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Page 31
It is not different with the author who writes a historical novel or
drama. Every man's life is crowded with the trivialities of the day. The
scholarly historian may have to look into them; the artist selects those
events in his hero's life which truly express his personality and which
are fit to sustain the significant plot. The more he brings those few
elements out of the many into sharp relief, the more he stimulates our
interest and makes us really feel with the persons of his novel or
drama. The sculptor even selects one single position. He cannot, like
the painter, give us any background, he cannot make his hero move as on
the theater stage. The marble statue makes the one position of the hero
everlasting, but this is so selected that all the chance aspects and
fleeting gestures of the real man appear insignificant compared with the
one most expressive and most characteristic position which is chosen.
However far this selection of the essential traits removes the artistic
creation from the mere imitative reproduction of the world, a much
greater distance from reality results from a second need if the work is
to fulfill the purposes of art. We saw that we have art only when the
work is isolated, that is, when it fulfills every demand in itself and
does not point beyond itself. This can be done only if it is sharply set
off from the sphere of our practical interests. Whatever enters into our
practical sphere links itself with our impulses to real action and the
action would involve a change, an intrusion, an influence from without.
As long as we have the desire to change anything, the work is not
complete in itself. The relation of the work to us as persons must not
enter into our awareness of it at all. As soon as it does, that complete
restfulness of the esthetic enjoyment is lost. Then the object becomes
simply a part of our practical surroundings. The fundamental condition
of art, therefore, is that we shall be distinctly conscious of the
unreality of the artistic production, and that means that it must be
absolutely separated from the real things and men, that it must be
isolated and kept in its own sphere. As soon as a work of art tempts us
to take it as a piece of reality, it has been dragged into the sphere of
our practical action, which means our desire to put ourselves into
connection with it. Its completeness in itself is lost and its value for
our esthetic enjoyment has faded away.
Now we understand why it is necessary that each art should have its
particular method for fundamentally changing reality. Now we recognize
that it is by no means a weakness of sculpture that the marble statue
has not the colors of life but a whiteness unlike any human being. Nor
does it appear a deficiency in the painting or the drawing that it can
offer two dimensions only and has no means to show us the depth of real
nature. Now we grasp why the poet expresses his feelings and thoughts in
the entirely unnatural language of rhythms and rhymes. Now we see why
every work of art has its frame or its base or its stage. Everything
serves that central purpose, the separation of the offered experience
from the background of our real life. When we have a painted garden
before us, we do not want to pick the flowers from the beds and break
the fruit from the branches. The flatness of the picture tells us that
this is no reality, in spite of the fact that the size of the painting
may not be different from that of the windowpane through which we see a
real garden. We have no thought of bringing a chair or a warm coat for
the woman in marble. The work which the sculptor created stands before
us in a space into which we cannot enter, and because it is entirely
removed from the reality toward which our actions are directed we become
esthetic spectators only. The smile of the marble girl wins us as if it
came from a living one, but we do not respond to her welcome. Just as
she appears in her marble form she is complete in herself without any
relation to us or to anyone else. The very difference from reality has
given her that self-sustained perfect life.
If we read in a police report about burglaries, we may lock our house
more securely; if we read about a flood, we may send our mite; if we
read about an elopement, we may try to find out what happened later. But
if we read about all these in a short story, we have esthetic enjoyment
only if the author somehow makes it perfectly clear to us by the form of
the description that this burglary and flood and elopement do not belong
to our real surroundings and exist only in the world of imagination. The
extreme case comes to us in the theater performance. We see there real
human beings a few feet from us; we see in the melodrama how the villain
approaches his victim from behind with a dagger; we feel indignation and
anger: and yet we have not the slightest desire to jump up on the stage
and stay his arm. The artificial setting of the stage, the lighted
proscenium before the dark house, have removed the whole action from the
world which is connected with our own deeds. The consciousness of
unreality, which the theater has forced on us, is the condition for our
dramatic interest in the events presented. If we were really deceived
and only for a moment took the stage quarrel and stage crime to be real,
we would at once be removed from the height of esthetic joy to the level
of common experience.
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