art and emotion

Tolstoy and everyday expressivism

By Gordon Graham

Art and emotion It is frequently said that what matters most in art is emotion, both the feeling of the artist and the emotional impact of a work on its audience. If pleasure is a commonplace explanation of the value of art, expression of emotion is the commonplace view of its nature. This is a view to which we can usefully give the label 'expressivism'. This distinguishes it from a closely similar term 'expressionism', a name widely used for a school of painting based on the principle that painters ought to express emotion in their pictures. The two terms and the ideas they invoke are obviously connected, but expressivism is a theory that applies to art in general, and not merely to the visual arts. It is a view closely allied with nineteenth-century Romanticism - the belief that true art is inspired by feeling - and the extensive influence of Romanticism well into the twentieth century explains, at least in part, the widespread acceptance of aesthetic expressivism.

In this chapter, the connection that expressivism makes between art and emotion will be explored, first in what might be called an everyday version, and then in the more sophisticated version that is to be found in R. G. Collingwood's Principles of Art. In both cases, the crucial question will be taken to be: can the appeal to emotion explain what is valuable and important about art? Tolstoy and everyday expressivism Not infrequently, great artists theorize about their work.

This is unsurprising, but what is more surprising is that even the greatest of creative artists can take a very simple-minded view of art. One of the best-known instances of this is Leo Tolstoy, the Russian literary giant. As well as his many novels, Tolstoy wrote a short book called What is Art? and in it the everyday conception of expressivism is set out with striking naiveté. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has 31 lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them. (Tolstoy in Neill and Ridley 1995: 511) In these few words, Tolstoy captures a picture of artistic activity that is very widely shared: artists are people inspired by an experience of deep emotion, and they use their skill with words, or paint, or music, or marble, or movement, to embody that emotion in a work of art.

The mark of its successful embodiment is that it stimulates the same emotion in its audience. It is in this way that artists may be said to communicate emotional experience. This picture of the relation between artist and audience is often just taken for granted. Even more famously than Tolstoy, the poet Wordsworth (in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads) held that 'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling', and it is not unusual to hear this quoted as a statement of the obvious. Yet, we do not have to think very long about this view before serious difficulties arise. Many of these were lucidly catalogued by the American philosopher John Hospers in an essay entitled 'The Concept of Artistic Expression' and again, at greater length, in Alan Tormey's The Concept of Expression. They can be listed as follows.

First, in attributing the origins of artistic production to emotional experience we appear to be determining a priori - by definition - what can only be determined a posteriori - by experience and investigation, namely the causal conditions under which works of art come to be. That is to say, the expression theory seems to assert in advance of considering any facts that emotional experience caused Shakespeare, Haydn, Leonardo, Christopher Wren and countless other artists to create in the way that they did. Of course, in response to this objection of assertion in advance of the facts, the doctrine espoused by Tolstoy and Wordsworth could be construed as a purely factual one - the origin of artworks has always been found to be emotion. But on this interpretation it appears to be empirically false; many celebrated artists have expressly denied that emotion lay at the heart of their work.

Second, by focusing upon the origins of a work as the criterion by which it is to be normatively classified as 'Art', the expressivist theory seems to involve a version of what is called the 'genetic fallacy'. This is the fallacy of assessing the merits (more usually the demerits) of something by referring to its cause. Hospers puts the point in this way:

Even if all artists did in fact go through the process described by the expression theory, and even if nobody but artists did this, would it be true to say that the work of art was a good one because the artist in creating it, went through this or that series of experiences in plying his medium? Once the issue is put thus baldly, I cannot believe that anyone could easily reply in the affirmative; it seems much too plain that ART AND EMOTION 32 the merits of a work of art must be judged by what we find in the work of art, quite regardless of the conditions under which the work of art came into being. (Hospers 1969: 147)

Third, in looking for an originating emotion we appear to be ignoring the difference between simple and complex works of art. There are indeed cases where the attribution of an overriding emotion to a work of art is quite plausible. For example, Gustav Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer (for which Mahler wrote both words and music) is easily thought of as the outpouring of emotion, and it is not difficult to identify a single emotion that each song expresses. But this sort of attribution is much less plausible when it comes to complex cases. In a complex work with a great array of characters in a variety of relationships - the range of emotions and attitudes represented is so wide that it is impossible to say that any one is the emotion that the work expresses. What emotion lies at the heart of, or is expressed by, novels such as George Eliot's Middlemarch or Thackeray's Vanity Fair?

This question is not easy to answer, but this does not mean that it is unanswerable. It might be claimed with some plausibility (to change the example) that Joseph Conrad's Nostromo is an expression of his deep pessimism. Since it is a novel with a complex plot and a wide range of disparate characters, if this is plausible it must be possible to regard a complex work of art as the expression of a single emotion. However, the change of example is significant. The fact that the question is reasonably easy to answer in the case of Nostromo does not make it any easier to answer with respect to Middlemarch. Moreover, as Nostromo is probably exceptional it is doubtful if we can give any easy answer for nearly every major work of art.

Consider Shakespeare's tragedies. It might be thought that these are works primarily expressing one emotion - jealousy in the case of Othello, for example. But if Othello (the character) symbolizes jealousy, Iago equally symbolizes malice. Which is the emotion of the play? In any case, the point of calling them tragedies is to focus attention not on their emotional content, but on the structure of their events. There is usually a high degree of emotion represented in a tragedy, but the tragic element, properly so called, is to be found in the interplay of character and event. In Sophocles' classical tragedy - Oedipus the King - it is forces beyond his control that makes Oedipus, despite his best efforts, bring plague on the city of Thebes. When it turns out that it is he who has killed his father, the horror he feels, so powerfully expressed by Sophocles, is the outcome of the tragedy, not its source, or its meaning.

So too with other art forms. The impact of Romanticism, especially in composition, can distort our perception of music and lead us to suppose that the expression of emotion is the key to music. But Romantic music is not the paradigm of all music. In a toccata and fugue by J. S. Bach, for ART AND EMOTION 33 example, it is structure that is important, and the complexity has more to do with mathematics than emotion. On the surface at any rate, this is true of nearly all Baroque music. Yet it would be absurd to dismiss it as valueless, or of less artistic merit, just because it is not Romantic.

Fourth, doubts can be raised about the emotional content, not merely of specific works of art, but of forms of art. It is easy to find plausible examples of emotional expression in poetry, opera and the theatre. But is it plausible to suggest that works of architecture express emotion? It seems obvious that Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream has depression as its subject matter, but this gives us no reason whatever to extend expressivism to the abstract painting of Piet Mondrian (though there is a school known as 'abstract expressionism'). And, despite the influence of Romanticism, there are arguments against the idea that music without words expresses emotion, a topic to be taken up again.

Hospers' doubts about expressivism have gained such currency that they are sometimes regarded as little more than preliminaries to the real issues. But even if they could be laid aside, there are further difficulties. How is emotion supposed to be embodied in a work of art, exactly? It is clearly a requirement of the expressivist theory that it must be embodied in some way or other. This is because for any given work, it could be true both that its creation arose from an emotional experience, and that it drew an emotional response from the audience, while at the same time being false that emotion was the content of the work. For instance, imagine that a singer past his prime, and somewhat despondent because he feels his powers failing, tries again to sing with the sort of vigorous jollity for which his performances were previously admired. He fails, however, and his failure causes his admirers to be equally despondent, saddened to hear how feeble his talents have become. But the song he has chosen to sing is not a sad one. So it must be the case, if expressivism is to be true, that emotion is to be found not merely in the artist and in the audience, but also in the work itself. Yet, if we say, in this case, that though the singer and the audience were feeling sad, but the song was feeling happy, this seems unintelligible. A song can't feel anything. In what sense then is happiness present, when the singer and the audience are sad?

In reply, the proponent of expressivism might draw a distinction between 'being an expression of happiness' and 'being expressive of happiness'. The song does not express anyone's happiness. How could it, since all the people are sad? But it is expressive of happiness in general. This is an important distinction that we will examine more closely in a subsequent section. For the moment, however, we can note that drawing it constitutes a major modification to the everyday version of expressivism, because it implies that artworks can be described in emotional language, without being directly connected to anyone's emotion. This is a major modification to Tolstoy's account of art and emotion.

Art and emotion We have found an important gap in expressivism's conception of the relation between artist and artwork. But there are also problems in the role that the Tolstoyan story assigns to the audience. Is it true that we are guilty of a failure of appreciation if at the end of Mahler's songs we are not filled with Weltschmerz (world-weariness)? Must we grieve to the degree that Leontes does in A Winter's Tale if we are to understand the remorse that follows his jealousy? Must we in fact feel jealous ourselves during the first part of the play? The answer to these questions is obvious - No. If it does not seem obvious, this is because we are misled into generalizing from two cases - sadness and fear. It is often true that sad and solemn poetry tends to induce sadness (though not always). It is certainly the case that horror and fear can be induced in an audience by films and plays.

The shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is one of the most famous examples; John Ford's play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, when Giovanni appears holding a human heart and covered in blood, is another. Once we generalize from sadness and fear, however, to all the other emotions - jealousy, despair, romantic love, hatred, patriotism, contempt, spite, and so on - expressivism's account of an audience's involvement becomes completely implausible. Perhaps it is true that anyone completely untouched by a nostalgic work cannot really be said to have appreciated it. But can we only be said to understand and appreciate a portrayal of racist loathing if we have felt slightly racist ourselves?

Even in the relatively simple case of gaiety, expressivism seems to fail because it is jokes that induce laughter in audiences and readers, rather than actors on stage being amused by them, or episodes in novels that describe people laughing. What this example makes plain is that the successful portrayal of an emotion in a work of art does not depend on generating the same emotion in the audience. It might be replied that art has to have impact, and an artwork that aims at a portrayal of any of these emotions, even those of a violent or evil nature, has to count as a failure if it leaves an audience as uncomprehending as before. In fact, this reply signals another important move away from the naive expressivism Tolstoy describes. It invokes the idea that a work of art should alter our understanding of emotion, but not that it does so by making us feel it. Understanding often generates sympathy, and so it can be true that those who come to a better understanding of an emotion come to feel differently about it. This change in feeling, though, is brought about through the intermediary of the understanding; it is not induced directly.