Home The Nature and Objective of Aesthetics Art and the Artist The Art Work The Art Work in the Making The Creative Mind Art and the Artist Art and the Layman The Experience of Beauty The Substance of the Experience of Beauty The Service of Art Art As Release Beauty in Music Painting Poetry	THE SERVICE OF ART   The aesthetic experience, we find, is a release, an emancipation from the practical demands of living. It is a restoration of the wholeness of the self which is constantly being shattered by the conflicting upheavals of biological necessity. Its appeal lies in the respite that it offers from oneself, from one's daily struggling, wounded, self, which Romain Rolland describes in such glowing words: Life passes. Body and soul flow onward like a stream. The years are written in the flesh of the aging tree. The whole visible world of form is forever wearing out and springing to new life. Thou only dost not pass, immortal music. Thou art the inward sea. Thou art the profound depths of the soul. In thy clear eyes the scowling face of life is not mirrored. Far, far from thee, like the herded cloud, flies the procession of days burning, icy, feverish, driven by uneasiness, huddling, moving on, on, never for one moment to endure. Thou art a whole world to thyself. Thou hast thy sun, thy laws, thy ebb and flow. Thou hast the peace of the stars in the great spaces of the field of night, marking their luminous track-plows of silver guided by the sure hand of the invisible ox-herd. Music, serene music, how sweet is thy moony light to eyes wearied of the harsh brilliance of this world's sun! The soul that has lived and turned away from the common horse-pond, where, as they drink, men stir up the mud with their feet, nestles to thy bosom, and from thy breasts suckled with the clear running waters of dreams. Music, thou virgin mother, who in thy immaculate womb bearest the fruit of all passions, who in the lake of thy eyes, whereof the color is as the color of the rushes, or as the pale green glacier water, enfoldest good and evil, thou art beyond evil, thou art beyond good; he that taketh refuge with thee is raised above the passing time; the succession of days will be but one day, and death that devours everything on such an one will never close its jaws. Salvador Dali To escape from necessity is one of the least recognized, and yet one of the most intense of human cravings, and the more sensitive the individual soul, the more intensely does it cry out against the tyranny and oppression of life's everyday affairs and trials. Wordsworth cries: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. In like vein Keats sings in To a Nightingale: O for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green. Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim; Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow. And in more prosaic terms Bertrand Russell suggests an avenue of escape from the tyranny of life: When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to the assertion of freedom, to defy with promethean constancy a hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires; the stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of the personal goods that are subject to the mutation of Time. What indications are there in life's routine of the need and desire for escape, or, in other words, how does this urge for relief manifest itself under usual conditions? One source of evidence is the great popularity of certain types of literature whose subject-matter is of a highly fantastic and improbable nature, namely: stories of adventure of the Robinson Crusoe type; romances, in which life appears as perfect and harmonious; fairy tales, with their unfailing appeal to young and old; mythology, where the prince is always perfect and the princess always beautiful; utopias of perfect government and harmonious social relationships; all these afford a compensation for the shortcomings and frustrations of actual experience. In a more definite manner this ever active urge manifests itself in the organization and appeal of secret societies with their very mysterious sounding names and esoteric rituals and ceremonies; in masquerades where the individual hides temporarily in the guise of a character of fictitious origin or distant land; and in the ever-recurring outbreak of the wanderlust. Nor is there a person who has not at one time or other experienced a strong impulse to be someone else, to possess the traits and characteristics of another individual, to exchange occupations or social standing. Another avenue of escape is a type of experience that is surrounded with a great deal of mystery, and is particularly associated with religion, namely, mysticism. The mystical experience consists essentially "in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self." "It is an experience in which the universe becomes without form and void of content," and during which one becomes identified with the unity of all life and thus attains a condition in which the eternal strife between subject and object is obliterated.