The Life of Reason by George Santayana (i have read the book TXT) π
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- Author: George Santayana
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One respect, for instance, in which man depends on things is for the Γ¦sthetic quality of his perceptions. If he happens, by a twist of the hand, to turn a flowering branch into a wreath, thereby making it more interesting, he will have discovered a decorative art and initiated himself auspiciously into the practice of it. Experimentation may follow, and whenever the new form given to the object improves itβi.e., increases its interest for the eyeβthe experimenter will triumph and will congratulate himself on his genius. The garland so arranged will be said to express the taste it satisfies; insight and reason will be mythically thought to have guided the work by which they are sustained in being. It is no small harmony, however, that they should be sustained by it. The consonances man introduces into nature will follow him wherever he goes. It will no longer be necessary that nature should supply them spontaneously, by a rare adventitious harmony with his demands. His new habit will habitually rear-range her chance arrangements, and his path will be marked by the beauties he has strewn it with. So long as the same plastic impulse continues operative it will be accompanied by knowledge and criticism of its happy results. Self-criticism, being a second incipient artistic impulse, contrasting itself with the one which a work embodies, may to some extent modify the next performance. If life is drawn largely into this deepening channel, physical proficiency and its ideal sanctions will develop more or less harmoniously into what is called a school of art.
The first felt utilities by which plastic instinct is sanctioned are of course not distinctly Γ¦sthetic, much less distinctly practical; they are magical. A stone cut into some human or animal semblance fascinates the savage eye much more than would a useful tool or a beautiful idol. The man wonders at his own work, and petrifies the miracle of his art into miraculous properties in its product. Primitive art is incredibly conservative; its first creations, having once attracted attention, monopolise it henceforth and nothing else will be trusted to work the miracle. It is a sign of stupidity in general to stick to physical objects and given forms apart from their ideal functions, as when a child cries for a broken doll, even if a new and better one is at hand to replace it. Inert associations establish themselves, in such a case, with that part of a thing which is irrelevant to its valueβits material substance or perhaps its name. Art can make no progress in such a situation. A man remains incorrigibly unhappy and perplexed, cowed, and helpless, because not intelligent enough to readjust his actions; his idol must be the self-same hereditary stock, or at least it must have the old sanctified rigidity and stare. Plastic impulse, as yet sporadic, is overwhelmed by a brute idolatrous awe at mere existence and actuality. What is, what has always been, what chance has associated with one person, alone seems acceptable or conceivable.
Idolatry is by no means incident to art; art, on the contrary, is a release from idolatry. A cloud, an animal, a spring, a stone, or the whole heaven, will serve the pure idolater's purpose to perfection; these things have existence and a certain hypnotic power, so that he may make them a focus for his dazed contemplation. When the mind takes to generalities it finds the same fascination in Being or in the Absolute, something it needs no art to discover. The more indeterminate, immediate, and unutterable the idol is, the better it induces panic self-contraction and a reduction of all discourse to the infinite intensity of zero. When idolaters pass from trying to evoke the Absolutely Existent to apostrophising the sun or an ithyphallic bull they have made an immense progress in art and religion, for now their idols represent some specific and beneficent function in nature, something propitious to ideal life and to its determinate expression. Isaiah is very scornful of idols made with hands, because they have no physical energy. He forgets that perhaps they represent something, and so have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never have unless they too become representative and express some ideal. Isaiah's conception of Jehovah, for instance, is itself a poetic image, the work of man's brain; and the innocent worship of it would not be idolatry, if that conception represented something friendly to human happiness and to human art. The question merely is whether the sculptor's image or the prophet's stands for the greater interest and is a more adequate symbol for the good. The noblest art will be the one, whether plastic or literary or dialectical, which creates figments most truly representative of what is momentous in human life. Similarly the least idolatrous religion would be the one which used the most perfect art, and most successfully abstracted the good from the real.
Conservatism rules also in those manufactures which are tributary to architecture and the smaller plastic arts. Utility makes small headway against custom, not only when custom has become religion, but even when it remains inert and without mythical sanction. To admit or trust anything new is to overcome that inertia which is a general law in the brain no less than elsewhere, and which may be distinguished in reflection into a technical and a social conservatism. Technical conservatism appears, for instance, in a man's handwriting, which is so seldom improved, even when admitted, perhaps, to be execrable. Every artist has his tricks of execution, every school its hereditary, irrational processes. These refractory habits are to blame for the rare and inimitable quality of genius; they impose excellence on one man and refuse it to a million. A happy physiological structure, by creating a mannerism under the special circumstances favourable to expression, may lift a man, perhaps inferior in intelligence, to heights which no insight can attain with inferior organs. As a voice is necessary for singing, so a certain quickness of eye and hand is needed for good execution in the plastic arts. The same principle goes deeper. Conception and imagination are themselves automatic and run in grooves, so that only certain forms in certain combinations will ever suggest themselves to a given designer. Every writer's style, too, however varied within limits, is single and monotonous compared with the ideal possibilities of expression. Genius at every moment is confined to the idiom it is creating.
Social inertia is due to the same causes working in the community at large. The fancy, for instance, of building churches in the shape of a cross has largely determined Christian architecture. Builders were prevented by a foregone suggestion in themselves and by their patrons' demands from conceiving any alternative to that convention. Early pottery, they say, imitates wicker-work, and painted landscape was for ages not allowed to exist without figures, although even the old masters show plainly enough in their backgrounds that they could love landscape for its own sake. When one link with humanity has been rendered explicit and familiar, people assume that by no other means can humanity be touched at all; even if at the same time their own heart is expanding to the highest raptures in a quite different region. The severer Greeks reprobated music without words; Saint Augustine complained of chants that rendered the sacred text unintelligible; the Puritans regarded elaborate music as diabolical, little knowing how soon some of their descendants would find religion in nothing else. A stupid convention still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away; whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the action of an animal's limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational decencies, make man's chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools' heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most satisfaction.
Since construction grows rational slowly and by indirect pressure, we may expect that its most superficial merits will be the first appreciated. Ultimate beauty in a building would consist, of course, in responding simultaneously to all the human faculties affected: to the eye, by the building's size, form, and colour; to the imagination, by its fitness and ideal expression. Of all grounds for admiration those most readily seized are size, elaboration, splendour of materials, and difficulties or cost involved. Having built or dug in the conventional way a man may hang before his door some trophy of battle or the chase, bearing witness to his prowess; just as people now, not thinking of making their rooms beautiful, fill them with photographs of friends or places they have known, to suggest and reburnish in their minds their interesting personal history, which even they, unstimulated, might tend to forget. That dwelling will seem best adorned which contains most adventitious objects; bare and ugly will be whatever is not concealed by something else. Again, a barbarous architect, without changing his model, may build in a more precious material; and his work will be admired for the evidence it furnishes of wealth and wilfulness. As a community grows luxurious and becomes accustomed to such display, it may come to seem strange and hideous to see a wooden plate or a pewter spoon. A beautiful house will need to be in marble and the sight of plebeian brick will banish all satisfaction.
Less irrational, and therefore less vulgar, is the wonder aroused by great bulk or difficulty in the work. Exertions, to produce a great result, even if it be material, must be allied to perseverance and intelligent direction. Roman bridges and aqueducts, for instance, gain a profound emotional power when we see in their monotonous arches a symbol of the mightiest enterprise in history, and in their decay an evidence of its failure. Curiosity is satisfied, historic imagination is stimulated, tragic reflection is called forth. We cannot refuse admiration to a work so full of mind, even if no great plastic beauty happens to distinguish it. It is at any rate beautiful enough, like the sea or the skeleton of a mountain. We may rely on the life it has made possible to add more positive charms and clothe it with imaginative functions. Modern engineering works often have a similar value; the force and intelligence they express merge in an Γ¦sthetic essence, and the place they hold in a portentous civilisation lends them an almost epic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, has become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk through the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A city, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill, and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds' nests. The purpose of improvements in modern
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