Thus men forgot
That All Deities reside in the Human breast.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
The initial signs from which the work of art is built up psychologically in the case of sculpture differ in several respects from the initial signs of painting. There are of course forms of sculpture for which the difference is slight. Some bas-reliefs, for example, can be considered as essentially drawings, and sculpture placed as a decorative detail in architecture so that it can only be viewed from one angle has necessarily to be interpreted in much the same manner. Similarly some primitive sculpture in which only one aspect is represented may be considered as covered by what has been said about painting, although the fact that the relief and the relation of volumes is more completely given and less supplied by imaginative effort is of some consequence. Further, the changes, slight though they may be, which accompany slight movements of the contemplator have their effect. His total attitude is altered in a way which may or may not be important according to circumstances.
With sculpture in which a number (four for example) of aspects are fully treated without any attempt to fill in the intermediate connecting aspects, the whole state of affairs is changed, since there arises the interpretative task of uniting these aspects into a whole.
This connection of a number of aspects into a whole may be made in varying ways. The signs may receive a visual interpretation and the form be mainly built up of visual images combined in sequences or fused. This, however, is an unsatisfactory method. It tends to leave out or blur too many of the possible responses to the statue and there is usually something unstable about such syntheses. The form so constructed is insubstantial and incomplete. Thus those sculptors whose work primarily asks for such a visual interpretation are commonly felt to be lacking in what is called a ‘sense of form’. The reasons for this are to be found in the nature of visual imagery and in the necessarily limited character of our purely visual awareness of space.
But the connection may be made, not through visual combination, but through combination of the various muscular images whereby we feel, or imaginatively construct the tensions, weights, stresses, etc. of physical objects. Each sequence of visual impressions as we look at the statue from varying standpoints calls up a group of these muscular images, and these images are capable of much more subtle and stable combinations than the corresponding visual images. Thus two visual images which are incompatible with one another may be each accompanied by muscular images (feelings of stress, tension, etc.) which are perfectly compatible and unite to form a coherent whole free from conflict. By this means we may realise the solidity of forms far more perfectly than if we rely upon visual resources alone, and since it is mainly through the character of the statue as a solid that the sculptor works, this muscular interpretation has, as a rule, obvious and overwhelming advantages.
None the less a place remains for sculpture whose primary interpretation is in visual terms. Looking at any of the more recent work of Epstein, for example, a feeling of quick and active intelligence on the part of the contemplator arises, and this sense of his own activity is the source of much that follows in his response. By contrast a work of Rodin seems to be not so much exciting activity in him as active itself. The correlation of visual aspects, in other words, is a conscious process compared with the automatic correlation of muscular image responses. The first we seem to be doing ourselves, the second seems to be something which belongs to the statue. This difference as we have described it is of course a technical difference and by itself involves nothing as to the value of the different works concerned. A similar difference may be found in the apprehension of form in painting.
These two modes are not as separate as our account would suggest; neither occurs in purity. Their interaction is further complicated through the highly representational character of most sculpture, and through the interlinking of different interpretations due to the congruences and incompatibilities of the emotional responses to which they give rise.
With sculpture perhaps more than with any other of the plastic arts we are in danger of overlooking the work of the contemplator’s imagination in filling out and interpreting the sign. What we transport from Egypt to London is merely a set of signs, from which a suitable interpreter setting about it rightly can produce a certain state of mind. It is this state of mind which matters and which gives its value to the statue. But so obscure to ordinary introspection are the processes of the interpretation that we tend to think that none occur. That we interpret a picture or a poem is obvious upon very little reflection. That we interpret a mass of marble is less obvious. The historical accident that speculation upon Beauty largely developed in connection with sculpture is responsible in great degree for the fixity of the opinion that Beauty is something inherent in physical objects, not a character of some of our responses to objects.
From certain visual signs, then, the contemplator constructs, muscularly as well as visually, the spatial form of the statue. We have seen that the picture-space is a construction, similarly the statue-space is a construction, and the proportions and relations of the volumes which in this statue-space make up the statue are by no means necessarily the same as those of the mass of marble from which we receive our signs. In other words, the scientific examination of the statue and the imaginative contemplation of it do not yield the same spatial results. Thus the process of measuring* statues with a view to discovering a numerical formula for Beauty is little likely to be fruitful. And the work of those, such as Havard Thomas, who have attempted to use this method, show the features which we should expect. Their merits derive from factors outside the range of the theory. The psychological processes involved in the construction of space are too subtle, and the differences between the actual configuration of the marble and the configuration of the statue in the statue-space are brought about in too many ways for any correlation to be established.
Among the factors which intervene in the building up of the imaginative form the most obvious are the lighting, and the material.
With change of lighting, change of form follows at once through change in the visual signs, and since stone is often a translucent not an opaque material, lighting is by no means such a simple matter as is sometimes supposed. More is involved than the avoidance of distracting cast shadows and the disposal of the brightest illumination upon the right portions of the statue. The general aim should obviously be to reproduce the lighting for which the sculptor designed his work, an aim which requires very sensitive and full appreciation for its success. An aim, moreover, which in the case of works transported from North to South and vice versa is sometimes impossible of realisation.
The interpretation of form is an extraordinarily complex affair. The consequences of the asymmetricality of space as we construct it must be noted. Up and down have distinct characters which differ from those of right and left, which differ again from those of away and towards us. A measured vertical distance does not seem to us the same as an equal horizontal distance. Nor does a equal distance away from us seem equal to either. These effects are modified again, sometimes reinforced, sometimes reduced, by effects due to quite a different source, to the relative ease or difficulty with which the eye follows certain lines. The greater and less compatibility of certain eye movements with others is the cause of much of what is confusedly called Rhythm in the plastic arts. After certain lines we expect others, and the success or failure of our expectation modifies our response. Unexpectedness, of course, is an obvious technical resource for the artist. The intervention here of the representational factor cannot be overlooked. An eye movement which encounters difficulty for any of a number of possible reasons, among which so-called rhythmical factors deserve special notice, is interpreted as standing for a greater distance than an equal but more easy movement. This is only a rough rule, for yet other psychological factors may come in to nullify or even reverse the effect; for example, an explicit recognition of the difficulty. Yet another determining condition in our estimation of intervals of space is the uniformity of their filling. Thus a line one inch long hatched across will generally seem longer than an equal line unhatched, and a modulated surface seem larger than a smooth one.
These instances of the psychological factors which help to make the imaginatively constructed statue-space different from the actual space occupied by the marble will be enough to show how intricate is the interpretation by which we take even the first step towards the appreciation of a statue. Our full response of attitude and emotion is entirely dependent upon how we perform the initial operations. It is of course impossible to make these interpretations separately, consciously and deliberately. Neural arrangements over which we have little or no direct control perform them for us. Thanks to their complexity the resultant effect, the imagined form of the statue, will vary greatly from individual to individual and in the same individual from time to time. It might be thought therefore that the hope that a statue will be a vehicle of the same experience for many different individuals is vain. Certain simplifications, however, save the situation.
Form, we have seen, is, through our selection among the possible signs present, within certain limits what we like to make it. As it varies, so do our further or deeper responses of feeling and attitude vary. But just as there are congruences and compatibilities among the responses we make, in the case of colour, which tend, given certain colours, to make us pick out of a range of possible colours one which will give us a congruent (or harmonious) response, so it is with form. Out of the multitude of different forms which we might construct by stressing certain of the signs rather than others, the fixing even temporarily of a part of the form tends to bias us towards so interpreting the rest as to yield responses accordant with those already active. Hence a great reduction of the disparity of the interpretations which arise, hence also the danger of an initial misapprehension which perverts the rest of the interpretation.
This Chapter, like the last, is intended as an indication, merely, of the ways in which a psychological analysis may assist the critic and help to remove misconceptions. The usual practice of alluding to Form as though it were a simple unanalysable virtue of objects—a procedure most discouraging to those who like to know what they are doing, and thus very detrimental to general appreciation—will lapse when a better understanding of the situation becomes general. None the less there are certain very puzzling facts as to the effects of forms when apprehended which in part explain this way of talking. These are perhaps best considered in connection with Music, the most purely formal of the arts.