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"Art Its Dawn, Perfection and Future Role" - In the early history of humanity, man was very much more of an animal than he is now, concerned primarily with finding food and shelter and protection against the sun and rain and the wilderness of inanimate and animate nature. His instincts were related to the task of self-preservation and his creative faculties took destructive and self-perpetuating directions. The bow and the arrow, the earthen pot and the goat or sheepskin were later amenities. When such elementary needs were satisfied, primitive man flowered into a later development when he started making painted earthenware. The art of communication with his fellow beings produced significant language and elementary work-a-day arithmetic so useful in buying and bartering articles like food and clothing. The dawn of art broke in these foggy years of human history when Intelligence fluttered her eyelids and saw Nature in the clearer perception of her own light. With his new and unique gift, man's vision of Nature and things reacted in novel, pleasant and unknown ways in his "five little senses", "startled with the delight" of a better and a new perception. Man realised the peculiar and pleasing effects of line and colour, tone and rhythm, the embryo of painting and music. Thus it is that we find that early man began making pretty dwelling and daily utensils, which were not only useful but also charming and handy. He painted the walls of his dwellings and surfaces of pottery and earthenware with likeness from Nature-animals, birds and natural scenery. The twang of the bowstring was the origin of the harp. The wind or breeze moaning through bamboo grooves or reeds was the inspiration for the making of the flute and other wind instruments, and the spreading of the goat-skin over the mouth of earthenware gave birth to percussion-instruments. He himself started humming tunes and airs while doing daily work, like ploughing the field or drawing water from the well. Paper was made from bamboo-wood. The barks of trees and leaves were used for written language, which later gave us literature. It is interesting here to note that man first started doing things before knowing how to do them.Thus the primitive emotions of love for all that contributed to security and comfort and hatred for the opposite, sublimated into something nobler, the love of the beautiful and hatred of the ugly. In a safer and more secure environment the sense of hearing and sight became less urgent in their use and man developed what can be called disinterested observation and appreciation of beauty. Though varying degrees of progress, the aesthetic sense - that which is sensitive to the quality of beauty - grew apace and the embryo of the artist - who as yet was unborn and dumb - came into being.
The material for all art is aesthetic experience, as different from ordinary human experience. The every-day man is one whose finer senses are dulled by routine, lethargy and mechanisation. Conditions of life being what they are or were, he could not react to his environment or circumstances so that the epicentre of his emotional being was shifted and he could experience, what may loosely called an aesthetics shock or earthquake. In the artiste, what the intelligence discovered is an experience the Imagination adorned and sublimated. Otherwise poets and artists cannot "give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name". But for this unique sensitiveness and aestheticism, the world of art would have been poorer for the stinging sensuous of Keats, the ethereal idealisation of Shelley, the elemental simplicity of Wordsworth and, the introverted mysticism of Browning and the Gothic, ornate grandeur of Milton. It is evident that the artist's reaction to things is quite different from the layman's. As if it were, Experience is put into the crucible of Emotions and under the warmth and fire of the Imagination and melts into aesthetic experience. Though no woman or man behaves in real life like the characters of Shakespeare's or Shaw's works, we are nowhere more shocked into the realisation of the fatal possessiveness of love than when we read Othello or when Anna Karenina, looks to us to be more really alive than many women we have met in private life. This leads us on to the realisation that more than the actual experience, it is the way the artist presents his theme or subject that distinguishes him from the rest of mankind in their expressiveness. Everyone looks at the moon, but it is the poet who calls her the "queen of the night". We do not describe wine in a glass-cup as "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim". Eventless time is eternity but the poet expresses it thus: "I saw eternity the other night, like a ring, great and pure, of endless bright". The artist is not concerned with the fruit of experience, but with experience itself - an aesthetic one - and his experience, in a language, which is again different from ours in its emotional content and significance. He creates as it were, fresh, immediate and sensible forms out of otherwise common things. It is an outcome of the irrepressible force of feeling that is innate in all human nature and overwhelming desire to express it. In other words, the artist is one whose capacity for feeling is inordinately greater than and uniquely different from the general order, of humanity - a gift for a peculiar quality of hypersensitiveness which transmutes everyday language into a higher significance. He communicates more to use than the mere smell of the rose more than the mere sounds in Music. We are made to feel with him and revel in the same kind and rush of reactions - a contagious and poignant excess in emotion - what Keats calls, "a burning forehead and a parching tongue". Thus the world of the artist is one that transcends common sense and common discourse, knowing and speaking what is otherwise unknowable and unspeakable. The artist here "partakes of the nature of the mystic in his experiences of beauty, in tune with the infinite, catching and communicating to us a glimpse of the Eternal and the Absolute". One is reminded of Carlyle who speaks of music as "a kind of inarticulate and unfathomable speech that takes us on and leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for a few moments gaze into it". Art gives us a peace that passeth understanding - the same peace the artist finds in form and the mystic in the contemplation of God.
As a corollary, the chief quality and characteristic of the artist is the divine capacity to infect others with the same feelings as teh artist himself has experienced. Of course this does not mean that art achieves a verisimilitude to life. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite. To achieve an artistic effect a certain amount of the addition of the grotesque, a twisting of the normal findings of life is indispensable. "When the reproduction coincides with the original, art is destroyed by the very perfection of the craftsmanship as the vital rhythm of a curve is lost in the geometrical symmetry of the circle". The apparently horizontal lines of the Parthenon are really curved. The most absorbing story is not necessarily a work of art. There is a certain deception in art. Art is something additional to the actual. The successions of sounds and rhythms in Music are artificial. From the study of the ordinary movements of the body while walking or sitting, the movements in dance are certainly artificial beyond the customary. To revert, one feels that the artist has expressed something which all of us have felt in us all the time, which we never realised. In revealing himself, the artist has revealed to us ourselves. While listening to good Music, one moves along its graces and nuances its waves of ascent and descent, its caresses and its kicks and its tears and its smiles.
One is thus made aware of the Universality of all art, its appeal irrespective of language or castes or creed.
Keats says in his "Ode on a Grecian urn",
"Forever warm and still to be enjoyed
Forever panting and forever young",
A statement on the endurance of all great art.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever". Great art endures forever, standing permanent against the ravages of time and space and forever satisfying the aesthetic sense in their hunger for the beautiful in all ages and climes. Its language is the language of the universe, the language of the human emotions, taking us through the concrete and the sensual, known and experience, into a world thoroughly abstract, transcending the senses, unknown and transcending experience, through experience, feeling and language to a world beyond all of them. "Is it, not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls of of men's bodies" (Shakespeare). It is a reorientation of an experience, usual and peaceful, into one strange and intense. It comes of the exercise of that impulse to creative expression which is, Universal in human nature - an impulse which is deeper and more spiritual than the physical, wherein as James H. Cousins says, "The artist becomes one with the creative power of the Universe, inwardly to his own happiness and outwardly to the happiness of others, a revealer and translator of beauty, and truth, inherent in Nature and Humanity."
Of all the arts, Music is the most universal and least sensual in its appeal. If painting is two-dimensional, sculpture three, one can say music is four-dimensional having its basic on tone, colour, rhythm and melody. The artist and the listener are free of the bonds of time and the logic of circumstances. It is enjoying and creating beauty without responsibility. Really, there is no language for sounds or music. Yet it is the most universal language. "Sounds with significance is language, but music exploits the aural possibilities of pure sound, signifying nothing logical, but carrying aesthetically great and emotionally poignant meaning". Hence, the appeal of music is more intellectual and abstract than in the other Fine Arts. It is so curious to notice that all "musical compositions are edifices which exist transiently in time" - which are mainly musical ideas and essences internally related to each other and no more. "This objectless realism of sounds, irrelevant to anything but its own internal relations, is surprising in its emotional effect on the listener". Music can express the whole gamut of all emotions. Walter Tater says, "All arts constantly aspire towards the condition of Music", meaning while in the other sister arts it is possible to detach form from matter, all art especially music, is an attempt to break the detachment. In all great art, the end is inseparable from the means. In music the great artists have put into sound a hearing which echoes their own meaning of life. Music has, more than any other art, the infinite capacity to express to thousands of listeners, in a thousands different accents, in an intimate but irresponsible manner, what will be otherwise incommunicable.
Roger Fry says, "Art is a biological blasphemy" in the sense that it panders to the sense of the beautiful and is otherwise of no use. Is it really so? The exercise of any creative faculty is a biological function. It is a venue for the release of powerful and delectable emotional energy, which is again Man's self-assertive and perpetuating instinct, later in so many, at play. " Man does not live on bread alone". Of course, society in all ages and conditions has encouraged any workman who performs a useful function. But more than merely living, the spiritual hunger of a man gives birth to the unusual power to feel and the passion to create. Art is the result. In other words, the world of the artist is a richer dream, as it were, of experience, where the only reality is for the artist that it is aesthetically convincing and enjoyable. To this extent he is not a mere copyist of Nature or Humanity. With the technique and resources of his medium he expresses, in the phrases and idiom peculiar to it his imaginative reaction to some aspects of them.
This bifocal vision of Art has at all times produced what is commonly called "Commercial Art and Art for its own sake". Commercial art is that which has always a reference to the requirements of society. A painter paints a picture with the idea of selling it. The more the artist bridges in his products, the gap between what he years to produce and what the then society demands, the more commercial, his art becomes. But this pragmatic view of art has always been thought of at a lower evaluation by the higher conception, namely, that art should be indulged in for its own sake. Great artists have always been people whose souls were thoroughly unfettered by the present dreamers and visionaries of no use to anyone but to themselves. Hence it is that one sometimes finds such artists thoroughly unworldly, impractical and contributing nothing to the schematic efficiency of life. Apart from its commercial use, art fulfils a higher purpose. By intelligently educating the latent aesthetic sense, it is a means to a higher exaltation of the human spirit and an expression' of this ecstatic state of the soul. Besides, it uplifts the souls of all with its contagion thus unifying all into one. Clive Bell says on Art, "It is in fact a necessity to and a product of the spiritual life." Tolstoy also says, "it is a means of union among men, joining together in the same feelings and indispensable for the life, and progress towards the well-being of the individuals arid humanity". This double-edged view of aesthetic creation gradually merges into the two schools of thought, namely, Classicism and Romanticism. Ever since the beginning of the history of art, there have been two undecided and embittered sections of opinion regarding the aesthetic process of producing works of art, the Classical and the Romantic. It is a distinction between Reason and Emotion, Intellect and Imagination, in a crude way between Form and matter.
The Classicist is one who is concerned more with form than with matter. he imposes a voluntary conscious and rational control on the imagination and strives at a selective and chiseling ideal, making for simplicity and severity. His mission is to make the familiar charming, give novelty to things of everyday life. He has the peculiar gift of retaining freshness even while endlessly repeating the same theme or subject matter or himself. He is so good here because he expresses himself so well. It is no surprise therefore, that the whole absorbs the attention of the Classicist, more than the parts. But the worst of Classicism is that much of it looks like hackwork and mechanisation. At his best, he does not excite or thrill you. At his depths, he looks formal and sterile, dull and uninspired and lacking in emotional fire. He makes up in the unity, simplicity and austerity of the whole. One is sometimes, therefore, almost tempted to agree with the view that Classicism is negation repudiation and contradiction of the creative impulse.
The Romanticist, on the contrary, is one who believes more in intuition and inspiration and in the philosophy, "Better to have attempted and lost than not to have attempted at all". He subordinates reason and conscious design to imagination, thus caring less for the attribute of beauty and being interested more in the addition of the element of strangeness in all artistic organisation. He is interested more in saying or expressing something that is unfamiliar and strange rather than saying or expressing it well. The worst of Romanticism is that it results in the violently fantastic and bizarre. The romanticist is rich in emotional content and easily swept of f his own feet and gives you the suspicion that you cannot always be sure of him or that he is dependable. Thus what he lacks in structural unity, he makes up in the remarkable vigour and beauty of the parts but his merit far out-shines his weakness because his work is that of the unfettered creative impulse inherent in all humanity and satisfies the everlasting spiritual hunger of mankind. From there it is quite logical to infer that the classicist has greater chances of becoming a professional success than his opposite. The greatest art is that which is born of profound and powerful emotional inspiration, controlled selected and chiselled by the exercise of reason and giving us a unified and structural whole and achieving the union of vigour and beauty in the parts and exquisite attractiveness and appeal in the whole.
In short, the end of all art is to unite all in one common feeling. The use to which the individual puts his leisure is a key to knowing his cultural index and the arts constituting as they do, the playing time of the race indicate unequivocally, the quality and nature of its civilisation. All art is therefore a foretaste and an earnest of the future ideal state wherein we will all have a rational civilisation in which sensuous beauty, emotional delicacy and intellectual order will work together in harmony - a regimen for the conduct of the living, concerned with remediable evil and attainable good with happiness in this world and salvation in the next.
"A refined musical sensibility is the most civilising of educational instruments. A mind educated to musical form and an imagination refined to the finesse of musical emotion cannot remain completely gross in the contacts of life". (Edman). To conclude - in the end when all the nations of the earth are worn out in their fight for world-supremacy, when, there is a desperate cry for Universal Peace, Music will be the Messiah for the golden age, uniting all in one common language and religion of sound at once sensuous and intellectual, exciting to calm, stimulating to appeasement and marshalling all the powers for Goodness. Truth and Beauty to work in unison in a spontaneous, disciplined and organised manner, towards the achievement of the common weal of all mankind.
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