of this impulse of pride (be it noted in passing that it is the very antipodes of primitive art, which is collective, social, anonymous); but it is an ephemeral form destined to die of inanition. Besides, its expansive force would be, if necessary, limited by the expansion of rival individualities. The production of monsters is a necessity of civilisation. By means of the division of labour, it imposes, in all positions and occupations, an excess of unilateral development, of tendency towards a single aim; it requires specialisation. In primitive times, art was not a profession; the artist, while all the time going on with other work, produced naturally, spontaneously, as a rose-tree gives its roses; it was a superabundance of mental activity which thus found vent. Gradually he fell into the professional track, and now, a victim to his own glory, he is forced to produce, nolens volens, as he can, consciously fabricating works of art as others do articles of commerce, reckless of over-production. It is a hypertrophy of the creative function.

The second cause must be sought in a deeper region than that of consciousness, in that unconscious part of us (whatever opinion may be entertained as to its nature) which produces what is vulgarly called inspiration. This state is a positive fact accompanied by physical and psychical characteristics peculiar to itself. First and foremost, it is impersonal and involuntary; it acts like an instinct, when and as it pleases, it may be solicited but not compelled. Neither reflection nor will can supply the place of original creation. We have numerous anecdotes relating to the habits of poets, painters, and musicians when composing: striding up and down, lying in bed, seeking complete darkness or full daylight, keeping the feet in water or ice, and the head in the sun, the use of wine, of alcohol, of aromatic drinks, of haschisch or other poisons acting on the intellect. Apart from some oddities not easy to explain, all these proceedings have the same object—viz., to bring about a particular physiological condition, and increase the cerebral circulation in order to provoke or maintain the unconscious activity. The ancients saw in inspiration a supernatural state, a divine action, a possession in which they firmly believed. Certainly, we now look on the Muses, and the various mythological gods of music and poetry, merely as superannuated fictions; yet there remains an impression of mystery, of a superior power, of a rare inborn gift bestowed on a man, which is his special privilege, which acts through him and is unknown to others, something analogous to what we have already met with in the case of theomania. From the vague consciousness of this state of election, this exceptional favour on the part of nature, it is for the artist an easy step to the affirmation of his greatness.

II. The pathology of the creative imagination does not belong to our subject; it is only connected with it through the influence of feeling on its operations. The power of constructing an imaginary world is a human attribute of which no one is devoid, since without it we could never take one step out of the present into the future and form for ourselves an image, however inadequate, of the latter. Observation shows that, from this universal level upward, there are all gradations, from the dry, clear, coherent imagination to incoherent, impalpable reverie and disordered exuberance: now, the increasing predominance of the imagination involves the danger of living entirely in the world of the unreal, which frequently happens. Biographical documents permit us to note the stages in this ascent towards the suprasensible.

There are artists who divide their lives into two parts and keep them distinct; they keep their accounts in double entry; they have their hours of unbridled imagination, and their hours of practical good sense. Ariosto was one of these; it was said of him that he had put his folly into his books and his wisdom into his life.

Others are, for the moment, caught by their own creations, and so violently carried away by them that they are near the state of hallucination. According to the constitution of their minds, they either see their characters or hear them speak; the sounds are in their ears, they breathe odours, taste flavours. On this last point, Flaubert’s declaration, reported by Taine has been doubted, but without sufficient reason.

There are some who appear to be in an almost continuous state of hallucination. Such seems to have been the case of Torquato Tasso. “At certain moments,” Gérard de Nerval used to say, “everything would assume a new aspect to me: secret voices rose from plants, trees, animals, to warn and encourage me. Formless and lifeless objects had mysterious ways, whose meaning I understood.” The “symbolists” of various countries—French, Belgian, English—are now telling us the same thing with more to the like effect. I do not think, however, that we can be deceived by them. They are returning, through a sharpened and refined sympathy, to the primitive period of naïf animism, in which everything in nature has life, sight and voice, in which, as one of them says, the real world assumes the air of fairyland.

Beyond this there is only one step, that of complete and permanent hallucination, such as is to be found in lunatic asylums; the total substitution of an imaginary world for the real, without intermission, doubt, or consciousness of unreality.

This is the clearest part of the subject, but there is one obscure point which must detain us, the more that it is connected with the fundamental phenomenon of emotional life: tendency. If there is one psychological law more firmly established than another, both by facts and argument, it is that every intense representation of an act tends to realise itself; which is inevitable, since the vivid image of a movement is the beginning of a movement—a revival of motor elements included in the image. A man who, standing on the top of a tower, is fascinated by the idea of a possible fall, runs the risk of throwing himself over; the attraction of the abyss is nothing else but this. On the other hand, artists naturally have intense representations and feel things violently; they dream of orgies, love adventures, sanguinary dramas, self-devotion, virtues and vices of all sorts. How comes it that all this is merely imagined, and never passes into action, or becomes a reality?

It is because in their case the law is subject, not to an exception, but to a deviation. The intense representation must be objectivised—i.e., from being internal become external, and it may arrive at this result in two ways: by a real action, as in the case of ordinary people, or by the creation of a work of art which delivers one from the haunting idea: this is the peculiarity of artists. If, besides this, a physiological reason is required, it might be admitted, merely as a hypothesis, that in these cases the motor centres have not, usually, sufficient energy for practical realisation, whence it comes that their satisfaction is a purely æsthetic one.

To keep strictly to our subject, we have a large body of testimony to show that many have only been delivered from their haunting ideas by creative production, as I have already mentioned when treating of memory. It is fixed in a poem, a novel, a drama, a symphony, on the earth, or in stone; we may remember Michelangelo and the sculptures of the Medici chapel, Schiller’s early manner and the “Robbers.” Is not Byron, whose psychological state has been so well analysed by Taine (born for action and adventure, returning, perhaps, to his true vocation when he went to die at Missolonghi), the poet of pirates, of strange and doubtful enterprises? The reader will think it needless for me to enumerate further instances.

This rule, however, is not without exceptions. The law which requires that the intense image shall be actualised is always satisfied; but sometimes this happens in two ways, artistically and practically, at once. Many have lived out their dreams of love, orgies, adventures, violence, and have produced a work of art besides; a double stream has flowed from the same source. Some of the romantic school have revived the aspect of past ages in their houses, their furniture, their lives. Artistic sovereigns have been able to realise their imaginations to the full: Nero, Hadrian, Ludwig II. of Bavaria, and others.

An Italian anthropologist, Ferrero, has pointed out, with some justice, that, in spite of our complaints of the pessimistic, satanic, macabre, or neurotic character of contemporary art, this evil is not without its accompanying good; it is a safety-valve, an overflow channel. Morbid art “is a defence against abnormal tendencies, which, otherwise, would tend to transform themselves into action.” Many content themselves with a literary, plastic, or musical satisfaction. This seems to be indisputable. We may also grant to this author that the suggestion of a work of art has not the power of direct suggestion, that of the actually perceived fact, and that, so far, it is less dangerous. But as it is more widely diffused and acts especially on subjects predisposed to it, it may be questioned whether, in the long run, the gain is serious.

This is a sociological question which it would be out of place to discuss here, and which, consequently, we may dismiss with a bare reference. Our conclusion is that the pathology of the æsthetic sentiment has no independent existence. It is one among many forms of expression (of which we have already pointed out several) of a morbid predisposition which can only follow this track in a small minority of persons—those possessed of the power of creative imagination.