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beauty (_krasota_) means, to begin with, only that which pleases the
sight. Even hearing is excluded. And though latterly people have begun
to speak of an "ugly deed" or of "beautiful music," it is not good
Russian. The simple Russian does not make Plato's divine muddle between
the good and the beautiful. If a man gives his coat to another, the
Russian peasant, knowing no foreign language, will not say the man has
acted "beautifully."
To see a thing, to feel a thing, as a work of art, we must, then, become
for the time unpractical, must be loosed from the fear and the flurry of
actual living, must become spectators. Why is this? Why can we not live
and look at once? The _fact_ that we cannot is clear. If we watch a
friend drowning we do not note the exquisite curve made by his body as
he falls into the water, nor the play of the sunlight on the ripples as
he disappears below the surface; we should be inhuman, aesthetic fiends
if we did. And again, why? It would do our friend no harm that we should
enjoy the curves and the sunlight, provided we also threw him a rope.
But the simple fact is that we _cannot_ look at the curves and the
sunlight because our whole being is centred on acting, on saving him; we
cannot even, at the moment, fully feel our own terror and impending
loss. So again if we want to see and to feel the splendour and vigour of
a lion, or even to watch the cumbrous grace of a bear, we prefer that a
cage should intervene. The cage cuts off the need for motor actions; it
interposes the needful physical and moral distance, and we are free for
contemplation. Released from our own terrors, we see more and better,
and we feel differently. A man intent on action is like a horse in
blinkers, he goes straight forward, seeing only the road ahead.
Our brain is, indeed, it would seem, in part, an elaborate arrangement
for providing these blinkers. If we saw and realized the whole of
everything, we should want to do too many things. The brain allows us
not only to remember, but, which is quite as important, to forget and
neglect; it is an organ of oblivion. By neglecting most of the things we
see and hear, we can focus just on those which are important for action;
we can cease to be potential artists and become efficient practical
human beings; but it is only by limiting our view, by a great
renunciation as to the things we see and feel. The artist does just the
reverse. He renounces doing in order to practise seeing. He is by nature
what Professor Bergson calls "distrait," aloof, absent-minded, intent
only, or mainly, on contemplation. That is why the ordinary man often
thinks the artist a fool, or, if he does not go so far as that, is made
vaguely uncomfortable by him, never really understands him. The artist's
focus, all his system of values, is different, his world is a world of
images which are his realities.
* * * * *
The distinction between art and ritual, which has so long haunted and
puzzled us, now comes out quite clearly, and also in part the relation
of each to actual life. Ritual, we saw, was a re-presentation or a
pre-presentation, a re-doing or pre-doing, a copy or imitation of life,
but,--and this is the important point,--always with a practical end. Art
is also a representation of life and the emotions of life, but cut loose
from immediate action. Action may be and often is represented, but it is
not that it may lead on to a practical further end. The end of art is in
itself. Its value is not mediate but _im_mediate. Thus ritual _makes, as
it were, a bridge between real life and art_, a bridge over which in
primitive times it would seem man must pass. In his actual life he hunts
and fishes and ploughs and sows, being utterly intent on the practical
end of gaining his food; in the _dromenon_ of the Spring Festival,
though his _acts_ are unpractical, being mere singing and dancing and
mimicry, his _intent_ is practical, to induce the return of his
food-supply. In the drama the representation may remain for a time the
same, but the intent is altered: man has come out from action, he is
separate from the dancers, and has become a spectator. The drama is an
end in itself.
* * * * *
We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became art, a _dromenon_
became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is symbolized and
expressed by the addition of the _theatre_, or spectator-place, to the
orchestra, or dancing-place. We have also tried to analyse the meaning
of the shift. It remains to ask what was its cause. Ritual does not
always develop into art, though in all probability dramatic art has
always to go through the stage of ritual. The leap from real life to the
emotional contemplation of life cut loose from action would otherwise be
too wide. Nature abhors a leap, she prefers to crawl over the ritual
bridge. There seem at Athens to have been two main causes why the
_dromenon_ passed swiftly, inevitably, into the drama. They are, first,
the decay of religious faith; second, the influx from abroad of a new
culture and new dramatic material.
It may seem surprising to some that the decay of religious faith should
be an impulse to the birth of art. We are accustomed to talk rather
vaguely of art "as the handmaid of religion"; we think of art as
"inspired by" religion. But the decay of religious faith of which we now
speak is not the decay of faith in a god, or even the decay of some high
spiritual emotion; it is the decay of a belief in the efficacy of
certain magical rites, and especially of the Spring Rite. So long as
people believed that by excited dancing, by bringing in an image or
leading in a bull you could induce the coming of Spring, so long would
the _dromena_ of the Dithyramb be enacted with intense enthusiasm, and
with this enthusiasm would come an actual accession and invigoration of
vital force. But, once the faintest doubt crept in, once men began to be
guided by experience rather than custom, the enthusiasm would die down,
and the collective invigoration no longer be felt. Then some day there
will be a bad summer, things will go all wrong, and the chorus will
sadly ask: "Why should I dance my dance?" They will drift away or become
mere spectators of a rite established by custom. The rite itself will
die down, or it will live on only as the May Day rites of to-day, a
children's play, or at best a thing done vaguely "for luck."
The spirit of the rite, the belief in its efficacy, dies, but the rite
itself, the actual mould, persists, and it is this ancient ritual mould,
foreign to our own usage, that strikes us to-day, when a Greek play is
revived, as odd and perhaps chill. A _chorus_, a band of dancers there
must be, because the drama arose out of a ritual dance. An _agon_, or
contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends
with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must
be tragic, must have its _pathos_, because the Winter, the Old Year, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]