Organic unity

A work of art must have what Aristotle called “a beginning, a middle, and an end”; it must be unified, it must “hang together” as one entity. Everything, of course, has some degree of unity or other. Even a collection of things, such as a woodpile, has some unity inasmuch as it can correctly be called one thing: it is a collection, but it is a single collection. But the unity desired in works of art is much greater than this: it is more like the unity of the higher organisms in which every part functions not independently of the others but interdependently with them, and it is this interdependency of the parts that constitutes an organic unity. Take away one part, and the remainder of the parts fail to function as before. This is only approximately true of organisms: without a heart or a brain a person could not continue to exist (and the activity of the other organs would cease), but a person without an ear or a toe surely would. Philosophers of art have often noted that the purest examples of organic unity in the universe are not organisms but works of art: here the interdependency of parts often achieves a state of such perfection that it could often be said, of a melody or a sonnet, that if this note (or word) were not there, in just the place that it is, the effect on the entire remainder of the melody or poem would be disastrous.

Complexity, or diversity

This principle is the natural accompaniment of the first one. A blank wall has unity but no variety and is not long worth contemplating. Nor is there any triumph in achieving unity at so small a price. The work of art must hold in suspension (as it were) a great diversity of elements and unify them—the greater the complexity that is integrated into a unity, the greater the achievement. This fact is so universally recognized that the two criteria are often stated as one, unity-in-diversity, or variety-in-unity.

Very many great works of art are much less than perfect organic unities (which is another way of saying that unity-in-variety is not the only criterion for excellence in works of art). Particularly in long poems or novels or operas, some parts are clearly more important than the others, though contributing to the whole, and some parts may be simply “padding.” One could hardly allege that Homer’s entire epic the Iliad is an organic unity and that if (for example) the catalog of ships were removed the entire epic would be ruined (some even say it would be improved). In the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a 19th-century Russian writer, there are whole chapters that are unnecessary from the point of view of relevance to the rest of the story, and, aesthetically (though perhaps not in other ways), these are a pure excrescence. In most works of art there are high spots and low spots, and there is a great deal of elasticity as to what could follow what. But in spite of this, unity-in-variety is quite universally recognized as a criterion for artistic excellence. If a drama consisted of two plots that never connected with one another, even at the end, such a play would be condemned at once for lack of unity; a work of art is never praised for being disjointed or disunified, though it might be praised in spite of being disunified.

Theme and thematic variation

In many works of art there is a dominant theme, or motif, which stands out and upon which the other portions are centred. This theme is then varied in different ways in other portions of the work. This is a special case of unity-in-variety. If every line in a work of music or literature were entirely novel and different from the other ones, there would be enormous diversity but no unifying connecting links, and if there were simply a repetition of the initial theme or of entire sections of the work (as sometimes happens when a composer does not know how to develop the thematic material), there would be unity but no variety. Both unity and variety are preserved by having central themes with other material that is related to them (unity) but not identical with them (variety).

Development, or evolution

In works of temporal art, each part develops or evolves into the next, each part being necessary to the succeeding part, so that if an earlier part were altered or deleted, all the subsequent parts would have to be altered in consequence. If a portion of Act IV could be interchanged with a portion of Act II without loss of effect, the principle of development has not been observed, for then the material occurring in between would not have made any difference.

Balance

The arrangement of the various parts should be balanced, usually in contrasting ways (the adagio movement coming between two faster movements, for example). In painting, there should be a balance between the right and left halves of the canvas. The many ways, other than simple mechanical symmetry (“for every item on the left there should be an item on the right,” which soon becomes monotonous), in which a painting may have variety and yet retain balance are too complex to be discussed other than in a book of art criticism. But in its simplest essentials, the principle is acknowledged by everyone: the person who places all the furniture on one half of the living room while leaving the other half empty finds the arrangement aesthetically displeasing because the room lacks balance.

There are many descriptions of principles of form in art, which differ from one another in their terminology more than in their final outcome. In general, however, few if any of these principles would be denied (only the detail of their formulations might be) by most philosophers of art. Why certain principles of form are found satisfactory and others are not is a fascinating psychological question, leading back to a discussion (necessarily vague in the present state of knowledge) of the nature of the human organism and the discriminatory powers of the human mind. But however obscure the explanation, the facts of the case seem clear enough: certain formal principles in art must be observed, and, to the degree that they are ignored or violated, aesthetic catastrophe occurs: the work of art cannot evoke interest or sustain it long once it is initiated.

Although a discussion of these formal principles is helpful particularly to those who have little native sense of form and who want “to know what to look for” in art, they are sufficiently vague so that many critics can agree on a formal principle, such as unity, and yet disagree on the degree to which a specific work possesses it.

In addition, these principles are far from complete: a work of art can possess unity and the other requirements in high degree and yet be unsuccessful even as form. The requirements listed seem only to have skimmed the surface. Yet what more is required to distinguish a formally correct but dull work of art from a brilliant one seems to defy precise analysis. Moreover, the majority of critics who have assented to these principles are not formalists: they have acknowledged and even insisted on the great importance of form in works of art, but they have not alleged, as formalists do, that these principles constitute the sole criteria of excellence in works of art. They have held that the fulfillment of formal criteria counts as a necessary condition for artistic excellence but not a sufficient condition.