Chapter XVIII: On Looking at a Picture

Hived in our bosoms like the bag o’ the bee,
Think’st thou the honey with those objects grew?
_Don Juan_.

The diagram and account given of the processes which make up the reading of a poem may be easily modified to represent what happens when we look at a picture, a statue or building, or listen to a piece of music. The necessary changes are fairly obvious, and it will only be necessary here to indicate them briefly. Needless to say the importance to the whole response of different kinds of elements varies enormously from art to art; so much so as to explain without difficulty the opinion so often held by persons interested primarily in one of the arts—that the others (or some of them) are entirely different in nature. Thus painters often aver that poetry is so different, so indirect, so second-hand in the way in which it produces its results, as hardly to deserve the name of an art at all. But, as we shall see, the differences between separate arts are sometimes no greater than differences to be found in each of them; and close analogies can be discovered by careful analysis between all of them. These analogies indeed are among the most interesting features which such scrutiny as we are here attempting can make clear. For an understanding of the problems of one art is often of great service in avoiding misconceptions in another. The place of representation in painting, for example, is greatly elucidated by a sound comprehension of the place of reference or thought in poetry, just as a crude view on this latter point is likely to involve unfortunate mistakes upon the first. Similarly a too narrow view of music which would limit it to an affair merely of the appreciation of the pitch and time relations of notes may be corrected most easily by a comparison with the phenomena of colour in the plastic arts. Comparison of the arts is, in fact, far the best means by which an understanding of the methods and resources of any one of them can be attained. We must be careful of course not to compare the wrong features of two arts and not to find merely fanciful or insecurely grounded analogies. The dangers both of too close assimilation and too wide separation of the structures of different arts are well illustrated in criticism, both before and since the days of Lessing. Only a thorough psychological analysis will allow them to be avoided, and those whose experience leads them to doubt whether analogies are of service, may be asked whether their objection is not directed merely to attempts to compare different arts without a sufficient analysis. With such an analysis, comparison and the elaboration of analogies involve no attempt to make one art legislate for another, no attempt to blur their differences or to destroy their autonomy.

In analysing the experiences of the visual arts the first essential is to avoid the word ‘see’, a term which is treacherous in its ambiguity. If we say that we see a picture we may mean either that we see the pigment-covered surface, or that we see the image on the retina cast by this surface, or that we see certain planes or volumes in what is called the ‘picture-space’. These senses are completely distinct. In the first case we are speaking of the source of the stimulus, in the second of the immediate effect of the stimulus on the retina, in the third we are referring to a complex response made up of perceivings and imaginings due to the intervention of mental structures left behind by past experience, and excited by the stimulus. The first case we may leave out of account as a matter of purely technical interest. The degree of similarity holding between the second and third, between the first effect of the stimulus and the whole visual response, will of course vary greatly in different cases. A perfectly flat, meticulously detailed depiction of conventionally conceived objects, such as is so often praised in the Academy for its ‘finish’, may be very nearly the same from its first impression on the retina to the last effort which vision can make upon it. At the other extreme a Cézanne, for example, which to the eye of a person quite unfamiliar with such a manner of painting may at first seem only a field or area of varied light, may, as the response develops, through repeated glances, become first an assemblage of blots and patches of colour, and then, as these recede and advance, tilt and spread relatively to one another and become articulated, a system of volumes. Finally, as the distances and stresses of their volumes become more definitely imagined, it becomes an organisation of the entire ‘picture-space’ into a three-dimensional whole with the characters of the solid masses which appear in it, their weights, textures, tensions and what not, very definitely, as it seems, given. With familiarity the response is of course shortened. Its final visual stage is reached much sooner, and the stages outlined above become, through this telescoping, too fleeting to be noticed. None the less the great difference between the first retinal impression and the complete _visual_ response remains. The retinal impression, the sign, that is, for the response, contains actually but a small part of the whole final product, an all-important part it is true, the seed in fact from which the whole response grows.

The additions made in the course of the response are of several kinds. They may, perhaps, for our present purposes be spoken of without misunderstanding as images, or image-substitutes (see