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Download textbook Human Computer Interaction Interaction Contexts 19Th International Conference Hci International 2017 Vancouver Bc Canada July 9 14 2017 Proceedings Part Ii 1St Edition Masaaki Kurosu Eds ebook all chapter pdf
Download textbook Human Computer Interaction Interaction Contexts 19Th International Conference Hci International 2017 Vancouver Bc Canada July 9 14 2017 Proceedings Part Ii 1St Edition Masaaki Kurosu Eds ebook all chapter pdf
Human–Computer
LNCS 10272
Interaction
Interaction Contexts
19th International Conference, HCI International 2017
Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 9–14, 2017
Proceedings, Part II
123
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10272
Commenced Publication in 1973
Founding and Former Series Editors:
Gerhard Goos, Juris Hartmanis, and Jan van Leeuwen
Editorial Board
David Hutchison
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Takeo Kanade
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Josef Kittler
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Jon M. Kleinberg
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Friedemann Mattern
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
John C. Mitchell
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Moni Naor
Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
C. Pandu Rangan
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
Bernhard Steffen
TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany
Demetri Terzopoulos
University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Doug Tygar
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Gerhard Weikum
Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7409
Masaaki Kurosu (Ed.)
Human–Computer
Interaction
Interaction Contexts
19th International Conference, HCI International 2017
Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 9–14, 2017
Proceedings, Part II
123
Editor
Masaaki Kurosu
The Open University of Japan
Chiba
Japan
LNCS Sublibrary: SL3 – Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI
Thematic areas:
• Human–Computer Interaction (HCI 2017)
• Human Interface and the Management of Information (HIMI 2017)
Affiliated conferences:
• 17th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergo-
nomics (EPCE 2017)
• 11th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interac-
tion (UAHCI 2017)
• 9th International Conference on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (VAMR
2017)
• 9th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design (CCD 2017)
• 9th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media (SCSM 2017)
• 11th International Conference on Augmented Cognition (AC 2017)
• 8th International Conference on Digital Human Modeling and Applications in
Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management (DHM 2017)
• 6th International Conference on Design, User Experience and Usability (DUXU
2017)
• 5th International Conference on Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions
(DAPI 2017)
• 5th International Conference on Human Aspects of Information Security, Privacy
and Trust (HAS 2017)
• 4th International Conference on HCI in Business, Government and Organizations
(HCIBGO 2017)
• 4th International Conference on Learning and Collaboration Technologies (LCT
2017)
• Third International Conference on Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population
(ITAP 2017)
Conference Proceedings Volumes Full List
19. LNCS 10289, Design, User Experience, and Usability: Designing Pleasurable
Experiences (Part II), edited by Aaron Marcus and Wentao Wang
20. LNCS 10290, Design, User Experience, and Usability: Understanding Users and
Contexts (Part III), edited by Aaron Marcus and Wentao Wang
21. LNCS 10291, Distributed, Ambient and Pervasive Interactions, edited by Norbert
Streitz and Panos Markopoulos
22. LNCS 10292, Human Aspects of Information Security, Privacy and Trust, edited
by Theo Tryfonas
23. LNCS 10293, HCI in Business, Government and Organizations: Interacting with
Information Systems (Part I), edited by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah and Chuan-Hoo Tan
24. LNCS 10294, HCI in Business, Government and Organizations: Supporting
Business (Part II), edited by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah and Chuan-Hoo Tan
25. LNCS 10295, Learning and Collaboration Technologies: Novel Learning
Ecosystems (Part I), edited by Panayiotis Zaphiris and Andri Ioannou
26. LNCS 10296, Learning and Collaboration Technologies: Technology in Education
(Part II), edited by Panayiotis Zaphiris and Andri Ioannou
27. LNCS 10297, Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population: Aging, Design and
User Experience (Part I), edited by Jia Zhou and Gavriel Salvendy
28. LNCS 10298, Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population: Applications, Ser-
vices and Contexts (Part II), edited by Jia Zhou and Gavriel Salvendy
29. CCIS 713, HCI International 2017 Posters Proceedings (Part I), edited by
Constantine Stephanidis
30. CCIS 714, HCI International 2017 Posters Proceedings (Part II), edited by
Constantine Stephanidis
Human–Computer Interaction
The full list with the Program Board Chairs and the members of the Program Boards of
all thematic areas and affiliated conferences is available online at:
http://www.hci.international/board-members-2017.php
HCI International 2018
General Chair
Prof. Constantine Stephanidis
University of Crete and ICS-FORTH
Heraklion, Crete, Greece
E-mail: general_chair@hcii2018.org
http://2018.hci.international/
Contents – Part II
Games in HCI
Gathering and Applying Guidelines for Mobile Robot Design for Urban
Search and Rescue Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 562
Ekaterina R. Stepanova, Markus von der Heyde, Alexandra Kitson,
Thecla Schiphorst, and Bernhard E. Riecke
User Requirement Analysis for Display User Experience in Smart Car. . . . . . 732
Hoon Sik Yoo and Da Young Ju
Multimodal Interaction
Emotions in HCI
Abstract. Game Design research, in the past few years, has spawned multiple
models and frameworks for understanding of games as systems. These models
and frameworks predominantly function as pedagogic tools rather than some-
thing designers can readily use. The availability of multiple frameworks with
varying detail as well as the lack of interactive layers on these frameworks
makes it difficult for practicing designers to use them effectively.
In an attempt to overcome this limitation we propose a Unified Game Design
(UGD) framework which assimilates components and elements from multiple
existing models, frameworks and ontologies. The UGD framework features a
superset of the existing elements and creates categories and relationships that
makes it more usable.
We explored several applications of the UGD framework in analysis, com-
pletion and synthesis of games. However this paper elaborates the interactive
implementation of the UGD framework in the generation of game ideas. The
game of ‘Lets Game it’ with the framework’s components and elements at its
core was designed for the same purpose. The game provokes the designers to
create new combinations of components and elements to generate game ideas.
We conducted play tests for this game and found that game practitioners found it
useful in generating game ideas.
1 Introduction
Game design is the act of deciding what a game system should be and a designer must
make hundreds of decisions about the components and elements therein to make a
working game [1]. While the availability of several frameworks makes the field of
game design rich in knowledge, game designers may lose necessary features when they
choose one over the other. This issue of having to choose between frameworks or refer
to multiple frameworks led us to a systematic study of 10 popular game design models.
A comparative study of the models helped us assimilate their weaknesses and strengths
and thus synthesize the Unified Game Design (UGD) framework.
The process of synthesizing the UGD framework involved the categorization of the
models into structural, elemental and ontological frameworks and studying their fea-
tures, elements and components in detail. While the elements for the UGD framework
were extracted from the existing models and classified using heuristic principles,
techniques such as card sorting were used to define the components of the framework
[2]. Section 2 of the paper explains the analysis of existing frameworks and Sect. 3
explains the synthesis of the UGD framework.
Once the UGD framework was synthesized we wanted to make the framework
accessible, interactive and ‘playable’ for experienced as well as novice game designers.
We deliberated on various applications of the framework such as providing a choice
based interface, rating elements for game analysis or providing a tool to select a
combination of elements for game synthesis. The idea of using a game to synthesize
game ideas offered us the interactive freedom as well as fun that we were searching for.
We therefore chose to design the game ‘Let’s game it’ using the UGD framework for
synthesis of game ideas.
The UGD framework defines the flow of the game ‘Let’s game it’. The game is
based on the interrelationships between the different components and elements as
supplied by the framework. ‘Let’s game it’, through its gameplay, encourages players
to think of game ideas utilizing the structure supplied by the framework. The game
gives its players an organized approach to generate game ideas without consciously
implementing the game model.
The Sects. 5 and 6 of this paper explain in detail the conception of ‘Lets game it’,
its design process as well as the data collection and discussion assimilated from the
playtest sessions. The game was tested with several players consisting of a mix of both
experienced as well as novice game designers. The game proved to be a successful
implementation of the framework and satisfied its core intention of helping in game
idea generation.
2 Analysis of Frameworks
We began our study for establishing a usable framework by searching the game design
literature, published since the year 2000. We searched using keywords such as game
design models, frameworks, ontologies, classification, components and elements as
well as game analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and generation. The study led to the
shortlisting of 10 game design frameworks. These were further grouped according to
their core focus aspects into structural, elemental and ontological framework. The next
sections explain in detail the theoretical analysis of the frameworks based on the
classification.
All the three models the MDA [3], the Means, Play and Ends [4] and Takatalo’s
model [5] differ intrinsically in their details and information but structurally they all
represent the same three part flow of a game system.
Although the models discussed above provide us with a strong structural base they
do not provide sufficient information on elements of a game system. To achieve a
detailed understanding of the same we analyzed and studied the elemental frameworks.
We have added SGDA framework by Mitgutsch and Alvarado [13] which was not
mentioned earlier. This framework gives us an additional dimension of designer
intentions or purpose.
The study lead us to a few important conclusions regarding the existing frameworks
• Each model provides its individual unique characteristics rather than being an
assimilation or an enhancement of a previously established model.
• The models are either biased to the structural or the elemental aspect of the system.
• The existing frameworks focus more on game mechanics and hence resources and
dynamics which are functions of mechanics are underrepresented.
• The elements that designers work on upfront (intention elements) have been
underrepresented in the existing models.
• The study of the relationship between the elements and components of a game is as
important as the elements and components themselves.
• Table 1 shows a concise view of how each of the frameworks individually do not
provide a unified view of the game system.
• The synthesis of the unified model would help designers to refrain from choosing
one model over another and thus losing out on important features.
• Every element should find a place in only one component (no redundancy).
• The classification may reach its final state after few iterations and field use.
The process of classification of components included
1. Enlisting all elements extracted from the literature
2. Removing any duplications, resolving synonyms, breaking up ambiguous elements
3. Conducting bottom-up analysis using card sorting
4. Conducting top down analysis using mind maps
5. Finalizing classification and trees.
This method of classification helped us arrive at the six components of the UGD
framework as shown in Fig. 2.
VIII
I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th
Century, when one after another all its great masters died, and the
question will naturally, therefore, be asked—is Impressionism (in the
current narrow sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting
lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must
not be deceived by appearances. Not only was there a dead space
between Rembrandt and Delacroix or Constable—for when we think
of the living art of high symbolism that was Rembrandt’s the purely
decorative artists of the 18th Century do not count—but, further, that
which began with Delacroix and Constable was, notwithstanding all
technical continuity, something quite different from that which had
ended with Rembrandt. The new episode of painting that in the 19th
Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in “Civilization”) has
succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting,
has itself chosen the word Plein-air (Freilicht) to designate its special
characteristic. The very designation suffices to show the significance
of the fleeting phenomenon that it is. It implies the conscious,
intellectual, cold-blooded rejection of that for which a sudden wit
invented the name “brown sauce,” but which the great masters had,
as we know, regarded as the one truly metaphysical colour. On it had
been built the painting-culture of the schools, and especially the
Dutch school, that had vanished irretrievably in the Rococo. This
brown, the symbol of a spatial infinity, which had for Faustian
mankind created a spiritual something out of a mere canvas, now
came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an offence to Nature. What
had happened? Was it not simply this, that the soul for which this
supernal colour was something religious, the sign of wistfulness, the
whole meaning of “Living Nature,” had quietly slipped away? The
materialism of a Western Cosmopolis blew into the ashes and
rekindled this curious brief flicker—a brief flicker of two generations,
for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I have (as the
reader will recall) characterized the noble green of Grünewald and
Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the
transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant
world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale
stand for irreligion.[364] From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar
expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust
of the earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not
contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. It is the
mechanical object of physics and not the felt world of the pastorale
that Courbet and Manet give us in their landscapes. Rousseau’s
tragically correct prophecy of a “return to Nature” fulfils itself in this
dying art—the senile, too, return to Nature day by day. The modern
artist is a workman, not a creator. He sets unbroken spectrum-
colours side by side. The subtle script, the dance of brush-strokes,
give way to crude commonplaces, pilings and mixings and daubings
of points, squares, broad inorganic masses. The whitewasher’s
brush and the trowel appear in the painter’s equipment; the oil-
priming of the canvas is brought into the scheme of execution and in
places left bare. It is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased—an art
for over-developed nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic
in everything that relates to the conquest of technical obstacles,
acutely assertive of programme. It is the “satyric pendant” of the
great age of oil-painting that stretches from Leonardo to Rembrandt;
it could only be at home in the Paris of Baudelaire. Corot’s silvern
landscapes, with their grey-greens and browns, dream still of the
spiritual of the Old Masters; but Courbet and Manet conquer bare
physical space, “factual” space. The meditative discoverer
represented by Leonardo gives way to the painting experimentalist.
Corot, the eternal child, French but not Parisian, finds his
transcendent landscapes anywhere and everywhere; Courbet,
Manet, Cézanne, portray over and over again, painfully, laboriously,
soullessly, the Forest of Fontainebleau, the bank of the Seine at
Argenteuil, or that remarkable valley near Arles. Rembrandt’s mighty
landscapes lie essentially in the universe, Manet’s near a railway
station. The plein-air painters, true megalopolitans, obtain as it were
specimens of the music of space from the least agitated sources of
Spain and Holland—from Velasquez, Goya, Hobbema, Franz Hals—
in order (with the aid of English landscapists and, later, the
Japanese, “highbrows” all) to restate it in empirical and scientific
terms. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head
against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.
In Germany it was otherwise. Whereas in France it was a matter of
closing-off the great school, in Germany it was a case of catching up
with it. For in the picturesque style, as practised from Rottmann,
Wasmann, K. D. Friedrich and Runge to Marées and Leibl, an
unbroken evolution is the very basis of technique, and even a new-
style school requires a closed tradition behind it. Herein lies the
weakness and the strength of the last German painters. Whereas the
French possessed a continuous tradition of their own from early
Baroque to Chardin and Corot, whereas there was living connexion
between Claude Lorrain and Corot, Rubens and Delacroix, all the
great Germans of the 18th Century had been musicians. After
Beethoven this music, without change of inward essence, was
diverted (one of the modalities of the German Romantic movement)
back into painting. And it was in painting that it flowered longest and
bore its kindliest fruits, for the portraits and landscapes of these men
are suffused with a secret wistful music, and there is a breath of
Eichendorff and Mörike left even in Thoma and Böcklin. But a foreign
teacher had to be asked to supply that which was lacking in the
native tradition, and so these painters one and all went to Paris,
where they studied and copied the old masters of 1670. So also did
Manet and his circle. But there was this difference, that the
Frenchmen found in these studies only reminiscences of something
that had been in their art for many generations, whereas the
Germans received fresh and wholly different impressions. The result
was that, in the 19th Century, the German arts of form (other than
music) were a phenomenon out of season—hasty, anxious,
confused, puzzled as to both aim and means. There was indeed no
time to be lost. The level that German music or French painting had
taken centuries to attain had to be made good by German painting in
two generations. The expiring art demanded its last phase, and this
phase had to be reached by a vertiginous race through the whole
past. Hence the unsteadiness, in everything pertaining to form, of
high Faustian natures like Marées and Böcklin, an unsteadiness that
in German music with its sure tradition (think of Bruckner) would
have been impossible. The art of the French Impressionists was too
explicit in its programme and correspondingly too poor in soul to
expose them to such a tragedy. German literature, on the contrary,
was in the same condition as German painting; from Goethe’s time,
every major work was intended to found something and obliged to
conclude something. Just as Kleist felt in himself both Shakespeare
and Stendhal, and laboured desperately, altering and discarding
without end and without result, to forge two centuries of
psychological art into a unit; just as Hebbel tried to squeeze all the
problems from Hamlet to Rosmersholm into one dramatic type; so
Menzel, Leibl, and Marées sought to force the old and new models—
Rembrandt, Claude, Van Goyen, and Watteau, Delacroix, Courbet
and Manet—into a single form. While the little early interiors of
Menzel anticipated all the discoveries of the Manet circle and Leibl
not seldom succeeded where Courbet tried and failed, their pictures
renew the metaphysical browns and greens of the Old Masters and
are fully expressive of an inward experience. Menzel actually re-
experienced and reawakened something of Prussian Rococo,
Marées something of Rubens, Leibl in his “Frau Gedon” something
of Rembrandt’s portraiture. Moreover, the studio-brown of the 17th
Century had had by its side a second art, the intensely Faustian art
of etching. In this, as in the other, Rembrandt is the greatest master
of all time; this, like the other, has something Protestant in it that puts
it in a quite different category from the work of the Southern Catholic
painters of blue-green atmospheres and the Gobelin tapestries. And
Leibl, the last artist in the brown, was the last great etcher whose
plates possess that Rembrandtesque infinity that contains and
reveals secrets without end. In Marées, lastly, there was all the
mighty intention of the great Baroque style, but, though Guéricault
and Daumier were not too belated to capture it in positive form, he—
lacking just that strength that a tradition would have given him—was
unable to force it into the world of painter’s actuality.
IX
The last of the Faustian arts died in “Tristan.” This work is the giant
keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like this as a
finale—on the contrary, the effect of Manet, Menzel and Leibl, with
their combination of “free light” and resurrected old-master styles, is
weak.
“Contemporaneously,” in our sense, Apollinian art came to its end
in Pergamene sculpture. Pergamum is the counterpart of Bayreuth.
The famous altar itself,[365] indeed, is later, and probably not the most
important work of the epoch at that; we have to assume a century
(330-220 B.C.) of development now lost in oblivion. Nevertheless, all
Nietzsche’s charges against Wagner and Bayreuth, the “Ring” and
“Parsifal”—decadence, theatricalness and the like—could have been
levelled in the same words at the Pergamene sculpture. A
masterpiece of this sculpture—a veritable “Ring”—has come down to
us in the Gigantomachia frieze of the great altar. Here is the same
theatrical note, the same use of motives from ancient discredited
mythology as points d’appui, the same ruthless bombardment of the
nerves, and also (though the lack of inner power cannot altogether
be concealed) the same fully self-conscious force and towering
greatness. To this art the Farnese Bull and the older model of the
Laocoön group certainly belong.
The symptom of decline in creative power is the fact that to
produce something round and complete the artist now requires to be
emancipated from form and proportion. Its most obvious, though not
its most significant, manifestation is the taste for the gigantic. Here
size is not, as in the Gothic and the Pyramid styles, the expression of
inward greatness, but the dissimulation of its absence. This
swaggering in specious dimensions is common to all nascent
Civilizations—we find it in the Zeus altar of Pergamum, the Helios of
Chares called the “Colossus of Rhodes,” the architecture of the
Roman Imperial Age, the New Empire work in Egypt, the American
skyscraper of to-day. But what is far more indicative is the
arbitrariness and immoderateness that tramples on and shatters the
conventions of centuries. In Bayreuth and in Pergamum, it was the
superpersonal Rule, the absolute mathematic of Form, the Destiny
immanent in the quietly-matured language of a great art, that was
found to be intolerable. The way from Polycletus to Lysippus and
from Lysippus to the sculptors of the groups of Gauls[366] is paralleled
by the way from Bach, by Beethoven, to Wagner. The earlier artists
felt themselves masters, the later uneasy slaves, of the great form.
While even Praxiteles and Haydn were able to speak freely and gaily
within the limits of the strictest canon, Lysippus and Beethoven could
only produce by straining their voices. The sign of all living art, the
pure harmony of “will,” “must” and “can,” the self-evidence of the
aim, the un-self-consciousness of the execution, the unity of the art
and the Culture—all that is past and gone. In Corot and Tiepolo,
Mozart and Cimarosa, there is still a real mastery of the mother-
tongue. After them, the process of mutilation begins, but no one is
conscious of it because no one now can speak it fluently. Once upon
a time, Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is
understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline. In the time of
Rembrandt or Bach the “failures” that we know only too well were
quite unthinkable. The Destiny of the form lay in the race or the
school, not in the private tendencies of the individual. Under the spell
of a great tradition full achievement is possible even to a minor artist,
because the living art brings him in touch with his task and the task
with him. To-day, these artists can no longer perform what they
intend, for intellectual operations are a poor substitute for the trained
instinct that has died out. All of them have experienced this. Marées
was unable to complete any of his great schemes. Leibl could not
bring himself to let his late pictures go, and worked over them again
and again to such an extent that they became cold and hard.
Cézanne and Renoir left work of the best quality unfinished because,
strive as they would, they could do no more. Manet was exhausted
after he had painted thirty pictures, and his “Shooting of the Emperor
Maximilian,” in spite of the immense care that is visible in every item
of the picture and the studies for it, hardly achieved as much as
Goya managed without effort in its prototype the “shootings of the
3rd of May.” Bach, Haydn, Mozart and a thousand obscure
musicians of the 18th Century could rapidly turn out the most
finished work as a matter of routine, but Wagner knew full well that
he could only reach the heights by concentrating all his energy upon
“getting the last ounce” out of the best moments of his artistic
endowment.
Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is
not, indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his
unerring flair for the decadent detected at once. For the
Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conjuring
up of a world in space out of strokes and patches of colour, and this
was just what Wagner achieved with three bars. A whole world of
soul could crowd into these three bars. Colours of starry midnight, of
sweeping clouds, of autumn, of the day dawning in fear and sorrow,
sudden glimpses of sunlit distances, world-fear, impending doom,
despair and its fierce effort, hopeless hope—all these impressions
which no composer before him had thought it possible to catch, he
could paint with entire distinctness in the few tones of a motive. Here
the contrast of Western music with Greek plastic has reached its
maximum. Everything merges in bodiless infinity, no longer even
does a linear melody wrestle itself clear of the vague tone-masses
that in strange surgings challenge an imaginary space. The motive
comes up out of dark terrible deeps. It is flooded for an instant by a
flash of hard bright sun. Then, suddenly, it is so close upon us that
we shrink. It laughs, it coaxes, it threatens, and anon it vanishes into
the domain of the strings, only to return again out of endless
distances, faintly modified and in the voice of a single oboe, to pour
out a fresh cornucopia of spiritual colours. Whatever this is, it is
neither painting nor music, in any sense of these words that attaches
to previous work in the strict style. Rossini was asked once what he
thought of the music of the “Huguenots”; “Music?” he replied. “I
heard nothing resembling it.” Many a time must this judgment have
been passed at Athens on the new painting of the Asiatic and
Sicyonian schools, and opinions not very different must have been
current in Egyptian Thebes with regard to the art of Cnossus and
Tell-el-Amarna.
All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet.
Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against
contemplation-painting (Inhaltsmalerei) and abstract music, their art
really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the
beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality
and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An artificial
art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end.
And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the
arts of form of the West. The crisis of the 19th Century was the
death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the
Faustian art dies of senility, having actualized its inward possibilities
and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.
What is practised as art to-day—be it music after Wagner or
painting after Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel—is impotence and
falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities
that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate
necessity? Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently
necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the
exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious
cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the
market, something that will “catch on” with a public for whom art and
music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At
what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is
called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders’
meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first-
rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character
and capacity than in the whole music and painting of present-day
Europe. There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred
superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great tradition (and
therefore great art) endured even these achieved something worthy.
We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the
tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But to-
day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them,
working art “for a living” (as if that were a justification!). One thing is
quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be shut down
without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to
know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to
forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There,
as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic
progress, of personal peculiarity, of “the new style,” of “unsuspected
possibilities,” theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists,
weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells—the “Literary Man” in the
Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the art-
trade has organized as a “phase of art-history,” thinking and feeling
and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-
dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and
painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their
public. What do we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, filled
with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full
of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so
concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new “style” which
is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying
plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet
this and only this, the taste of the “man of the world,” can be
accepted as the expression and sign of the age; everything else,
everything that “sticks to” old ideals, is for provincial consumption.
The grand Ornamentation of the past has become as truly a dead
language as Sanskrit or Church Latin.[367] Instead of its symbolism
being honoured and obeyed, its mummy, its legacies of perfected
forms, are put into the pot anyhow, and recast in wholly inorganic
forms. Every modern age holds change to be development, and puts
revivals and fusions of old styles in the place of real becoming.
Alexandria also had its Pre-Raphaelite comedians with their vases,
chairs, pictures and theories, its symbolists, naturalists and
expressionists. The fashion at Rome was now Græco-Asiatic, now
Græco-Egyptian, now (after Praxiteles) neo-Attic. The relief of the
XIXth Dynasty—the modern age in the Egyptian Culture—that
covered the monstrous, meaningless, inorganic walls, statues and
columns, seems like a sheer parody of the art of the Old Kingdom.
The Ptolemaic Horus-temple of Edfu is quite unsurpassed in the way
of vacuous eclecticism—so far, for we are only at the beginning of
our own development in this line, showy and assertive as the style of
our streets and squares already is.
In due course, even the strength to wish for change fades out.
Rameses the Great—so soon—appropriated to himself buildings of
his predecessors by cutting out their names and inserting his own in
the inscriptions. It was the same consciousness of artistic impotence
that led Constantine to adorn his triumphal arch in Rome with
sculptures taken from other buildings; but Classical craftsmanship
had set to work long before Constantine—as early, in fact, as 150—
on the business of copying old masterpieces, not because these
were understood and appreciated in the least, but because no one
was any longer capable of producing originals. It must not be
forgotten that these copyists were the artists of their time; their work
therefore (done in one style or another according to the moment’s
fashion) represent the maximum of creative power then available. All
the Roman portrait statues, male and female, go back for posture
and mien to a very few Hellenic types; these, copied more or less
true to style, served for torsos, while the heads were executed as
“Likenesses” by simple craftsmen who possessed the knack. The
famous statue of Augustus in armour, for example, is based on the
Spearman of Polycletus, just as—to name the first harbingers of the
same phase in our own world—Lenbach rests upon Rembrandt and
Makart upon Rubens. For 1500 years (Amasis I to Cleopatra)
Egypticism piled portrait on portrait in the same way. Instead of the
steady development that the great age had pursued through the Old
and Middle Kingdoms, we find fashions that change according to the
taste of this or that dynasty. Amongst the discoveries at Turfan are
relics of Indian dramas, contemporary with the birth of Christ, which
are similar in all respects to the Kalidasa of a later century. Chinese
painting as we know it shows not an evolution but an up-and-down of
fashions for more than a thousand years on end; and this
unsteadiness must have set in as early as the Han period. The final
result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms
which we see to-day in Indian, Chinese, and Arabian-Persian art.
Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and
musical compositions—all is patternwork.[368] We cease to be able to
date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of
its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.
CHAPTER IX
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL
CHAPTER IX
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
I
ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL
I