PART IV: THE CHAIN OF BEAUTY
CHAPTER TEN: ASSOCIATIONS
Introduction
Politeness
precedes the epistemological account of beauty because of the violence which a
building necessarily inflicts on its surroundings and the violence which
architecture necessarily inflicts upon its model: nature. The structure of the
rest of the argument, however, remains faithful to the perceived natural order
of the brain, the organisation of which proceeds from the sensual to the
intellectual. It is essentially a Platonic hierarchy, distantly modelled on the
allegory of the cave, although more immediately on Reynolds' recommendations
concerning responsible pedagogy:
It is the natural
progress of instruction to teach first what is obvious and perceptible to the
sense, and from hence proceed gradually to notions large, liberal and complete,
such as comprise the more refined and higher excellences in
art.
[1]
That
is the motto to the second chapter of Garbett's Treatise. The next section of this dissertation, composed of five
chapters in all, will follow Garbett's anabatic progress towards architectural
perfection.
Because Garbett sees politeness as
an act of compensation, it is called a negative art which seeks to neutralise
positive wrongs. Therefore politeness is fundamental to the reform that
architecture is being subjected to. Only when its inherent social evils are
neutralised can the architect proceed with the next step whereby the negative
art of avoiding offence is transformed in to the positive art of pleasing. This
account needs to begin with an account of Garbett's epistemology, beginning
with a discussion of Alison's influence on Garbett. Chapter 12, is concerned
with following out the normative implications of that epistemology and
discusses some of Garbett's axiomatic rules for architects and tries to clarify
his stand on many of the aesthetic issues which occupied contemporary
architectural thought. Chapter 13 is devoted to Garbett's discussion of the
concept of imitation in the first part of the fourth chapter of the Treatise. While chapters 14 to 16 are
concerned with the highest of architectural beauties, namely those of purity,
truth and poetry.
The natural versus the acquired
Garbett's
Treatise is subject to a continuous
process of cell division. As the theory unfolds in greater detail, it
progressively undermines his first, very inclusive definition of architecture.
This is because Garbett is a child of his times and spends much of his time in
trying to out-manoeuvre the less savoury implications of that original
inclusiveness, qualifying it by reasserting a more conventional system of
oppositions and divisions in value. Ultimately this process would undermine his
theory as a whole. His philosophy of perception became so heavily polluted with
the familiar hierarchies in value that it undermined much of its original
radicalism and consistency.
The separation between cookery,
perfumery and architecture, for example, is allowed on the rather strange
assumption that architecture can express an emotion and perfumery cannot. To
enforce the division while trying to forestall anyone raising obvious objections
to his apparent lack of logical consistency he writes:
We must not confound
essential differences of expression with those which arise accidentally from our
associations.
[2]
He
used the smell of vinegar as an example of an accidental association which
naturally reminded the nineteenth century of illness and the sick-bed.
Garbett's
use of the association of ideas in his theories of expression places him firmly
within a British empirical tradition which stretches from Hobbes & Locke,
via David Hartley to Archibald Alison's Essays
on the Nature and Principles of Taste which was
first published in Edinburgh in 1790.
[3] It was not
until the second expanded edition of 1811 appeared that the Essay achieved the
revolutionary thrust in British thinking as the hitherto most rigorous,
systematic and complete attempt to apply the doctrine of association to
aesthetics.
[4]
Garbett's careful and lengthy critique of Alison's ideas attempted to translate
the latter's phenomenological philosophy to his own normative purposes. This
raised a number of problems, largely because of a fundamental difference in
attitude between the two thinkers.
For Alison the attempt to find an
objective standard of beauty was
altogether impossible.[5]
That made it easy for Alison to come to terms with the subjectivity which
associationism encourages. For Garbett on the other hand an objective standard
was essential. His ultimate aim, like Hogarth, was to fix our fluctuating ideas of taste. Garbett needed at least the
possibility of an objective, or a widely intersubjective standard of beauty.
Otherwise his theory would be useless.
He found that possibility in two principles discussed by Reynolds' in his
Seventh Discourse.
[6]
The first was the principle of univocality, i.e. the need to fix language which has already been
discussed in an earlier chapter. The second was an idea which had been launched
by Leonardo da Vinci but has a Greek pedigree, namely the majority vote, or,
the idea of universal consensus: If the greater number of cultivated and
educated minds agreed, then the question as to whether a thing was beautiful or
not was adequately decided. Univocality in turn allows the idea that the
process of personal cultivation naturally leads to consensus.
Alison was much more of a relativist than Garbett, and not concerned with
the normative application of his doctrine. As such Alison could afford to be
logically consistent and did not need to worry about the social implications of
his semantics. Alison sought to understand what made our tastes fluctuate,
frequently spotting exceptions to his own assertions about the character of
forms.
[7]
The basis of Alison's aesthetics was the proposition that the pleasures
of taste or the enjoyment of beauty, occur when the imagination is employed in
the prosecution of a regular train of ideas of emotion.
[8] An object to
be considered aesthetically had to initiate a train of associations which in
turn had to be productive of definite emotions. Any normative application of
associationist aesthetics to a particular design problem had to try and find
ways of conventionalising the experience of beauty, so as to make it subject to
academic reconstruction. The
subjective fluidity of such a train of thought, which allowed much of the
sensation of beauty to be dependent on arbitrary collisions of thought had to
be cleared out of the way. As we have seen, Garbett did recognise that the
conventionalisation of beauty could not reside in the provision of conventional
models which the architect could copy. Instead he wanted to concentrate on the
formulation of axioms which could generalise the salient features of a model
into a set of attitudes or principles of design. These could then take account
of the variations in circumstances which would make the copying of a particular
model within a different context inappropriate.
Because of Alison's definition of
beauty, associationism has a way of running away with itself. Resemblances
could attach themselves to wholly inappropriate and ephemeral models, thereby
creating categories which could not be sustained. Garbett used the illustration
of Charles Barry's Club Style to
illustrate the problem.
The
Companion to the British Almanak for
1846 once criticised a particular domestic building for having in its general aspect quite as much or even
more of the club house than of the ordinary villa character.[9]
What we have to observe here, replies
Garbett impatiently, is the singular
force of association, by which the use of [the Florentine] manner in two
London club-houses suffices to stamp it forthwith as a sort of club-house
style.[10]
The
problem for Garbett was to identify the cause of such accidents of expression
and provide them with a well-defined place within his system so as to keep them
under control. The expressive possibilities of a building could, he thought, be
controlled by consciously differentiating in the design between the extrinsic
and intrinsic character of forms.
Garbett believed that colours,
sounds and forms could in themselves produce pleasant sensations, i.e. they
could excite a sensual pleasure, without reference to experience. Their
expressive beauty, on the other hand, arose from their value as stimuli of particular
associations. In order to be able to reconstruct beauty, however, one needed
permanently valid associations.
To avoid this problem then, another
unfortunate dualism in logic, already suggested by Alison, was fixed by Garbett. This dualism was eased
into a precarious existence by Garbett's insistence on there being two forms of
expression, one acquired, the other natural. It is specifically the idea of a
natural expression which would sound dubious in today's intellectual climate.
Accidental expression, was based on accidental associations. Natural expression
was caused by natural associations, on things
permanently true.[11]
I do not mean to imply
that time-hallowed associations (such as that, for instance, which connects the
Gothic style with our religious edifices) are to be wantonly broken through;
only that, when any such are proved to be mere associations, they may (though
still respected) not be suffered for a moment to have preference before such as
may have been proved to be not accidental, but essential.
[12]
The
explanation for this dualism is derived from Reynolds' Seventh Discourse.
Ultimately the dichotomy can be traced back to Locke's chapter on the
association of ideas:
Some of our ideas have a natural
correspondence one with another: it is the office and excellency of our reason
to trace these, and hold them together in that union and correspondence which
is founded in their peculiar beings. Besides this there is another connection
of ideas wholly owing to chance and custom.[13]
This
passage anticipated Garbett's distinction between natural and acquired
expression. The way Reynolds applied Locke's ideas to the theory of art
produced the highly significant and influential division between Raphael and
Rembrandt in English art theory.
Raphael versus Rembrandt, Part I
Reynolds
distinguished two forms of truth. The first was characterised by uniformity and
predictability. The second was variable and arbitrary. The first was
demonstrable, based upon the laws of
nature. The second was experiential and sought out the many variations that
nature saw fit to produce. For some unexplained reason these variations were
not subject to the laws of nature
beyond the fact that they were thought to be there only in order to confirm the infinite variety of the creation.
The first is represented by the idealising and androgenising Raphael, the
second by the particularising and psychologising Rembrandt. Raphael painted
permanent types, Rembrandt represented individuals; Raphael therefore stands
for everything permanent, Rembrandt for everything ephemeral; they have become
the Parmenides and Heraclitus of aesthetics.
Garbett allies his accidental or
Rembrandtesque associations to Reynolds' secondary truths, or truths upon sufferance, or truth by courtesy.
These
are to be respected in proportion to
[their] stability or duration, or as their influence is more or less extensive,
but never allowed to supersede real immutable TRUTH.[14]
The Greeks did not want
to produce statues of men but of mankind.
[15]
Despite the contemporary despair concerning the possibility of objectivity in
aesthetics, Garbett held on to the idea of absolute values like Don Quichote
held on to his paranoid chivalry. Associationism, as had been Locke's great
fear, could, if allowed to, start to lead its own life creating a perverse imaginative
world of eclectic monsters. This was the reason that Garbett needed to control
the power of associationism by separating its desirable aspects from the
undesirable ones. This instituted a division which distantly resembled the
conceptual division between long and short-term memories, between, let us say
cerebral and genetic memory. The difference in accidental association and
permanent association is the difference between the individuals of a species
and the species in a generic sense.
The need for such a difference was
created by the belief that that which had permanence came from within and was
the result of natural processes allowed to go their own way unhindered, while
the particular was determined from without and suffered passively by the object
through the force of circumstance.
This theme returns in a different disguise when we discuss the explanation of
the expression of power and delicacy.
The difference between natural and acquired expression may be illustrated
by way of the metaphysical gap imposed by man, between himself (that is
civilisation, culture) and nature. True associations are natural, acquired
association were thought to belong peculiarly to culture. Perhaps this meant no
more than that natural associations conformed to Garbett's personal
interpretation of Nature's language of symbols, which was itself a manifestation
of culture. But one that Garbett did not recognise as such. Natural associations
were seen to conform to an interpretation of nature as significant and
purposive. Acquired associations differed in that they appeared to rest on more
arbitrary collisions of resemblance and therefore were not able to signify more
that the remarkableness of the coincidence or the moulding activity of external
circumstance. A cloud in the shape of an animal, a tree contorted to resemble an
evil face, that is what Garbett meant with accidental associations. In this the
difference between true and acquired expression bore much similarity to
Coleridge's argument for the distinction between imagination and
fancy.
[16]
On this basis Garbett rejected the
possibility of Blondel's version of an architecture
parlante, which has to be based on cultural conventions which can have no
basis in natural processes:
To distinguish a club-house from a mansion
is beyond the province of expression in any art. It is not to be done by
expression, but only by language, and architecture does not pretend to be
phonetic. If you want to distinguish the destinations of these buildings, the
best way is by writing up their names. (...) You may make a language of
anything, -rustic quoins, Gothic windows,- provided people will agree to
understand them alike, and take this for church and that for club-house;
but what is the advantage of substituting a new and extremely limited language,
understood by very few, for an established and incomparably more copious
language, understood by the whole nation? It is harmless, of course, in
itself,-merely an innocent pastime; but it is by no means harmless if it usurp
the place of artistic expression,- of that which alone distinguishes a fine
from an ornamental art, the architect from the
decorator. [17]
Garbett
did subscribe to the notion that expression can supplement a building's
destination. Emotions, like smells and tastes can be reduced to a number of
simple varieties. A successful building would not attempt to mix the several
possible emotions too much. But to deny the possibility of combining an emotion
with a destination was a fallacy. Garbett chastised the author of the article
on architecture in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for writing such things as: "The Merit or demerit of a composition
is not at all affected by the use to which the edifice is applied."[18]
This is followed by something which really gets Garbett's bile flowing: "Moreover, there is nothing in any one
'order' that, were it not for custom, would not be thought fitting in any
other, as in that to which it may belong."[19]
Perhaps not to Londoners,
replies Garbett working himself up into a sublime anger, -utterly deadened to this art, and rendered incapable of ever
understanding it, by the atrocious misapplications of its forms, perpetually
before their eyes, -they might see no harm in a Doric entablature placed on
Corinthian columns; but it would not on that account be a less flagrant
violation of the immutable principles of right and wrong, -it would not be less
unnatural than combining the parts of different animals, or joining the
head of a Hercules to the body of an Apollo. (...) [The] majority has testified
to the existence of expression in architecture, independently of all
associations; and all minds educated and cultivated in the subject bear the
same testimony, and find the same peculiar expressions in the same buildings;
whether grave or festive, meek or ostentatious, awful or playful, majestic,
reposing, agitate, or aspiring.[20]
Oh,
says Garbett's imagined objector: "Then
a special education and culture is necessary, is it, in order to perceive these
differences in character? Your distinctions, after all, then, are only
conventional signs, only a kind of symbolism or heraldry, or free-masonry,
intelligible to the initiated and to no one else."[21]
No.
says Garbett, trying desperately to keep his plea for objective standards in
tact by applying to Rousseauist variations of intellectual primitivism. No
education, he writes, is necessary to feel the expressiveness of our art:
Give us the mind wholly uneducated in
[architecture]; give us the rustic or the child, unused to cities, uncorrupted
by the sight of abused architecture, and he shall be awed by the sublime
majesty of the Doric, or raised by the heavenward aspiration of the Gothic
temple; soothed by the mild repose of Palladio, and enlivened by the playful
fancy of Scamozzi; sobered by the severe purity of the Greeks, and relaxed by
the picturesque riot of Vanbrugh; attracted by the inviting urbanity of the
Vicentine villa, and repelled by the gloomy frown of the Florentine castle.
Among the pieces of true architecture, he shall not need to ask which is the
temple, and which the forum. He shall know at a glance the festive theatre, and
the stern hall of hood-winked justice, the modest hospital and the patrician
palace. He shall not mistake what is public for what is private, nor fail to
distinguish which buildings are dedicated to business, which to pleasure or to
repose. All this is expressed by art, not conventionalism, and intelligible to
the perfectly artless, as well or better than to him of cultivated
taste; and why? Because the cultivation required does not consist in learning
but in unlearning the prejudices of a life, -in getting rid of the mass
of falsehood imbibed during the years passed in the presence of an
indiscriminate mixture and misapplication of every thing that is expressive in
architecture, the abuse of employing it all alike for the sake of ornament
instead of propriety...In the culture required to feel rightly the
effects of this art, there is nothing to be learnt but everything to be
unlearnt. The savage and the highly cultivated are alike in this respect; or
rather the acme of this cultivation is to approach as near as possible to the
feelings of the totally ignorant, of one to whom all architecture is
new.
[22]
The
process of cultivation, of transcending the errant masses, is the shedding of
the accretions of wasted explanations, of superstitions and sticky stupidity.
Garbett subscribes not to the primitivism of Laugier, he specifically rejected
the idea of the wooden hut as the paradigm of Greek architecture. Garbett did
however subscribe to a source he had in common with Laugier, namely the
primitivism of, among others, Rousseau; a form of primitivism which became
ubiquitous towards the end of the eighteenth-century. That primitivism
envisioned a cultivated savagery, with Diogenes as its hero, representing the
summum of conscious thought which desires to revert to a self-conscious
savagery. Garbett would have loved to have told the emperor Alexander to remove
himself because he and his escort were blocking the recluse's sun. That,
allegorically speaking, had been Rousseau's raison d'être. The metropolis
represented the clothing of an errant mankind, blocking the light, the naked
truth if you prefer me not to mix my metaphors, which the cultivated must
re-find. It was a light which the innocent child had not yet lost and the
savage by definition could never lose as he was not thought to be conscious of
having it in the first place.
This is what distinguished the
natural from the acquired. Associations gain in value as their pedigree
descends in time. But true associations are the ones justified by Nature as the
unchanging source of our symbols. The fact that that process of justification
was based on an intricate system of cultural values would have been lost on
Garbett.
The syntax of force
Natural
association, becomes simply that which is derived directly from a contemporary
metaphysics. On that basis Nature afforded Garbett a huge encyclopaedia of
complex characters. In Garbett's critical analysis of Alison's theory, these
characters could be shown to consist of different combinations of simple
elements. For Garbett's architectural purposes, these elements were divided
into two basic classes: those expressing power and those expressing delicacy.
When Nature wanted to express power it could do so by making and object angular
and hard, giving the object the appearance of solidity. Conversely, when nature
wanted to express delicacy it did so by
making an object soft and curvaceous. The analogy extended to the biological
process of growth: the soft, winding and delicate lines and malleable surfaces
of youth inevitably age and are transformed into hard surfaces and angular
outlines. Infancy and youth express tenderness, delicacy and playfulness;
maturity expresses strength and vigour and old-age complete petrification.
Youth determines its own form, old age is battered into shape.
Alison used semantics to illustrate
his point further. Power, as the operation of force, is expressed in an object
when force is operated on it; when the object is subjected to constraint.
Unable to assume a natural form with ease, it is forced into one. Thus the
force is operated from outside. Alison cleverly points out that we use a
passive verb to describe its condition: The
oak is gnarled, the body is contorted. When, on the other hand, we speak of
ease and volition in form we use the active verb to describe it i.e. a flower bends, a vine wreathes itself about
the elm, a river winds.[23]
3.
Alison
(1811) intr.: ...while we feel the
Emotions they [qualities] excite, we are ignorant of the causes by which they
are produced; and when we seek to discover them we have no other method of
discovery than that varied and patient experiment, by which, amid these
complicated circumstances, we may gradually ascertain the peculiar qualities
which, by the constitution of our Nature, are permanently connected with the
emotions we feel.
7.
Garbett
was often upset at Alison's modesty, arguing that where Alison saw an exception
to one of his theory, there was in fact none. For example see Treatise, p. 68.
9.
Treatise, p. 24-25. quoted from The Companion to the British Almanak for
1846, p.243. Another example is taken from the 1849 edition, p. 238.