The Philosophy of Enjoyment of Art

THE question, Why do we enjoy pictures ? which must at times occur to every one who has to do with art (if, indeed, in moments of discouragement, it does not formulate itself more dryly as, Do we enjoy pictures ?), is intimately bound up with another inquiry, namely, What pictures do we enjoy ?

That aesthetics is still the vaguest and most fantastic branch of psychology is perhaps owing to the fact that people have attempted to answer these two questions separately : on the one hand, psychologists endeavor to deduce all art enjoyment from the experiences of the child or the savage; and on the other, connoisseurs devote their attention to the study of history and documents relating to art, and to the reconstruction of ancient masters. Thus, while Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Psychology, illustrates his views of the “ æsthetic sentiments ” by nothing more illuminating than “ the battle-scenes of Vernet and the pieces of Gérôme,” and Morelli elaborately reconstructs the various phases of a Bachiacca or an Ambrogio da Predis, those whose only desire is to enjoy the best art in the most appreciative way receive no answer to their question, How and what shall I enjoy in order to get the utmost pleasure from pictures ? It might therefore have been predicted that such a class of amateurs — and they form by far the greater number of those into whose lives art enters — would, if they took any interest in more abstract problems, remain unsatisfied by the application of mere metaphysics or mere learning to a matter which, for them, is either a question of enjoyment or nothing, and that no treatment of the subject could be adequately carried out except by a writer who was competent to answer both the how and the why of art enjoyment.

Such competence, we believe, is possessed by Mr. Bernhard Berenson. whose small volume on The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance ¹ forms the subject of the present paper. In his Venetian Painters, a preceding volume of a series which is planned to include the whole of Italian painting during the Renaissance, Mr. Berenson proved himself well acquainted with the historical aspects of his subject; while in his Lorenzo Lotto, already noticed in these pages, he brought to bear upon the problem of reconstructing the artistic personality of a neglected though fascinating painter an unusual degree of skill in the use of all the delicate instruments of scientific connoisseurship. Moreover, in the lists of works by the great masters that he submits to our attention, he has shown that, so far as research, taste, and discrimination can go, he is fully competent to answer one, at any rate, of the questions, namely, what to enjoy in the world’s heritage of art.

Thus, when he turns, as he has done in this volume about the Florentines, to the question of why and how we enjoy the masterpieces which he and other people well trained in the appreciation of art have selected for us as being really great, we are entitled to expect something more precise and helpful than the theories elaborated by people who have never taken a discriminating pleasure in æsthetic objects. How, then, does Mr. Berenson treat this interesting question ?

Setting aside those elements in painting which it has in common with literature, — that is to say, all the elements of association with sentiment, the suggestions of pleasant scenes, attractive types, and the emotional states induced by these, — setting aside all, in fine, that we call “ poetic ” in a picture, as not being the specific elements of enjoyment capable of being afforded by painting, and by nothing else, the author proceeds to analyze the elements which are peculiar to the art of painting; judging that these, and these alone, must be the sources of our specifically artistic pleasure. The result, he finds, is, at first hearing, a decided shock ; yet when we examine it, it is so simple, so severely logical, so true to our most intimate sensations, that we feel as if we had always known it.

The art of painting is differentiated from nature and from all the other arts, not by color, which it shares with nature itself, with pottery, rugs, etc., but by the fact that on a surface of two dimensions it represents objects that have three ; and painting, furthermore, along with sculpture, is peculiar in that it represents movement by means of objects actually motionless. In form and movement, then, Mr. Berenson finds the essence of the representative arts. But how do we realize represented form and movement ? It sounds at first almost as comic to say that we enjoy pictures by the sense of touch as it would to assert that our enjoyment of music comes to us through our sense of smell; nevertheless. if we follow our author’s brief yet convincing account of how it is that represented form and movement become to us a source of æsthetic pleasure, we shall be forced to admit that, although crude finger-tips are not in question, the sense of touch — that is to say, of resistance to pressure and of varying muscular adjustments — does lie at the bottom of the matter.

Although it has recently become a moot point whether or not touch really is, what the old psychologies called it, the “parent sense,” from which all the other senses have been derived by process of evolution, yet no one has denied that touch plays a leading part in forming our notions of reality. Even if we do not at first see things flat, as we used to be taught, it is only when to the merely visual impressions of the world we have added an infinity of muscular experiences that our perception of things about us becomes definite. It is largely, if not wholly, by means of touch that we learn to appreciate distance, solidity, and motion. If we speak of the third dimension, we mean a space corresponding to certain muscular sensations ; if of solidity, we mean a resistance to certain muscular pressures ; if of movement, we mean a correspondence to muscular experiences of our own organisms. Thus, in order vividly to realize the solidity of objects, and their position or movement in space, our sense of touch must be called into play, either actually or through remembrance and imagination. Painting, whose peculiar task it is to represent objects of three dimensions upon a surface that has only two, must therefore call the sense of touch to its aid, if it is to succeed in making a vivid impression ; while both painting and sculpture, which have to represent movement by means of objects actually stationary, can do it successfully only by appealing to the muscular sense, — to touch in another form.

This merely abstract chain of reasoning would lead us to an a priori conclusion, namely, that those paintings which succeed in rousing the imagination of touch (actual handling is of course out of the question) are the only ones which solve the problems peculiar to their art, — the representation of form and movement, — and are, consequently, the pictures which we must regard as great art.

But what are the facts ? Testing the theory by applying it in a concrete case, Mr. Berenson finds it to be not only a formula upon which he can hang all the great masterpieces of Florentine art, without exception, but one which explains as well the hierarchy of the artists of that school, accounting for the supremacy of the great masters, Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, over their illustrious and often, at first blush, more attractive fellow-craftsmen, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo, Ghirlandaio, Andrea, and the rest. Florentine art, as he points out, does not attempt to win us by charm of color, beauty of types, or exalting effects of space composition. From Giotto to Michelangelo it is almost exclusively devoted to the human figure, in repose or movement, and Mr. Berenson would have us believe that the profound hold Florentine art has upon us is due to the fact that it persistently devoted almost its whole energy to the rendering of form and movement,— the specific task of the art of painting.

If we admit with our author that “ successful grappling with problems of form and movement is at the bottom of the higher arts,” we shall probably follow him a step farther, when, in connection with Michelangelo, he discusses the world-old question of the nude in art, and explains, on the basis of the same formula, the fact that the figure arts find, and inevitably must find, in the nude their most absorbing interest. Granting that the success of painting in its specific task depends upon making us realize three dimensions by means of two, and movements by means of objects actually motionless; and granting further that the only way in which it can make us realize space, solidity, and movement is by appealing powerfully to our ideated sense of touch,— by compelling us, in other words, to get upon our own persons the sensation of all the pressures and strains and of all the muscular tension that the objects themselves would give us in real experience, — granting all this, as we can scarcely fail to do if we have followed the argument so far, the mere statement of the question What lends itself most readily to such vivid realization ? suggests the inevitable answer. What can be so easy to realize in ideated muscular sensations as the human body ? But Mr. Berenson goes still farther into the matter. He accounts for the possibility of our realizing represented movement in a vivid way by the mimetic element in our natures, which makes it almost certain that we shall tend to imitate nearly every motion that we see, whether in real life or in representation. Now, what so easy to imitate in its movements as the human body ?

We have stated the problem of the nude in art in a way that appears, perhaps, foolishly simple, but we have been obliged to summarize Mr. Berenson’s interesting discussion of this point in order to leave space for a still more important matter. So far we have considered only the author’s view of what are the specific elements in the art of painting, — that is to say, form and movement, — and his explanation of how we realize these specific elements. But the question of why, when we have once realized them, we enjoy the representation of form and movement still awaits us.

Mr. Berenson’s doctrine on this point, if not so startlingly original as the formula already discussed, is at all events a thoroughly original application of a general theory of pleasure held by many. The view that pleasure springs from the energetic and healthy functioning of the organism is familiar to us, but no one before Mr. Berenson has succeeded in systematically applying this theory to the pleasure derived from art. When read in the light of the lucid statement in the book before us, every serious thinker, it seems, has been groping his way towards a similar conclusion, but it has remained for our author to put it in precise and definite terms.

It is the aim of all the arts, Mr. Berenson says, to be “ life-enhancing ; ” that is to say, to stimulate that healthy functioning of the organism which is the source of most of our normal pleasures. Each one of the arts has, as we all know, its own method of attaining this effect, but painting, being specifically concerned with form and movement, if it is capable of enhancing life in a unique way, must do it by these two means. And in what way can the representation of form and movement directly enhance life ? The answer, according to Mr. Berenson, is bound up with the fact that such representation “ stimulates to an unwonted activity psychical processes which are in themselves the source of most of our pleasures, and which here, free from disturbing physical sensations, never tend to pass over into pain.”

But is this so ? Do represented form and movement rouse greater psychical activity than form and movement in actual life ? Art, it is true, isolates the object represented from anything that in real life might tend to diminish our enjoyment of it; allowing us, for example, to enjoy the artistic elements in a race or a wrestling-match, which, if we took part in either, would tire us, or, even if we merely watched them, would pass too quickly to allow us to note all the energetic and graceful movements. But if this were all, instantaneous photography would give us everything, except color, that painting can offer. In what way, then, does the representation of form and movement in art differ from that registered by the photographic camera ?

To answer this question we need not go far afield. According to Mr. Berenson, the task of painting is not fulfilled when it has rendered just so much of form and movement as shall serve to make us recognize that the object is shaped in such and such a way, or poised in such and such a position, but only when it has presented us with form and movement in such wise that we shall realize them more readily than we do in actuality. Now, in real life, most of us who are not painters or sculptors ourselves realize but vaguely the forms and movements of the objects our eyes rest upon. To us, a person is rather a cause of transitive emotion, a social factor, than a form; and thus it is with everything we see. We are content with the mere recognition of properties in so far as they practically concern us. The visual world has come to be, to most people, only a set of symbols, signifying emotion, action, cause and effect, or what-not. But painting, whose peculiar task, we remember, is to be concerned with the visible qualities of form and movement, recalls to our consciousness the ancient means by which the race and every individual learned to realize the outer universe; reminds us that things are not merely symbols of dynamic forces, but objects to be dwelt on in and for themselves. If painting represented things, as photography does, only as they are in nature, our habit of taking them as symbols would receive no corrective. Painting must, therefore, select or invent those surfaces and those articulations which shall startle our ideated sense of touch and muscular tension into unwonted activity. It must, in Mr. Berenson’s words, “ extract the tactile and muscular values of retinal impressions, and present to us the significant in the visible world, so that we realize the representation more quickly and more completely than we should realize the things themselves.”

We have already pointed out that the pleasure consequent upon this heightened realization may be connected with the familiar evolutionary theory that pleasure inevitably accompanies an increase of healthy functioning. Mr. Berenson expresses this view in unequivocal terms in a passage which we quote as a summary of the sources of our enjoyment of the specifically artistic elements in painting : “ I am in the habit of realizing a given object with an intensity that we shall value as 2. If I suddenly realize this familiar object with an intensity of 4, I receive the immediate pleasure which accompanies a doubling of my mental activity. But the pleasure rarely stops there. Those who are capable of receiving direct pleasure from a work of art are generally led on to the further pleasures of selfconsciousness. The fact that the psychical process of recognition goes forward with the unusual intensity of 4 to 2 overwhelms them with the sense of having twice the capacity they had credited themselves with : their whole personality is enhanced, and, being aware that this enhancement is connected with the object in question, they for some time after not only take an increased interest in it, but continue to realize it with the new intensity. Precisely this is what form does in painting : it lends a higher coefficient of reality to the object represented, with the consequent enjoyment of accelerated psychical processes, and the exhilarating sense of increased capacity in the observer.”

Thus, the final test of the work of art is that it should be “ life-enhancing,” should “ confirm our hold on life,” should “ reinforce our personality ; ” that it should give us a hyperæsthesia not bought with drugs, and not paid for with checks drawn on our vitality,” and should make us feel “ as if the elixir of life, not our own sluggish blood, were coursing through our veins.” Few of us, unaided, would be able to analyze the ultimate why and wherefore of the lifestimulating effect of great art, even when we feel it.² Many, indeed, influenced by æsthetic theories based on no practical acquaintance with art, or, more misleading still, by theories that mix up the art with the artist, and pronounce the picture or the poem insane and diseased because the painter or poet was physically degenerate, will be inclined to dispute these conclusions. Such recalcitrants we must refer to Mr. Berenson’s concrete application of the theory to the whole body of Florentine art, and we must ask them if they can find another which so perfectly explains the greatness of the Florentine school, or yields so satisfactory a classification of the masters within that school. Nor can we doubt that the theory, although treated here only in connection with Florentine painting, will apply equally to every school in which the living figure is the preoccupying interest. Indeed, Mr. Berenson’s references to Greek art, to Rembrandt, to Velasquez, to Degas, to the Japanese, hint to a thoroughgoing application of the theory on the author’s own part.

If this theory is logical and consistent, as we have endeavored to show it to be, and if it explains the facts as no other existing hypothesis, we are justified in yielding ourselves enthusiastically to the brave doctrine that art is one of the great tonic forces of civilization, that it can never be immoral except when it is unhealthy, and that it can never be unhealthy except when it is had.