01.02 - Part 1, Chapter 2

CHAPTER II NATURALISM AND ESTHETIC IN the last chapter I considered the effects which Naturalism must tend to produce upon the sentiments associated with Morality. I now proceed to consider the same question in connection with the sentiments known as aesthetic; and as I assumed that the former class were, like other evolutionary utilities, in the main produced by the normal operation of selection, so I now assume that the latter, being (at least in any developed stage) quite useless for the preservation of the individual or species, must be regarded, upon the naturalistic hypothesis, as mere byproducts of the great machinery by which organic life is varied and sustained. It will not, I hope, be supposed that I propose to offer this distinction as a material contribution towards the definition either of ethic or of aesthetic sentiments. This is a question in which I am in no way interested; and I am quite prepared to admit that some emotions which in ordinary language would be described as ’ moral,’ are useless enough to be included in the class of natural accidents; and also that this class may, indeed does, include many emotions which no one following common usage would characterise as aesthetic. The fact remains, however, that the capacity for every form of feeling must in the main either be, or not be, the direct result of selection and elimination; and whereas in the first section of the last chapter I considered the former class, taking moral emotion as their type, so now I propose to offer some observations on the second class, taking as their type the emotions excited by the Beautiful. Whatever value these Notes may have will not necessarily be affected by any error that I may have made in the apportionment between the two divisions, and the reader may make what redistribution he thinks fit, without thereby necessarily invalidating the substance of the conclusions which I offer for his acceptance.

I do not, however, anticipate that there will be any serious objection raised from the scientific side to the description of developed aesthetic emotion as ’accidental,’ in the sense in which that word is here employed. The obstacle I have to deal with in conducting the argument of this chapter is of a different kind. My object is to indicate the consequences which flow from a purely naturalistic treatment of the theory of the Beautiful; and I am at once met with the difficulty that, so far as I am aware, no such treatment has ever been attempted on a large scale, and that the fragmentary contributions which have been made to the subject do not meet with general acceptance on the part of scientific investigators themselves. To say that certain capacities for highly complex feeling are not the direct result of natural selection, and were not evolved to aid the race in the struggle for existence, may be a true, but is a purely negative account of the matter, and gives but little help in dealing with the two questions to which an answer is especially required: namely, What are the causes, historical, psychological, and physiological, which enable us to derive aesthetic gratification from some objects, and forbid us to derive it from others? and, Is there any fixed and permanent element in Beauty, any unchanging reality which we perceive in or through beautiful objects, and to which normal aesthetic feelings correspond?

Now, it is clear that on the naturalistic hypothesis the second question cannot be properly dealt with till some sort of answer has been given to the first; and the answers given to the first seem so unsatisfactory that they can hardly be regarded as even provisionally adequate. In order to realise the difficulties and, as I think, the shortcomings of existing theories on the subject, let us take the case of Music by far the most convenient of the Fine Arts for our purpose, partly because, unlike Architecture, it serves no very obvious purpose, 1 and we are thus absolved from

1 I may be permitted to ignore Mr. Spencer’s suggestion that ihe function of music is to promote sympathy by improving our modulation in speech. giving any opinion on the relation between beauty and utility; partly because, unlike Painting and Poetry, it has no external reference, and we are thus absolved from giving any opinion on the relation between beauty and truth. Of the inestimable blessings which these peculiarities carry with them, anyone may judge who has ever got bogged in the barren controversies concerning the Beautiful and the Useful, the Real and the Ideal, which fill so large a space in certain classes of aesthetic literature. Great indeed will he feel the advantages to be of dealing with an Art whose most characteristic utterances have so little directly to do, either with utility or truth.

What, then, is the cause of our delight in Music? It is sometimes hastily said to have originated in the ancestors of man through the action of sexual selection. This is of course impossible. Sexual selection can only work on materials already in existence. Like other forms of selection, it can improve, but it cannot create; and the capacity for enjoying music (or noise) on the part of the female, and the capacity for making it on the part of the male, must both have existed in a rudimentary state before matrimonial preferences can have improved either one gift or the other. I do not in any case quite understand how sexual selection is supposed even to improve the capacity for enjoyment. If the taste exist, it can no doubt develop the means required for its gratification; but how can it improve the taste itself? The females of certain species of spiders, I believe, like to see good dancing. Sexual selection, therefore, no doubt may gradually improve the dancing of the male. The females of many animals are, it seems, fond of particular kinds of noise. Sexual selection may therefore gradually furnish the male with the apparatus by which appropriate noises may be produced. In both cases, however, a pre-existing taste is the cause of the variation, not the variation of the taste; nor, except in the case of the advanced arts, which do not flourish at a period when those who successfully practise them have any advantage in the matrimonial struggle, does taste appear to be one of the necessary qualifications of the successful artist. Of course, if violin - playing were an important aid to courtship, sexual selection would tend to develop that musical feeling and discrimination, without which good violin-playing is impossible. But a grasshopper requires no artistic sensibility before it can successfully rub its wing-cases together; so that Nature is only concerned to provide the anatomical machinery by which such rubbing may result in a sibilation gratifying to the existing aesthetic sensibilities of the female, but cannot in any way be concerned in developing the artistic side of those sensibilities themselves.

Sexual selection, therefore, however well it may be fitted to give an explanation of a large number of animal noises and of the growth of the organs by which they are produced, throws but little light on the origin and development of musical feeling, either in animals or men. And the other explanations I have seen do not seem to me much better. Take, for instance, Mr. Spencer’s modification of Rousseau’s theory. According to Mr. Spencer, strong emotions are naturally accompanied by muscular exertion, and, among other muscular exertions, by contractions and extensions of ’ the muscles of the chest, abdomen, and vocal cords.’ The resultant noises recall by association the emotions which gave them birth, and from this primordial coincidence sprang, as we are asked to believe, first cadenced speech, and then music. Now I do not desire to quarrel with the ’ primordial coincidence.’ My point is, that even if it ever took place, it affords no explanation of any modern feeling for music. Grant that a particular emotion produced a ’ contraction of the abdomen,’ that the ’ contraction of the abdomen ’ produced a sound or series of sounds, and that, through this association with the originating emotion, the sound ultimately came to have independent aesthetic value, how are we advanced towards any explanation of the fact that quite different sound-effects now please us, and that the nearer we get to the original noises, the more hideous they appear? How does the ’ primordial coincidence ’ account for our ancestors liking the tom-tom? And how does the fact that our ancestors liked the tom-tom account for our liking the Ninth Symphony? The truth is that Mr. Spencer’s theory, like all others which endeavour to trace back the pleasuregiving qualities of art to some simple and original association, slurs over the real difficulties of the problem. If it is the primitive association which produces the pleasure-giving quality, the further this is left behind by the developing art, the less pleasure should be produced. Of course, if the art is continually fed from other associations and different experiences, if fresh emotional elements are constantly added to it capable of being worn and weathered into the fitting soil for an aesthetic harvest, in that case, no doubt, we may suppose that with each new development its pleasure - giving qualities may be enriched and multiplied. But then, it is to these new elements and to these new experiences, not to the ’ primordial coincidence,’ that we should mainly look for the causal explanation of our aesthetic feeling. In the case of music, where are these new elements and experiences to be found? None can tell us; few theorists even try. Indeed, the procedure of those who account for music by searching for the primitive association which first in the history of man or of his ancestors conferred aesthetic value upon noise, is as if one should explain the Amazon in its flood by pointing to the rivulet in the far Andes which, as the tributary most distant from its mouth, has the honour of being called its source. This may be allowed to stand as a geographical description, but it is very inadequate as a physical explanation. Dry up the rivulet, and the huge river would still flow on, without abatement or diminution. Only its titular origin has been touched; and if we would know the Amazon in its beginnings, and trace back the history of the vast result through all the complex ramifications of its contributory causes, each great confluent must be explored, each of the countless streams enumerated whose gathered waters sweep into the sea four thousand miles across the plain. The imperfection of this mode of procedure will become clear if we compare it with that adopted by the same school of theorists when they endeavour to explain the beauty of landscape. I do not mean to express any assent to their account of the causes of our feelings for scenery; on the contrary, these accounts seem to me untenable. But though untenable, they are not on the face of them inadequate. Natural objects the sky and hills, woods and waters are spread out before us as they were spread out before our remotest ancestors, and there is no obvious absurdity (if the hereditary transmission of acquired qualities be granted) in conceiving them, through the secular experience of mankind, to become charged with associations which reappear for us in the vague and massive form of aesthetic pleasure. But according to all association theories of music, that which is charged with the raw material of aesthetic pleasure is not the music we wish to have explained, but some primeval howl, or at best the unmusical variations of ordinary speech, and no solution whatever is offered of the paradox that the sounds which give musical delight have no associations, and that the sounds which have associations give no musical delight.

It is, perhaps, partly in consequence of these or analogous difficulties, but mainly in consequence of his views on heredity, which preclude him from accepting any theory which involves the transmission of acquired qualities, that Weismann gives an account of the musical sense which is practically equivalent to the denial that any explanation of the pleasure we derive from music is possible at all. For him, the faculties which enable us to appreciate and enjoy music were evolved for entirely different purposes, and it is a mere accident that, when they come into relation with certain combinations of sound, we obtain through their means aesthetic gratification. Mankind, no doubt, are continually inventing new musical devices, as they are continually inventing new dishes. But as the second process implies an advance in the art of cookery, but no transmitted modification in the human palate, so the former implies musical progress, but no change in the innate capacities of successive generations of listeners. 1

1 I have made no allusion to Helmholtz’s classic investigations, for these deal chiefly with the physical character of the sounds, or combinations of sound, which give us pleasure, but do not pretend fully to answer the question why they give pleasure.

II This is, perhaps, a sufficiently striking example of the unsatisfactory condition of scientific aesthetics, and may serve to show how difficult it is to find in the opinions of different authorities a common body of doctrine on which to rest the argument of this chapter. I should imagine, however, both from the speculations to which I have just briefly adverted, and from any others with which I am acquainted, that no person who is at all in sympathy with the naturalistic view of things would maintain that there anywhere exists an intrinsic and essential quality of beauty, independent of the feelings and the taste of the observer. The very nature, indeed, of the senses principally engaged indicates that on the naturalistic hypothesis they cannot, in most cases, refer to any external and permanent object of beauty. For Naturalism (as commonly held) is deeply committed to the distinction between the primary and the secondary qualities of matter; the former (extension, solidity, and so forth) being supposed to exist as they are perceived, while the latter (such as sound and colour) are due to the action of the primary qualities upon the sentient organism, and apart from the sentient organism have no independent being. Every scene in Nature, therefore, and every work of art, whose beauty consists either directly or indirectly, either presentatively or representatively, in colour or in sound, has, and can have, no more permanent existence than is possessed by that relation between the senses and our material environment which gave them birth, and in the absence of which they perish. If we could perceive the succession of events which constitute a sunset exactly as they occur, as they are (physically, not metaphysically speaking) in themselves, they would, so far as we can guess, have no aesthetic merit, or even meaning. If we could perform the same operation on a symphony, it would end in a like result. The first would be no more than a special agitation of the ether; the second would be no more than a special agitation of the air. However much they might excite the curiosity of the physicist or the mathematician, for the artist they could no longer possess either interest or significance.

It might, however, be said that the Beautiful, although it cannot be called permanent as compared with the general framework of the external world, is, nevertheless, sufficiently permanent for all human purposes, inasmuch as it depends upon fixed relations between our senses and their material surroundings. Without at present stopping to dispute this, let us consider whether we have any right to suppose that even this degree of ’ objectivity ’ can be claimed for the quality of beauty. In order to settle the question we can, on the naturalistic hypothesis, appeal, it would seem, to only one authority, namely, the experience of mankind. Does this, then, provide us with any evidence that beauty is more than the name for a miscellaneous flux of endlessly varying causes, possessing no property in common, except that at some place, at some time, and in some person, they have shown themselves able to evoke the kind of feeling which we choose to describe as aesthetic?

Put thus there seems room for but one answer. The variations of opinion on the subject of beauty are notorious. Discordant pronouncements are made by different races, different ages, different individuals, the same individual at different times. Nor does it seem possible to devise any scheme by which an authoritative verdict can be extracted from this chaos of contradiction. An appeal, indeed, is sometimes made from the opinion of the vulgar to the decision of persons of ’ trained sensibility ’; and there is no doubt that, as a matter of fact, through the action of those who profess to belong to this class, an orthodox tradition has grown up which may seem at first sight almost to provide some faint approximation to the ’ objective ’ standard of which we are in search. Yet it will be evident on consideration that it is not simply on their ’ trained sensibility ’ that experts rely in forming their opinion. The ordinary critical estimate of a work of art is the result of a highly complicated set of antecedents, and by no means consists in a simple and naked valuation of the ’ aesthetic thrill ’ which the aforesaid work produces in the critic, now and here. If it were so, clearly it could not be of any importance to the art critic when and by whom any particular work of art was produced. Problems of age and questions of authorship would be left entirely to the historian, and the student of the beautiful would, as such, ask himself no question but this: How and why are my aesthetic sensibilities affected by this statue, poem, picture, as it is in itself? or (to put the same thing in a form less open to metaphysical disputation), What would my feelings towards it be if I were totally ignorant of its date, its author, and the circumstances of its production? As we all know, these collateral considerations are never in practice ignored by the critic. He is preoccupied, and rightly preoccupied, by a multitude of questions beyond the mere valuation of the outstanding amount of aesthetic enjoyment which, in the year 1892, any artistic or literary work, taken simpliciter, is, as a matter of fact, capable of producing. He is much concerned with its technical peculiarities. He is anxious to do justice to its author, to assign him his true rank among the productive geniuses of his age and country, to make due allowance for his ’ environment,’ for the traditions in which he was nurtured, for the causes which make his creative genius embody itself in one form rather than in another. Never for one instant does the critic forget, or allow his reader to forget, that the real magnitude of the foreshortened object under observation must be estimated by the rules of historical perspective. Never does he omit, in dealing with the artistic legacies of bygone times, to take account of any long - accepted opinion which may exist concerning them. He endeavours to make himself the exponent of the ’correct view.’ His judgment is, consciously or unconsciously, but not, I think, wrongly, a sort of compromise between that which he would form if he drew solely from his own inner experience, and that which has been formed for him by the accumulated wisdom of his predecessors on the bench. He expounds case made law. He is partly the creature and partly the creator of a critical tradition; and we can easily conjecture how devious his course would be, were his orbit not largely controlled by the attraction of received views, if we watch the disastrous fate which so often overtakes him when he pronounces judgment on new works, or on works of which there is no estimate embodied in any literary creed which he thinks it necessary to respect. Voltaire’s opinion of Shakespeare does not make one think less of Voltaire, but it throws an interesting light on the genesis of average critical decisions and the normal growth of taste. From these considerations, which might easily be supplemented, it seems plain that the opinions of critical experts represent, not an objective standard, if such a thing there be, but an historical compromise. The agreement among them, so far as such a thing is to be found, is not due solely to the fact that with their own eyes they all see the same things, and therefore say the same things; it is not wholly the result of a common experience: it arises in no small measure from their sympathetic endeavours to see as others have seen, to feel as others have felt, to judge as others have judged. This may be, and I suppose is, the fairest way of comparing the merits of deceased artists. But, at the same time, it makes it impossible for us to attach much weight to the assumed consensus of the ages, or to suppose that this, so far as it exists, implies the reality of a standard independent of the varying whims and fancies of individual critics. In truth, however, the consensus of the ages, even about the greatest works of creative genius, is not only in part due to the process of critical manufacture indicated above, but its whole scope and magnitude are absurdly exaggerated in the phrases which pass current on the subject. This is not a question, be it observed, of aesthetic right and wrong, of good taste or bad taste; it is a question of statistics. We are not here concerned with what the mass of mankind, even of educated mankind, ought to feel, but with what t as a matter of fact they do feel, about the works of literature and art which they have inherited from the past. And I believe that every impartial observer will admit that, of the aesthetic emotion actually experienced by any generation, the merest fraction is due to the ’ immortal ’ productions of the generations which have long preceded it. Their immortality is largely an immortality of libraries and museums; they supply material to critics and historians, rather than enjoyment to mankind; and if it were to be maintained that one music-hall song gives more aesthetic pleasure in a night than the most exquisite compositions of Palestrina in a decade, I know not how the proposition could be refuted. The ancient Norsemen supposed that besides the soul of the dead, which went to the region of departed spirits, there survived a ghost, haunting, though not for ever, the scenes of his earthly labours. At first vivid and almost lifelike, it slowly waned and faded, until at length it vanished, leaving behind it no trace or memory of its spectral presence amidst the throng of living men. So, it seems to me, is the immortality we glibly predicate of departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which imagination holds the secret. Driven from the market-place, they become first the companions of the student, then the victims of the specialist. He who would still hold familiar intercourse with them must train himself to penetrate the veil which, in ever-thickening folds, conceals them from the ordinary gaze; he must catch the tone of a vanished society, he must move in a circle of alien associations, he must think in a language not his own. Need we, then, wonder that under such conditions the outfit of a critic is as much intellectual as emotional, or that if from off the complex sentiments with which they regard the ’ immortal legacies of the past ’ we strip all that is due to interests connected with history, with biography, with critical analyses, with scholarship, and with technique, but a small modicum will, as a rule, remain which can with justice be attributed to pure aesthetic sensibility.

Ill

I have, however, no intention of implying by the preceding observations that the aesthetic feelings of ’ the vulgar ’ are less sophisticated than those of the learned. A very cursory examination of ’ public taste’ and its revolutions may suffice to convince anyone of the contrary. And, in the first place, let us ask why every ’ public ’ has a taste? And why, at least in Western communities, that taste is so apt to alter? Why, in other words, do communities or sections of communities so often feel the same thing at the same time, and so often feel different things at different times? Why is there so much uniformity, and why is there so much change?

These questions are of great interest, although they have not, perhaps, met with all the attention they deserve. In these Notes it would not be fitting to attempt to deal with them at length, and I shall only offer observations on two points which seem relevant to the design of the present chapter. The question of Uniformity is best approached at the humbler end of the aesthetic scale, in connection, not with art in its narrower and loftier sense, but with dress. Everybody is acquainted, either by observation or by personal experience, with the coercive force of fashion; but not everybody is aware what an instructive and interesting phenomenon it presents. Consider the case of bonnets. During the same season all persons belonging, or aspiring to belong, to the same ’ public,’ if they wear bonnets at all, wear bonnets modelled on the same type. Why do they do this? If we were asking a similar question, not about bonnets, but about steam engines, the answer would be plain. People tend at the same date to use the same kind of engine for the same kind of purpose because it is the best available. They change their practice when a better one is invented. But as so used the words ’ better* and ’ best ’ have no application to modern dress. Neither efficiency nor economy, it will at once be admitted, supplies the grounds of choice or the motives for variation.

If, again, we were asking the question about some great phase of art, we should probably be told that the general acceptance of it by a whole generation was due to some important combination of historic causes, acting alike on artist and on public. Such causes no doubt exist and have existed; but the case of fashion proves that uniformity is not produced by them alone, since it will hardly be pretended that there is any widely diffused cause in the social environment, except the coercive operation of fashion itself, which should make the bonnets which were thought becoming in 1881 unbecoming in the year 1892.

Again, we might be told that art contains essential principles of self-development, which require one productive phase to succeed another by a kind of inner necessity, and determine not merely that there shall be variation, but what that variation shall be. This also may be, and is, in a certain sense, true. But it can hardly be supposed that we can explain the fashions which prevail in any year by assuming, not merely that the fashions of the previous years were foredoomed to change, but also that, in the nature of the case, only one change was possible, that, namely, which actually took place. Such a doctrine would be equivalent to saying that if all the bonnet wearers were for a space deprived of any knowledge of each other’s proceedings (all other things remaining the same), they would, on the resumption of their ordinary intercourse, find that they had all inclined towards much the same modification of the type of bonnet prevalent before their separation a conclusion which seems to me, I confess, to be somewhat improbable.

It may perhaps be hazarded, as a further explanation, that this uniformity of practice is indeed a fact, and is really produced by a complex group of causes which we denominate ’ fashion,’ but that it is a uniformity of practice alone, not of taste or feeling, and has no real relation to any aesthetic problem whatever. This is a question the answer to which can be supplied, I apprehend, by observation alone; and the answer which observation enables us to give seems to me quite unambiguous. If, as is possible, my readers have but small experience in such matters themselves, let them examirie the experiences of their acquaintance. They will find, if I mistake not, that by whatever means conformity to a particular pattern may have been brought about, those who conform are not, as a rule, conscious of coercion by an external and arbitrary authority. They do not act under penalty; they yield no unwilling obedience. On the contrary, their admiration for a ’ well-dressed person,’ qud well-dressed, is at least as genuine an aesthetic approval as any they are in the habit of expressing for other forms of beauty; just as their objection to an outworn fashion is based on a perfectly genuine aesthetic dislike. They are repelled by the unaccustomed sight, as a reader of discrimination is repelled by turgidity or false pathos. It appears to them ugly, even grotesque, and they turn from it with an aversion as disinterested, as unperturbed by personal or ’ society ’ considerations, as if they were critics contemplating the production of some pretender in the region of Great Art. In truth this tendency in matters aesthetic is only a particular case of a general tendency to agreement which plays an even more important part in other departments of human activity. Its operation, beneficent doubtless on the whole, may be traced through all social and political life. We owe to it in part that deep-lying likeness in tastes, in opinions, and in habits, without which cohesion among the individual units of a community would be impossible, and which constitutes the unmoved platform on which we fight out our political battles. It is no contemptible factor among the forces by which nations are created and religions disseminated and maintained. It is the very breath of life to sects and coteries. Sometimes, no doubt, its results are ludicrous. Sometimes they are unfortunate. Sometimes merely insignificant. Under which of these heads we should class our ever-changing uniformity in dress I will not take upon me to determine. It is sufficient for my present purpose to point out that the aesthetic likings which fashion originates, however trivial, are perfectly genuine; and that to an origin similar in kind, however different in dignity and permanence, should be traced much of the characteristic quality which gives its special flavour to the higher artistic sentiments of each successive generation.

IV

It is, of course, true that this ’ tendency to agreement,’ 1 this principle of drill, cannot itself determine the objects in respect of which the agreement is to take place. It can do much to make every member of a particular ’ public ’ like the same bonnet, or the same epic, at the same time; but it cannot determine what that bonnet or that epic is to be. A fashion, as the phrase goes, has to be ’ set,’ and the persons who set it manifestly do not follow it. What, then, do they follow? We note the influences that move the flock. What moves the bell-wether?

Here again much might conveniently be learnt from an examination of fashion and its changes, for these provide us with a field of research where we are disturbed by no preconceived theories or inconvenient admirations, and where we may dissect our subject with the cold impartiality which befits scientific investigation. The reader, however, may think that enough has been done already by this method; and I shall accordingly pursue a more general treatment of the subject, premising that in the brief observations which follow no complete

1 Of course the ’ tendency to agreement ’ is not presented to the reader as a simple, undecomposable social force. It is, doubtless, highly complex, one of its most important elements being, I sup*’ pose, the instinct of uncritical imitation, which is the very basis of all effective education. The line of thought hinted at in this paragraph is pursued much further in the Third Part of this Essay. analysis pf the complexity of concrete Nature is attempted, or is, indeed, necessary for my purpose.

It will be convenient, in the first place, to distinguish between the mode in which the public who enjoy, and the artists who produce, respectively promote aesthetic change. That the public are often weary and expectant weary of what is provided for them, and expectant of some good thing to come will hardly be denied. Yet I do not think they can be usually credited with the conscious demand for a fresh artistic development. For though they often want some new thing, they do not often want a new kind of thing; and accordingly it commonly, though not invariably, happens that, when the new thing appears, it is welcomed at first by the few, and only gradually by the force of fashion and otherwise conquers the genuine admiration of the many. The artist, on the other hand, is moved in no small measure by a desire that his work should be his own, no pale reflection of another’s methods, but an expression of himself in his own language. He will vary for the better if he can, yet, rather than be conscious of repetition, he will vary for the worse; for vary he must, either in substance or in form, unless he is to be in his own eyes, not a creator, but an imitator; not an artist, but a copyist. 1 It will be observed that I am not obliged to

1 No doubt it is an echo of this feeling that makes purchasers commonly prefer a bad original to the best copy of the best original a preference which in argument it would be exceedingly difficult to justify. draw the dividing-line between originality and plagiarism; to distinguish between the man who is one of a school, and the man who has done no more than merely catch the trick of a master. It is enough that the artist himself draws the distinction, and will never consciously allow himself to sink from the first category into the second.

We have here, then, a general cause of change, but not a cause of change in any particular direction, or of any particular amount. These I believe to be determined in part by the relation between the artists and the public for whom they produce, and in part by the condition of the art itself at the time the change occurs. As regards the first, it is commonly said that the artist is the creation of his age, and the discovery of this fact is sometimes thought to be a momentous contribution made by science to the theory of aesthetic evolution. The statement, however, is unfortunately worded. The action of the age is, no doubt, important, but it would be more accurate, I imagine, to describe it as destructive than as creative; it does not so much produce as select. It is true, of course, that the influence of ’ the environment ’ in moulding, developing, and stimulating genius within the limits of its original capacity is very great, and may seem, especially in the humbler walks of artistic production, to be all powerful. But innate and original genius is not the creation of any age. It is a biological accident, the incalculable product of two sets of ancestral tendencies; and what the age does to these biological accidents is not to create them, but to choose from them, to encourage those which are in harmony with its spirit, to crush out and to sterilise the rest. Its action is analogous to that which a plot of ground exercises on the seeds which fall upon it. Some thrive, some languish, some die; and the resulting vegetation is sharply characterised, not because few kinds of seed have there sown themselves, but because few kinds have been allowed to grow up. Without pushing the parallel too far, it may yet serve to illustrate the truth that, as a stained window derives its character and significance from the absorption of a large portion of the rays which endeavour to pass through it, so an age is what it is, not only by reason of what it fosters, but as much, perhaps, by reason of what it destroys. We may conceive, then, that from the total but wholly unknown number of men of productive capacity born in any generation, those whose gifts are in harmony with the tastes of their contemporaries will produce their best; those whose gifts are wholly out of harmony will be extinguished, or, which is very nearly the same thing, will produce only for the benefit of the critics in succeeding generations; while those who occupy an intermediate position will, indeed, produce, but their powers will, consciously or unconsciously, be warped and thwarted, and their creations fall short of what, under happier circumstances, they might have been able to achieve.

Here, then, we have a tendency to change arising out of the artist’s insistence on originality, and a limitation on change imposed by the character of the age in which he lives. The kind of change will be largely determined by the condition of the art which he is practising. If it be in an early phase, full as yet of undeveloped possibilities, then in all probability he will content himself with improving on his predecessors, without widely deviating from the lines they have laid down. For this is the direction of least resistance: here is no public taste to be formed, here are no great experiments to be tried, here the pioneer’s rough work of discovery has already been accomplished. But if this particular fashion of art has culminated, and be in its decline; if, that is to say, the artist feels more and more difficulty in expressing himself through it, without saying worse what his predecessors have said already, then one of three things happens either originality is perforce sought for in exaggeration; or a new style is invented; or artistic creation is abandoned and the field is given up to mere copyists. Which of these events shall happen depends, no doubt, partly on the accident of genius, but it depends, I think, still more on the prevailing taste. If, as has frequently happened, that taste be dominated by the memory of past ideals; if the little public whom the big public follow are content with nothing that does not conform to certain ancient models, a period of artistic sterility is inevitable. But if circumstances be more propitious, then art continues to move; the direction and character of its movement being due partly to the special turn of genius possessed by the artist who succeeds in producing a public taste in harmony with his powers, and partly to the reaction of the taste thus created, or in process of creation, upon the general artistic talent of the community.

Even, however, in those periods when the movement of art is most striking, it is dangerous to assume that movement implies progress, if by progress be meant increase in the power to excite (esthetic emotion. It would be rash to assume this even as regards Music, where the movement has been more remarkable, more continuous, and more apparently progressive over a long period of time than in any other art whatever. In music, the artist’s desire for originality of expression has been aided generation after generation by the discovery of new methods, new forms, new instruments. From the bare simplicity of the ecclesiastical chant or the village dance to the ordered complexity of the modern score, the art has passed through successive stages of development, in each of which genius has discovered devices of harmony, devices of instrumentation, and devices of rhythm which would have been musical paradoxes to preceding generations, and became musical commonplaces to the generations that followed after. Yet, what has been the net gain? Read through the long catena of critical judgments, from Wagner back (if you please) to Plato, which every age has passed on its own performances, and you will find that to each of them its music has been as adequate as ours is to us. It moved them not less deeply, nor did it move them differently; and compositions which for us have lost their magic, and which we regard as at best but agreeable curiosities, contained for them the secret of all the unpictured beauties which music shows to her worshippers.

Surely there is here a great paradox. The history of Literature and Art is tolerably well known to us for many hundreds of years. During that period Poetry and Sculpture and Painting have been subject to the usual mutations of fashion; there have been seasons of sterility and seasons of plenty; schools have arisen and decayed; new nations and languages have been pressed into the service of Art; old nations have fallen out of line. But it is not commonly supposed that at the end of it all we are much better off than the Greeks of the age of Pericles in respect of the technical dexterity of the artist, or of the resources which he has at his command. During the same period, and measured by the same external standard, the development of Music has been so great that it is not, I think, easy to exaggerate it. Yet, through all this vast revolution, the position and importance of the art as compared with other arts seem, so far as 1 can discover, to have suffered no sensible change. It was as great four hundred years before Christ as it is at the present moment. It was as great in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as it is in the nineteenth. How, then, can we resist the conclusion that this amazing musical development, produced by the expenditure of so much genius, has added little to the felicity of mankind; unless, indeed, it so happens that in his particular art a steady level of aesthetic sensation can only be maintained by increasing doses of aesthetic stimulant.

These somewhat desultory observations do not, it must be acknowledged, carry us very far towards that of which we are in search, namely, a theory of aesthetics in harmony with naturalism. Yet, on recapitulation, negative conclusions of some importance will, I think, be seen to follow from them. It is clear, for instance, that those who, like Goethe, long to dwell among ’ permanent relations wherever else they may find them, will at least not find them in or behind the feeling of beauty. Such permanent relations do, indeed, exist, binding in their unchanging framework the various forms of energy and matter which make up the physical universe; but it is not the perception of these which, either in Nature or in art, stirs within us aesthetic emotion else should we find our surest guides to beauty in an astronomical chart or a table of chemical equivalents, and nothing would seem to us of less aesthetic significance than a symphony or a love-song. That which is beautiful is not the object as we know it to be the vibrating molecule and the undulating ether but the object as we know it not to be glorious with qualities of colour or of sound. Nor can its beauty be supposed to last any longer than the transient reaction between it and our special senses, which are assuredly not permanent or important elements in the constitution of the world in which we live. But even within these narrow limits narrow, I mean, compared with the wide sweep of our scientific vision there seemed to be no ground for supposing that there is in Nature any standard of beauty to which all human tastes tend to conform, any beautiful objects which all normally constituted individuals are moved to admire, any aesthetic judgments which can claim to be universal. The divergence between different tastes is, indeed, not only notorious, but is what we should have expected. As our aesthetic feelings are not due to natural selection, natural selection will have no tendency to keep them uniform and stable. In this respect they differ, as I have said, from ethical sentiments and beliefs. Deviations from sound morality are injurious either to the individual or to the community those who indulge in them are at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence; hence, on the naturalistic hypothesis, the approximation to identity in the accepted codes of different nations. But there is, fortunately, no natural punishment annexed to bad taste; and accordingly the variation between tastes has passed into a proverb.

Even in those cases where some slender thread of similarity seemed to bind together the tastes of different times or different persons, further consideration showed that this was largely due to causes which can by no possibility be connected with any supposed permanent element in beauty. The agreement, for example, between critics, in so far as it exists, is to no small extent an agreement in statement and in analysis, rather than an agreement in feeling; they have the same opinion as to the cooking of the dinner, but they by no means^all eat it with the same relish. In few cases, indeed, do their estimates of excellence correspond with the living facts of aesthetic emotion as shown either in themselves or in anybody else. Their whole procedure, necessary though it may be for the comparative estimate of the worth of individual artists, unduly conceals the vast and arbitrary 1 changes by which the taste of one generation is divided from that of another. And when we turn from critical tradition to the aesthetic likes and dislikes of men and women; when we leave the admirations which are professed for the emotions which are felt, we find 1 ’Arbitrary,’ i.e. not due to any causes which point to the existence of objective beauty. in vast multitudes of cases that these are not connected with the object which happens to excite them by any permanent aesthetic bond at all. Their true determining cause is to be sought in fashion, in that ’tendency to agreement’ which plays so large and beneficent a part in social economy. Nor, in considering the causes which produce the rise and fall of schools, and all the smaller mutations in the character of aesthetic production, did we perceive more room for the belief that there is somewhere to be found a permanent element in the beautiful. There is no evidence that these changes constitute stages in any process of gradual approximation to an unchanging standard; they are not born of any strivings after some ideal archetype; they do not, like the movements of science, bring us ever nearer to central and immutable truth. On the contrary, though schools are born, mature, and perish, though ancient forms decay, and new ones are continually devised, this restless movement is, so far as science can pronounce, without meaning or purpose, the casual product of the quest after novelty, determined in its course by incalculable forces, by accidents of genius, by accidents of public humour, involving change but not progress, and predestined, perhaps,"to end universally, as at many times and in many places it has ended already, in a mood of barren acquiescence in the repetition of ancient models, the very Nirvana of artistic imagination, without desire and without pain. And yet the persistent and almost pathetic endeavours of aesthetic theory to show that the beautiful is a necessary and unchanging element in the general scheme of things, if they prove nothing else, may at least convince us that mankind will not easily reconcile themselves to the view which the naturalistic theory of the world would seemingly compel them to accept. We feel no difficulty, perhaps, in admitting the full consequences of that theory at the lower end of the aesthetic scale, in the region, for instance," of bonnets and wall-papers. We may tolerate it even when it deals with important elements in the highest art, such as the sense of technical excellence, or sympathy with the craftsman’s skill. But when we look back on those too rare moments when feelings stirred in us by some beautiful object not only seem wholly to absorb us, but to raise us to the vision of things far above the ken of bodily sense or discursive reason, we cannot acquiesce in any attempt at explanation which confines itself to the bare enumeration of psychological and physiological causes and effects. We cannot willingly assent to a theory which makes a good composer only diifer from a good cook in that he deals in more complicated relations, moves in a wider circle of associations, and arouses our feelings through a different sense. However little, therefore, we may be prepared to accept any particular scheme of metaphysical aesthetics and most of these appear to me to be very absurd we must believe that somewhere and for some Being there shines an unchanging splendour of beauty, of which in Nature and in Art we see, each of us from our own standpoint, only passing gleams and stray reflections, whose different aspects we cannot now coordinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend, but which at least is something other than the chance play of subjective sensibility or the far-off echo of ancestral lusts. No such mystical creed can, however, be squeezed out of observation and experiment; Science cannot give it us; nor can it be forced into any sort of consistency with the Naturalistic Theory of the Universe.