Willard Huntington Wright’s book The Creative Will, published in New York in 1916, made a sensational, revelatory impression on American artistic circles in a period of excitement over ideas heralding a great new turning point in art. The book was read, reread, discussed and learned by heart, and often circulated among art students, groups, courses, departments, professionals and amateurs, as well as collectors and lay admirers of new trends. Describing her feelings upon rereading The Creative Will, Anita Pollitzer, a colleague and confidante of Georgia O’Keeffe, also an ardent admirer of The Creative Will, enthusiastically calls Wright’s work “the naked truth.” The author, who described himself as an “aesthetic expert and psychological shark” and predicted the advent of an era in which abstractionism would replace realism, indeed managed to exert a huge influence on the further development not only of American visual art, but even literature.

 

 

Excerpts from “The Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy, and the Syntax of Aesthetics” by Willard Huntington Wright, 1916

 

15.

 

Two Elements of Art. — Just as man is the result of the conjunction of the male and the female, so is art the offspring of the abstract medium (colour, sound, document) in conjunction with the concrete symbol (objects, notes, actions). Art can never be wholly abstract any more than it can be wholly imitative. Its mission is certainly not to make us think: life with its infinite variations and manifestations presents a richer field for posing problems. Nor is its mission that of imitation: such a procedure would be useless and sterile of emotional results. The middle ground between abstract thinking and imitation must, then, be its terrain. Here the abstract comes into harmonic conjunction with the concrete: — these are the outermost limits of thought and sensation. Neither one can create alone. Both must be present, like cause and effect. The cause is, of necessity, an abstract force: this is the medium. Out of it must come a recognisable world — not in the sense of life, but of art.

 

16.

 

False Exteriors. — Fantastic and eccentric surfaces are often the disguises of spurious and worthless works. The greatness of true art, like aristocracy in the individual, is easily recognised beneath the most commonplace integuments.

 

17.

 

Evolution of Intensity in Art Media. — A desire for greater emotional intensity has much to do with the progress of art and especially with the strides taken by it in the last forty years. These developmental strides are undoubtedly due to the increased intensity of modern life as evidenced in mechanics, densely populated areas, the flooding of the mind with a vast amount of knowledge of events through the perfecting of means for collecting news, the rapidity of travel, the clangour and noise of modern commerce, the swiftly moving panorama of life, the discoveries in brilliant artificial lights, etc. These complexities and intensifications of modern life tend to deaden the mind (through the senses) to the subtleties of minute variations of greys, the monotonies of simple melodies and rhythms, the unadorned verbiage of the 250,000-word novel, and similar manifestations of a day when febrile living had not blunted the sensitivities. All art must dominate life; and this is as true to-day as it was in the Middle Ages. The modern artist has come to realise that the media of art have never been fully sounded, and that only by perfecting the purely mechanical side of his art can he achieve that new intensity which today is so needed. To be sure, great art will always remain great so long as the human organisms remain unchanged; yet the demands of human evolution must be met. Consequently the means of art have been greatly developed through research and experimentation. A painter of to-day, with genius equal to that of a Rubens, could, because of the new colour knowledge, create compositions far more emotional and intense than those of the Flemish master. If Richard Strauss, with his knowledge of the modern orchestra, possessed the magistral creative vision of Beethoven, he could double the effect of the latter’s music. Joseph Conrad (whom few have recognised for his significant anarchy), with the colossal gifts of a Balzac, could transcend anything yet accomplished in literature. Imagine Beethoven’s C-Minor Symphony played behind a partition which would deaden the vibration and neutralise the sound after the manner of a xylophone. The formal basis, the genius of its construction, would remain unchanged; but its effect on us would be infinitely weakened. A Cezanne or a Renoir reproduced in black and white is merely the skeleton of the original. Read a short condensation of “Madame Bovary”, and you have only a commonplace and not extraordinary idea. Retell Swinburne in prose, and the effect is lost. Thus can be realised the tremendous importance of the purely mechanical side of art. For, after all, art can be judged only by its effect upon the individual. It is for this reason that the prescient modern artists are experimenting, some with new instruments and methods of orchestration, some with the functionings of pure colour, and some (though fewer, alas! than in the other media) with new word combinations and documentary rhythms.

 

28.

 

Enduring Vitality of Great Art. — Why is it that, as a general rule, the really great art of the past has come down to us to-day with a halo upon it? It is not because the world has understood this great art, — the reasons the world gives for reverencing it are irrelevant. But it is because all exalted creative expression has a power of unity which is capable of pushing through the barriers of aesthetic ignorance and of making its vitality felt.

 

29.

 

Harmony of Thought and Emotion the Test of Great Art. — What man could say that great constructive thinking which results in beauty as rich and palpable as Greek, Italian and Gothic architecture and as sequentially lyrical as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is not as keen a joy as physical ecstasy? The ultimate effect of great art lies in the mind where it has been introduced by way of the senses. And the acid test of art’s puissance is that the heart and mind — the male and female elements of human life — vibrate in harmony, forming a perfect conjunction.

 

34.

 

Analogies Between Creative Impulses. — The character is to literature and the motif is to music what the line or form is to painting. A literary character is arbitrarily chosen by the writer; and, in a general way, the character’s individual traits and temperament are conceived in the writer’s mind before the work of projecting him through the numerous influences of his life is undertaken. Thus, in the parlance of the painter, a literary character is a form with individual outlines, weight and colour. Every force with which he comes in contact during the unfolding of the narrative will in some way modify his disposition, as well as change the trend of his environment. In like manner, the painter arbitrarily chooses, as the noyau of his canvas, a certain form whose influence is imprinted over the whole work; and upon this form the sequential lines, colours and rhythms will have a determining and directing influence. Likewise, a musical composer chooses a motif — a small musical phrase that he has fixed upon; and out of this simple motif will grow a great edifice of musical form constructed by succeeding themes, counterstatements, development sections and recapitulations— all influencing the original motif, creating a sound environment, and finally bringing about a consummation in the coda. Thus the methods of all great art (no matter what its medium) have the same mental problems with which to deal. For the painter there is the shifting of directions and masses: for the musician there are the natural re-adjustments of succeeding sounds: for the writer there is the re-creation, from ideas and actions, of a new and vital ground-plan. In all the arts the creative impulse begins with an arbitrary selection, passes through a natural development of the chosen motif, line or idea, and terminates in a formal climax. The vicissitudes of a literary character amid good and bad environments are identical with those undergone by a line or a motif. In each case the initial shape passes through the calm and turbulence of a complete existence before it comes to rest. Any great work of art is, therefore, the psychological history of an individual.

 

48.

 

Result of Democracy on Art. — Once the principles which are necessary to aesthetic expression are known, there will be a minimum of chaotic variation in the conceptions of different artists. During all great creative periods there has been a general homogeneous trend toward certain results, because then artists had a definite conception of composition, and possessed, in certain conventions of methods, a definite vehicle of expression. Today the great disintegration of effort is almost wholly the result of a widespread ignorance of art laws. In an age of research each man becomes a law unto himself, and regards one idea as just as valuable as another, provided it is novel or personal. He therefore proclaims himself the equal of all others because he is “expressing himself.” Are not his responses to objective stimuli as genuine as those of any one else? This may be true; but a recorded reaction to stimuli is not necessarily art. The inadequacy of such a man’s work is due to the fact that he has never been taught the basis on which creative effort must be built, and, as a result, his “expression” is of no more aesthetic importance than his personality.

 

54.

 

Greatness and Nationality. — There is no nationality in art. Those who plead for a national art are ignorant of art’s primary significance. Only in the most superficial qualities can the traits of a nation be expressed; and these qualities are aesthetically negligible. The germ of genius, which lies at the bottom of all high creative expression, is changeless and eternal; and for this reason a great man belongs to all countries and to all times. He embraces every struggle that has gone before.

 

55.

 

National Types of Art and the Influences Which Dictate Them. — When trying to sound the reason why one nation creates one kind of art and brings it to its highest perfection, why another excels in a different art and brings forth only mediocre or imitative works of the first kind, and why yet another nation reaches its highest level in a third kind of art, we must go deep into their organisms and influences. Superficial characteristics will never reveal the true source of aesthetic variation. Taine has brought together the salient characteristics of nationality, and by stating their sources has explained their relation to art production. From these can be deduced the specific kinds of art which each nation has given birth to and the reasons which underly them. In ancient times the Greeks seemed to combine all the art impulses of the various modern temperaments: they produced philosophy, music, poetry, prose, sculpture, dancing and painting. This versatility was a result of their wonderfully balanced mental and physical forces. The separate traits of these inclusively intelligent people are to be found, exaggerated, developed or weakened, in all the Germanic and Latin races and their descendants to-day. Their philosophic attributes have passed somewhat vulgarised and systematised, to the modern Germans. Their subtleties, undergoing a similar metamorphosis, have lodged in the French temperament. And their nobility and pride of race are to be found, converted into a sentimental fetish, in the Spaniard. It is in these traits, disintegrated among many peoples and given an acuteness or complexity in answer to the needs of modern life, that form the matrices out of which modern plastic art has issued. The genius of the ancient Greek was eminently pictorial; his imagination encompassed all life by way of images. This is explainable by the fact that he understood man and studied him more deeply than he did nature. His conclusions were dictated by the functioning of the human body to which he turned because in it he found something tangible, absolute, concrete. By keeping himself before his own eyes as an important entity he conceived a precise, formal idea of life. This attitude led to generalising and to an utter indifference toward useless details. With the Italians of the Renaissance we have the Greek conditions over again. Between these two nations there existed temperamental similarities despite the feudalism and asceticism of the Middle Ages. Like the Greeks, the Italians preferred symmetry and proportion to comfort, the joy of the senses to celestial pleasures after death. In the religion of the Italians was that toleration which is necessary to art production; and there were courts where intellectual attainments were placed above all else. The greatest difference between the Greeks and the Italians was that whereas the Greek mind and body, exquisitely balanced and wholly harmonious, constituted a unified and conjoined whole, the Italian mind and body were separate developments. The Greeks cultivated sound, rhythm, poetry and movement simultaneously in their theatres and dances. The Italians laid stress on these various impulses at different periods and, instead of welding them into one impulse, cultivated and intensified them individually. Just as sculpture was the leading art of the Greeks, so it was the leading art of the Renaissance, for the Italian painting was primarily sculpturesque, inspired by form and line, not by tone and gradation as was the painting of the Netherlands. The colour that the Italian painters used was purely decorative, never realistic: it was an ornament superimposed on perfect sculptural forms, just as the figures and designs of the Gothic cathedrals were superimpositions on an unstable, tortured science. In Germany to the north we find other conditions at work, and, as a result, other types of mental and creative endeavour. The temperamental difference between the Germans, and the Greeks and Italians is due in large measure to climate. In the greater part of Greece and Italy the light is so luminous that the colour is sucked from nature, and all that remains is line and hard-cut, precise silhouette. Therefore the Greeks’ and Italians’ perception is formally sculptural, for it is silhouette which inspires to sculpture. With such a vision ever before their eyes it follows that their thought — the life of their minds — should be general and, though specific, conventionalised. The Germanic races are the offspring of an opposite environment. Their climate is damper and more overcast. Cold and mist are far more general than to the southward. Hence we see no sculpture among the Germans; and since their environment is the opposite of clear-cut and incisive, they deal in metaphysical terms, naked symbols devoid of images, precise ideas and abstract systems of life. As a result the German is patient, researchful, metaphysical, whereas the Italian is mercurial, seeing the metaphysical only in terms of the pictorial. The Germans have had to clothe themselves, and thus have not lived with, as it were, and glorified the human body. In their paintings the idea is the highest consideration. The German is methodical, and the consequent slowness of his mental processes protects him against quick and distracting reactions, and permits him a greater capacity for sequential thinking. But with all his abstract philosophical reasoning he is a realist, for he never conceives idealised forms, as did the Renaissance Italians. He penetrates to the foundations even when those foundations are ugly, his ideal being internal, rather than external, truth. The German rests all his thoughts on a definite basis of science and observation, and all his thinking must lead to an absolute result. Here we have an explanation for his music. In it he expresses the abstract conceptions of life; and his ability to create it rests on his infinite patience in deciphering the enormous mass of requisite technical knowledge necessary to its successful birth. The Dutch and the Belgians — both stemming from Germanic stock — represent once more the influence which climate and religion and methods of life have on aesthetic creation. The Dutch chose Protestantism, a form of religion from which external and sensuous beauty had been eliminated. They adopted the settled’ contentment of mere animal comforts, and, as a result, grew torpid and flaccid through good living and the gratification of heavy appetites. The ease of their existence brought about a tolerance which created an art appreciation; and appreciation is the soil in which art production always flourishes. The result was an art which was an added comfort to the home — an art with a sensuality of vision which reflected the sensuality of life. The Dutch, comfortable and disliking effort, lived in a land which was all colour and blurs. Man was pictured as he appeared, neither idealised nor degraded, with little parti pris, as great masses of substance, with misty outlines, emerging from a tenebrous climatic environment. The Belgians, on the other hand, were Catholics. They were more sensuous, more joyous than the Dutch. They saw images through the eyes of Catholicism. Their lives were filled with pomp and show and parade : even their form of worship was external and decorative. Consequently their art, while realistic, was more exalted and sensuous, filled with a spirit of freedom and infused with philosophic thought. These two types of realism are represented in Rubens and Rembrandt. France received all its permanent impetus to plastic creation from the north. There was a short period when the art was a political mélange of classic ideas, and another period when the Venetian admiration resuscitated composition (as in Delacroix); but the permanent contributions came in the form of Flemish realism with its delicacy of tonal subtleties. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutchmen were echoed in the Barbizon school; and this salutary reaction to nature from Graeco-Roman academism gave an added impetus to realism. The mercurial quality of the French mind, now classically philosophical, now naturalistic, now stiffly moral, taking on all the colours of all influences, demands strong emotions. Two centuries of inventions and complex life, added to the adopted culture of the Dutch and the Italians, created an art which was novel, colourful and at times even sensational. The individualism of the Renaissance found a new home in the French intellect. That love of life and the reversion to a more joyous existence (which came after the Revolution) cast the Church out and drove the intellectuals back to the worship of nature. The French then had time to enjoy the complexities of composition; and the elegance of their cultivation resurrected an insistence upon style. They wrote no philosophies; they were not interested in detailed research; but they lived febrilely, and the records of their lives, subordinated to general philosophic plans which, were created by style, produced great literature. Like children they received the half-completed flowers of the Renaissance and the partial realism of their forebears, and these bequests were a source of wonder and delight to them. They continued both quickly on a wave of reaction by expressing the one by means of the other. They combined the Germanic and the Latin impulses; and from this perfectly poised combination issued the excellence of their painting and literature. Their work in the other arts was merely an aside, as was poetry in Flanders, and painting in Germany. They lacked the German meticulousness and preoccupation with abstractions which are necessary to the highest musical composition; and their plasticity of mind made possible intenser images in painting than in poetry. In England few outside influences have taken hold. Its geographical isolation has resulted in a self-contented provincialism. The British mind, like the American mind, is, and always has been, unsympathetic to art. Art is regarded as a curiosity, an appanage of the higher education. Intelligence, as such, is not believed in. With the English all thought must be bent toward a utilitarian end, just as Latin thought is turned toward form and German thought toward philosophy. In the stress of affairs Englishmen have little time for so exotic a flower as art. Their minds are rigid and immobile, largely because of their form of religion. They are aggressively Protestant. In their religion there are absolute punishments and rewards untempered by circumstances or individual cases. There are fixed emotional values and absolute foci of the mind; and, as a consequence, the race is without plastic expression. Their minds, groping after beyond-world comforts, have become static and out of touch with the actualities of existence. They harbour Utopian schemes, and consider life as they deem it should be lived, not in accord with nature’s intention. Even in their rare painters of landscape, like Turner and Constable, the spirit of the subject is hunted above form; and when this is not the case, their pictures are, in essence, moral and anecdotal. Because the English are primarily busy, constantly occupied with practical, commercial accomplishments, they have no leisure for an art which is a compounding of subtleties, like the painting of the Dutch and the music of the Germans. Their tastes naturally resolve themselves into a desire for a simple image — that is, for an art entirely free from the complex intricacies of organisation. Their pleasures must be of a quick variety so that the appreciation may be instantaneous. And since their lives are neither physical nor mental but merely material, like the Americans’, it is natural that they should react to trivial transcendentalism and sentimentality. They produce no ‘art which is either philosophical or plastically formal. But in the art of poetry they lead the world. Poetry presents an image quickly, and it has a sensual side in its rhythm as well as a vague and transcendental side in its content. Poetry is the lyricism of the spirit, even as sculpture is the lyricism of form. Both are arts which represent quick reactions, the one sentimental and spiritualised, the other tangible and absolute. Even English style is more a matter of diction than of underlying rhythm. The conditions, religion, temperament and pursuits of America are similar to those of England, and American art is patterned largely on that of its mother country. Poetry is the chief, as well as the most highly developed, aesthetic occupation of Americans. Everywhere to-day, however, national conditions have less influence than formerly. The cosmopolitanism of individuals is fast breaking down national boundaries. The modern complex mind, encrusted by 2,000 years of diverse forms of culture, is becoming more a result of what has gone before than a result of that which lies about it. We of to-day easily assimilate influences from all sides, and while some of the arts are still the property of temperamentally kindred nations, the admixture of nationalities and the changes of regime are constantly reversing the old abilities.

 

61.

 

The Emotion of Form in Nature and in Art. — If a work of graphic art fails to give us, either objectively or subjectively, a greater sensation of form than we can get direct from nature, its compositional order, though rhythmically perfect, cannot make it vital or attractive. The complex organisation of a picture reveals itself only after prolonged contemplation; and if there is not a plenitude of full form to inspire the spectator to this contemplation he turns away: the emotional element is lacking. A sensitive person, seeing the flesh-like and tactile nudes of Rubens or Renoir, is astonished by their almost super-lifelike solidity; and the subjective emotion of form produced by Cezanne, once experienced, is never forgotten. It is these formal qualities in Rubens, Renoir and Cezanne which halt us and lead us into the intellectual order of the picture. Thus in music. The score dominates and moves us more when we hear it played than when we merely read it.

 

62.

 

Conception of the Great Idea. — Every idea, from infancy to old age, is motivated by man’s contact with the objective world. A conscious effort toward great thought ends either in chaos or in an abstract triviality. Great ideas, like all significant achievements in life, come only as a result of certain perfect conditions; and these perfect conditions are what give birth to one’s ability to separate ideas which are sterile from ideas pregnant with possibility. The artist’s process of thought is like an arithmetical progression. He conceives a trivial idea from his contact with exterior nature. Something in this trivial idea, after a period of analysis, calls up another idea which, in turn, develops, through volitional association, into a group of ideas. And this group becomes, for him, the basis of constructive thinking, replacing, as it were, the original basis of objectivity. From his segregation and arrangement of these ideas, which are no longer directly inspired by nature, there springs the great idea. It is the golden link in a chain of trivial ideas — the heritor of an intrinsically worthless thought. An artist’s intellectual significance lies in his power to presage instinctively the future importance of seemingly inconsequential reactions, for a great thought, like a great mind or epoch, is not an isolated phenomenon, the result of an accident. It is subject to the same laws of evolution and growth as is the human body. That is why one can never consciously force great thinking; it is impossible to call up that particular group of trivial objective ideas which, when analysed and augmented, will generate the great idea. This is true also of those creative processes which result in concrete manifestations. A musician cannot force himself to play impromptu a masterpiece, even though he be a master. Here again the combination of circumstances must be au point before his creative faculties are in their highest state of fluency. But when he recognises a pregnant musical form which casually results from idle improvisation, he may develop and continue it, add to it and take from it, until, at last, the final form of the composition appears. The generation of great ideas is analogous to the generation of great forms. In lesser men the beginnings of a great idea are passed over unnoticed.

 

63.

 

Art’s Indirect Progress. — The evolution of art is no more mechanical than the development of the individual. In it there are irregularities, retrogressions, forward spurts, divagations, distractions. At one time it goes ahead rapidly; at another, it seems to halt. There are periods of darkness and stagnation as well as periods of swift and splendid development. Some men carry forward the spirit of research; others, employing the qualities which have been handed down to them, breathe into old inspirations the flame of individual idiosyncrasy. During one era there will be a progress in principles; during another era progress will have to do entirely with means. Every new movement has about it a certain isolation of ambition and aspiration. The first innovators push out the boundary on one side; their followers, on another; and the final exponents of an epoch, having fully assimilated what has preceded them, combine the endeavours and accomplishments of their forerunners and create new and lasting forms.

 

65.

 

The Universal in Art. — Not until the facts of art are dissociated from the individual — that is, are separated from all personal considerations — has the intellect been brought to bear on aesthetics. Only the impersonal can attain to immortality : it belongs to no cult, no period, no one body of men: it reflects the whole of life, and its vision is the universal vision of mankind. Art is the mouthpiece of the will of nature, namely, the complete, unified intelligence of life — that intelligence of which each individual is only an offshoot, or, rather, a minute part. An artist’s mind, in the act of creating, is only an outlet of that intelligence. Art is the restatement of life — a glimpse, brought to a small focus, of the creative laws of nature. It reveals the universal will, the machinery, as it were, of the human drama; and in our appreciation of it we are exalted because in it we experience, not a segment of life, but the entire significance of life. Thus can be accounted for art’s philosophic, as well as its humanly concrete, side.

 

66.

 

Art and Nature. — Art does not show man the way to nature. Rather does it lead him via nature to knowledge.

 

78.

 

The Esthetic Rationale. — Do not consider the arts as isolated and independent, each governed by its own laws. The laws which apply to one art will apply with equal fitness to any other art. What is basically true of one art is true of all the others: seek for the aesthetic analogy. Precisely the same reactions are expressed by painting, music and literature; and these reactions are expressed in the same aesthetic manner. Only the media differ. You cannot know one art a fond without knowing all the others; or, to state the proposition conversely, it is necessary to know all the arts fundamentally before you can truly grasp one of them. The emotional effects of the various arts are superficially dissimilar; but the principles do not vary.

 

79.

 

Analogies Between the Arts. — There is no abstract quality of a rhythmic nature in any one art which does not have an analogy in the other arts. Because music was the first art to become abstract, we have an aesthetic musical nomenclature; and generally it is necessary to use musical terms in describing corresponding qualities in literature, drawing, painting and sculpture.

 

80.

 

Melody. — Melody is the simplest form of art which has passed beyond mere primitive rhythm. It is common to all the arts, for though it has a definite musical connotation, it may be applied figuratively to the other arts. Melody is merely rhythm applied to two-dimensional form — auditory, visual or documentary. The form-essence of pure melody is linear. In drawing or painting it is commonly called decoration or design. In literature it is the simple tale which has been delicately composed. Pure musical melody exists without accompaniment: it is a series of single notes. Its parallel in the graphic arts is a line drawing in which the linear cadence is the final effect sought for. In literature it is the episodic story.

 

81.

 

Homophony. — Homophony is the structural augmentation of melody, or melody resting on its bases of chord sequences : melody with an accompaniment. The analogy of homophony in the graphic arts would be a linear drawing, or painting, to which were added masses or volumes of tonality — light and dark or coloured patches which sustained and accorded with the linear directions. The chords, or bases, on which a melody rests — or, more accurately, the remainders of the broken-up chords from which the melody was lifted — correspond to the tonal masses in two-dimensional drawing or painting. In literature the effect of homophony is obtained in a more arbitrary manner. If to the simple episodic story, such as a folk tale or a Boccaccio novella, should be added a foundation of descriptive or historical material which augmented and filled out the narrative without altering its formal development, the result would correspond to musical homophony.

 

82.

 

Polyphony. — Polyphony is three-dimensional auditory form into which has been introduced rhythm. During the interweaving of two or more melodies, the musical form is multilinear and moves in depth as well as laterally or “vertically.” Here the masses and volumes are made up of the extensional relationships of the numerous melodic lines, and are an integral part of the aesthetic structure. The dominant melody represents merely that surface of the form which is most evident to the ear, in the same way that a certain aspect of a painted form is most apparent to the eye. There are parallels for polyphony in literature and painting. A book which possesses documentary solidity and which has been composed rhythmically in accord with aesthetic development, is — figuratively — polyphonic. The plot is merely the dominant melody, and bears the same relation to the whole that the dominant melody bears to the complete form of a polyphonic piece of music. In drawing there can be no polyphony because black and white cannot give the emotion of depth. But in painting where the linear forms relate themselves rhythmically to one another in three dimensions we have an exact analogy to musical polyphony. Here, too, there may be a dominant linear melody.

 

83.

 

Simultaneity in Art. —Although the perception of beauty — that is, of form — is never simultaneous, since it requires a series of movements and necessitates a process of comparison and adjustments which can be made only by the act of memory and shape-projection, nevertheless the effect of beauty is simultaneous. It may take us an hour or more to absorb or to find the aesthetic form, as in listening to a symphony, or in reading a book, or in studying the ramifications of a picture’s composition; but when we have followed the lines of the form to their completion and are conscious of the unity of their direction and interrelations, we receive, in an immeasurably brief instant of time, the unified effect of the whole. It is like a sudden flash: our memory has retained and built up accumulatively all that has taken place during our long process of absorption or comprehension. If, while we are listening to a perfectly constructed sonata, it should suddenly cease at the beginning of the coda, let us say, we would be left with a feeling of incompleteness: we would fail to react to its form. The same sensation or feeling of incompleteness would be ours if we closed a book when part way through it, or if we regarded a picture which was partially concealed. In all such cases we would have curtailed our contemplation during the process of absorption; and our aesthetic reaction would not fully take place. That which is necessary for our complete satisfaction is the very last note or chord of a piece of music, the final episode in a book, and the ultimate curve or volume in a picture’s organisational scheme. When we have reached this final point in a work of art, our memory, which has retained every step through which our consciousness has passed in the contemplative process, reconstructs the whole. We then have an instantaneous vision of the entire form which may have taken hours to unroll. In that instant of realisation we receive our keenest sense of beauty, for in that instant we react to a formal unity. This sudden coalescence of memory constitutes the simultaneity which characterises all aesthetically constructed art works.

 

84.

 

The Primitive Demand for Symmetry.— In the perception of form we always relate that form to ourselves — that is, to the conditions of our own bodily consciousness. Perceiving form necessitates certain muscular, auditory or optical activities on our part; and the character of the form regulates those activities. Thus, in looking at a flagpole, our eyes must travel up and down: we cannot perceive the flagpole by moving our eyes to the right or left. All forms therefore produce in us certain corresponding movements; or rather, our movements, since they are voluntary and active, determine the form. Now, since our consciousness of bodily existence is based on an ever-present sense of balance (our ability to stand without falling), it is our instinct, when making a muscular movement which would tend to destroy that balance, to make a counter-movement for the purpose of preserving our equilibrium. The involuntary adjustments of the body have for their purpose a balance of weights which will be equal on either side of our centre of gravity. In the contemplation of form the same process takes place, since it is our movements which determine form perception. For example, draw a heavy line to the left of the centre of a piece of paper. We feel an incompleteness when viewing it: we are not at ease. Then draw a similar line to the right of the paper’s centre. At once we feel a completion, a sense of satisfaction. This is because we relate all perceived form to a centre of gravity; and if this form is not balanced by another form, we undergo a process of mental adjustment (analogous to physical adjustment) by desiring the other form. In other words, we feel a need of a counter-form. It is our internal and involuntary demand for balance. Hence the static and primitive satisfaction we experience in the presence of symmetry, or symmetrical designs; and the dissatisfaction we experience before an unseen metrical or lop-sided design.

 

85.

 

Auditory Symmetry. — Sound-forms are perceived in the same manner that visual forms are perceived. There are auditory adjustments analogous to optical adjustments; and, at bottom, they are, no doubt, muscular, since we vocalise sounds while listening to them, although this vocalisation may be silent. In short, sound-forms are determined by our own physical movements. And in the same manner that we relate visual forms to a centre of gravity, and consider the extension of those forms as so far to the right or left, so we relate tone-masses to a centre of musical gravity. This centre is the vocal mean of the human voice. Thus we have standardised middle C (the C on the first line below the treble); and all other notes are either upper or lower notes. Middle C, the centre of musical gravity, is that point where the bass clef runs into the treble clef. For clarity, let us say that all notes (save middle C) are either to the right or left of this musical centre. Unconsciously, we relate all notes to this centre, (their height or depth is judged by their distance from middle C); and if the sound- forms are not balanced on either side of it (like visual forms on either side of a centre of gravity), we feel a dissatisfaction similar to the physical sensation of being unbalanced. Thus a chord or a note (a sound-form) struck in the treble or bass calls up in us at once a need for a chord or note in the opposite clef. This, again, is our primitive demand for balance based on physical consciousness. When the seen forms on either side of a centre of gravity counterbalance each other in the static sense, we have visual symmetry. And when the heard forms on either side of middle C — the centre of musical gravity — counterbalance each other statically, we have auditory symmetry. The felt need for both is due, first, to the fact that equilibrium is our basis of physical consciousness, and, secondly, to the further fact that our perception of form — whether visual or auditory — is the result of physical movements which, when they take place either to the right or left of a pivotal centre, demand corresponding movements on the other side in order that the balance be maintained.