Books: The Psychology of Beauty
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Ethel D. Puffer >> The Psychology of Beauty
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16 The Psychology of Beauty
by Ethel D. Puffer
PREFACE
THE human being who thrills to the experience of beauty in
nature and in art does not forever rest with that experience
unquestioned. The day comes when he yearns to pierce the
secret of his emotion, to discover what it is, and why, that
has so stung him--to defend and to justify his transport to
himself and to others. He seeks a reason for the faith that
is in him. And so have arisen the speculative theories of
the nature of beauty, on the one hand, and the studies of
concrete beauty and our feelings about it, on the other.
Speculative theory has taken its own way, however, as a
part of philosophy, in relating the Beautiful to the other
great concepts of the True and the Good; building up an
architectonic of abstract ideas, far from the immediate
facts and problems of the enjoyment of beauty. There has
grown up, on the other hand, in the last years, a great
literature of special studies in the facts of aesthetic
production and enjoyment. Experiments with the aesthetic
elements; investigations into the physiological psychology
of aesthetic reactions; studies in the genesis and development
of art forms, have multiplied apace. But these are still
mere groups of facts for psychology; they have not been taken
up into a single authoritative principle. Psychology cannot
do justice to the imperative of beauty, by virtue of which,
when we say "this is beautiful," we have a right to imply
that the universe must agree with us. A synthesis of these
tendencies in the study of beauty is needed, in which the
results of modern psychology shall help to make intelligible
a philosophical theory of beauty. The chief purpose of this
book is to seek to effect such a union.
A way of defining Beauty which grounds it in general principles,
while allowing it to reach the concrete case, is set forth in
the essay on the Nature of Beauty. The following chapters aim
to expand, to test, and to confirm this central theory, by
showing, partly by the aid of the aforesaid special studies,
how it accounts for our pleasure in pictures, music, and
literature.
The whole field of beauty is thus brought under discussion;
and therefore, though it nowhere seeks to be exhaustive in
treatment, the book may fairly claim to be a more or less
consistent and complete aesthetic theory, and hence to
address itself to the student of aesthetics as well as to the
general reader. The chapter on the Nature of Beauty, indeed,
will doubtless be found by the latter somewhat technical, and
should be omitted by all who definitely object to professional
phraseology. The general conclusions of the book are
sufficiently stated in the less abstract papers.
Of the essays which compose the following volume, the first,
third, and last are reprinted, in more or less revised form,
from the "Atlantic Monthly" and the "International Monthly."
Although written as independent papers, it is thought that
they do not unduly repeat each other, but that they serve to
verify, in each of the several realms of beauty, the truth
of the central theory of the book.
The various influences which have served to shape a work of
this kind become evident in the reading; but I cannot refrain
from a word of thanks to the teachers whose inspiration and
encouragement first made it possible. I owe much gratitude
to Professor Mary A. Jordan and Professor H. Norman Gardiner
of Smith College, who in literature and in philosophy first
set me in the way of aesthetic interest and inquiry, and to
Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard University, whose
philosophical theories and scientific guidance have largely
influenced my thought.
WELLESLEY COLLEGE, April 24, 1905.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. CRITICISM AND AESTHETICS.............................1
II. THE NATURE OF BEAUTY................................27
III. THE AESTHETIC REPOSE................................57
IV. THE BEAUTY OF FINE ART..............................89
A. THE BEAUTY OF VISUAL FORM.....................91
B. SPACE COMPOSITION AMONG THE OLD MASTERS......128
V. THE BEAUTY OF MUSIC................................149
VI. THE BEAUTY OF LITERATURE...........................203
VII. THE NATURE OF THE EMOTIONS OF THE DRAMA............229
VIII. THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS................................263
I
CRITICISM AND AESTHETICS
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEAUTY
I
CRITICISM AND AESTHETICS
IT is not so long ago that the field of literary criticism
was divided into two opposing camps. France being the only
country in the world where criticism is a serious matter,
the battle waged most fiercely there, and doubtless greatly
served to bring about the present general interest and
understanding of the theoretical questions at issue. The
combatants were, of course, the impressionistic and scientific
schools of criticism, and particularly enlightening were the
more or less recent controversies between MM. Anatole France
and Jules Lemaitre as representatives of the first, and M.
Brunetiere as the chief exponent of the second. They have
planted their standards; and we see that they stand for
tendencies in the critical activity of every nation. The
ideal of the impressionist is to bring a new piece of
literature into being in some exquisitely happy characterization,--
to create a lyric of criticism out of the unique pleasure of
an aesthetic hour. The stronghold of the scientist, on the
other hand, is the doctrine of literary evolution, and his
aim is to show the history of literature as the history of
a process, and the work of literature as a product; to explain
it from its preceding causes, and to detect thereby the general
laws of literary metamorphosis.
Such are the two great lines of modern criticism; their purposes
and ideals stand diametrically opposed. Of late, however, there
have not been wanting signs of a spirit of reconciliation, and
of a tendency to concede the value, each in its own sphere, of
different but complementary activities. Now and again the
lion and the lamb have lain down together; one might almost say,
on reading a delightful paper of Mr. Lewis E. Gates on
Impressionism and Appreciation,<1> that the lamb had assimilated
the lion. For the heir of all literary studies, according to
Professor Gates, is the appreciative critic; and he it is who
shall fulfill the true function of criticism. He is to
consider the work of art in its historical setting and its
psychological origin, "as a characteristic moment in the
development of human spirit, and as a delicately transparent
illustration of aesthetic law." But, "in regarding the work
of art under all these aspects, his aim is, primarily, not to
explain, and not to judge or dogmatize, but to enjoy; to
realize the manifold charms the work of art has gathered unto
itself from all sources, and to interpret this charm imaginatively
to the men of his own day and generation."
<1> Atlantic Monthly, July, 1900.
Thus it would seem that if the report of his personal reactions
to a work of literary art is the intention of the impressionist,
and its explanation that of the scientist, the purpose of the
appreciative critic is fairly named as the illuminating and
interpreting reproduction of that work, from material furnished
by those other forms of critical activity. Must, then, the
method of appreciation, as combining and reconciling the two
opposed views, forthwith claim our adherence? To put to use
all the devices of science and all the treasures of scholarship
for the single end of imaginative interpretation, for the sake
of giving with the original melody all the harmonies of subtle
association and profound meaning the ages have added, is, indeed,
a great undertaking. But is it as valuable as it is vast? M.
Brunetiere has poured out his irony upon the critics who believe
that their own reactions upon literature are anything to us in
the presence of the works to which they have thrilled. May it
not also be asked of the interpreter if its function is a
necessary one? Do we require so much enlightenment, only to
enjoy? Appreciative criticism is a salt to give the dull
palate its full savor; but what literary epicure, what real
boo-lover, will acknowledge his own need of it? If the whole
aim of appreciative criticism is to reproduce in other
arrangement the contents, expressed and implied, and the
emotional value, original and derived, of a piece of literature,
the value of the end, at least to the intelligent reader, is
out of all proportion to the laboriousness of the means. Sing,
reading's a joy! For me, I read.
But a feeling of this kind is, after all, not a reason to be
urged against the method. The real weakness of appreciative
criticism lies elsewhere. It teaches us to enjoy; but are we
to enjoy everything? Since its only aim is to reveal the
"intricate implications" of a work of art; since it offers,
and professes to offer, no literary judgments,--having indeed
no explicit standard of literary value,--it must, at least
on its own theory, take its objects of appreciation ready-made,
so to speak, by popular acclaim. It possesses no criterion;
it likes whate'er it looks on; and it can never tell us what
we are not to like. That is unsatisfactory; and it is worse,--
it is self-destructive. For, not being able to reject,
appreciation cannot, in logic, choose the objects of its
attention. But a method which cannot limit on its own principles
the field within which it is to work is condemned from the
beginning; it bears a fallacy at its core. In order to make
criticism theoretically possible at all, the power to choose
and reject, and so the pronouncing of judgment, must be an
integral part of it.
To such a task the critic may lend himself without arousing
our antagonism. We have no pressing need to know the latent
possibilities of emotion for us in a book or a poem; but whether
it is excellent or the reverse, whether "we were right in being
moved by it," we are indeed willing to hear, for we desire to
justify the faith that is in us.
If, then, the office of the judge be an essential part of the
critical function, the appreciative critic, whatever his other
merits,--and we shall examine them later,--fails at least of
perfection. His scheme is not the ideal one; and we may turn
back, in our search for it, to a closer view of those which
his was to supersede. Impressionism, however, is at once out
of the running; it has always vigorously repudiated the notion
of the standard, and we know, therefore, that no more than
appreciation can it choose its material and stand alone. But
scientific criticism professes, at least, the true faith M.
Brunetiere holds that his own method is the only one by which
an impersonal and stable judgment can be rendered.
The doctrine of the evolution of literary species is more or
less explained in naming it. Literary species, M. Brunetiere
maintains, do exist. They develop and are transformed into
others in a way more or less analogous to the evolution of
natural types. It remains to see on what basis an objective
judgment can be given. Although M. Brunetiere seems to make
classification the disposal of a work in the hierarchy of
species, and judgment the disposal of it in relation to others
of its own species, he has never sharply distinguished between
them; so that we shall not be wrong in taking his three
principles of classification, scientific, moral, and aesthetic,
as three principles by which he estimates the excellence of a
work. His own examples, indeed, prove that to him a thing is
already judged in being classified. The work of art is judged,
then, by its relation to the type. Is this position tenable?
I hold that, on the contrary, it precludes the possibility of
a critical judgment; for the judgment of anything always means
judgment with reference to the end for which is exists. A bad
king is not the less a bad king for being a good father; and
if his kingship is his essential function, he must be judged
with reference to that alone. Now a piece of literature is,
with reference to its end, first of all a work of art. It
represents life and it enjoins morality, but it is only as a
work of art that it attains consideration; that, in the words
of M. Lemaitre, it "exists" for us at all. Its aim is beauty,
and beauty is its excuse for being.
The type belongs to natural history. The one principle at the
basis of scientific criticism is, as we have seen, the
conception of literary history as a process, and of the work
of art as a product. The work of art is, then, a moment in a
necessary succession, governed by laws of change and adaptation
like those of natural evolution. But how can the conception of
values enter here? Excellence can be attributed only to that
which attains an ideal end; and a necessary succession has no
end in itself. The "type," in this sense, is perfectly hollow.
To say that the modern chrysanthemum is better than that of
our forbears because it is more chrysanthemum-like is true only
if we make the latter form the arbitrary standard of the
chrysanthemum. If the horse of the Eocene age is inferior to
the horse of to-day, it is because, on M. Brunetiere's principle,
he is less horse-like. But who shall decide which is more like
a horse, the original or the latter development? No species
which is constituted by its own history can be said to have
an end in itself, and can, therefore, have an excellence to
which it shall attain. In short, good and bad can be applied
to the moments in a necessary evolution only by imputing a
fictitious superiority to the last term; and so one type cannot
logically be preferred to another. As for the individual
specimens, since the conception of the type does not admit the
principle of excellence, conformity thereto means nothing.
The work of art, on the other hand, as a thing of beauty, is
an attainment of an ideal, not a product, and, from this point
of view, is related not at all to the other terms of a succession,
its causes and its effects, but only to the abstract principles
of that beauty at which it aims. Strangely enough, the whole
principle of this contention has been admitted by M. Brunetiere
in a casual sentence, of which he does not appear to recognize
the full significance. "We acknowledge, of course," he says,
"that there is in criticism a certain difference from natural
history, since we cannot eliminate the subjective element if
the capacity works of art have of producing impressions on us
makes a part of their definition. It is not in order to be
eaten that the tree produces its fruit." But this is giving
away his whole position! As little as the conformity of the
fruit to its species has to do with our pleasure in eating it,
just so little has the conformity of a literary work to its
genre to do with the quality by virtue of which it is defined
as art.
The Greek temple is a product of Greek religion applied to
geographical conditions. To comprehend it as a type, we must
know that it was an adaptation of the open hilltop to the
purpose of the worship of images of the gods. But the most
penetrating study of the slow moulding of this type will never
reveal how and why just those proportions were chosen which
make the joy and the despair of all beholders. Early Italian
art was purely ecclesiastical in its origin. The exigencies
of adaptation to altars, convent walls, or cathedral domes
explain the choice of subjects, the composition, even perhaps
the color schemes (as of frescoes, for instance); and yet all
that makes a Giotto greater than a Pictor Ignotus is quite
unaccounted for by these considerations.
The quality of beauty is not evolved. All that comes under
the category of material and practical purpose, of idea or of
moral attitude, belongs to the succession, the evolution, the
type But the defining characters of the work of art are
independent of time. The temple, the fresco, and the symphony,
in the moment they become objects of the critical judgment,
become also qualities of beauty and transparent examples of
its laws.
If the true critical judgment, then, belongs to an order of
ideas of which natural science can take no cognizance, the
self-styled scientific criticism must show the strange paradox
of ignoring the very qualities by virtue of which a given work
has any value, or can come at all to be the object of aesthetic
judgment. In two words, the world of beauty and the world of
natural processes are incommensurable, and scientific criticism
of literary art is a logical impossibility.
But the citadel of scientific criticism has yet one more
stronghold. Granted that beauty, as an abstract quality, is
timeless; granted that, in the judgment of a piece of literary
art, the standard of value is the canon of beauty, not the
type; yet the old order changeth. Primitive and civilized man,
the Hottentot and the Laplander, the Oriental and the Slav,
have desired differing beauties. May it, then, still be said
that although a given embodiment of beauty is to be judged
with reference to the idea of beauty alone, yet the concrete
ideal of beauty must wear the manacles of space and time,--
that the metamorphoses of taste preclude the notion of an
objective beauty? And if this is true, are we not thrown
back again on questions of genesis and development, and a
study of the evolution, not of particular types of art, but
of general aesthetic feeling; and, in consequence, upon a
form of criticism which is scientific in the sense of being
based on succession, and not on absolute value?
It is indeed true that the very possibility of a criticism
which shall judge of aesthetic excellence must stand or fall
with this other question of a beauty in itself, as an objective
foundation for criticism. If there is an absolute beauty, it
must be possible to work out a system of principles which shall
embody its laws,--an aesthetic, in other words; and on the basis
of that aesthetic to deliver a well-founded critical judgment.
Is there, then, a beauty in itself? And if so, in what does
it consist?
We can approach such an aesthetic canon in two ways: from the
standpoint of philosophy, which develops the idea of beauty as
a factor in the system of our absolute values, side by side
with the ideas of truth and of morality, or from the standpoint
of empirical science. For our present purpose, we may confine
ourselves to the empirical facts of psychology and physiology.
When I feel the rhythm of poetry, or of perfect prose, which
is, of course, in its own way, no less rhythmical, every
sensation of sound sends through me a diffusive wave of nervous
energy. I am the rhythm because I imitate it in myself. I
march to noble music in all my veins, even though I may be
sitting decorously by my own hearthstone; and when I sweep with
my eyes the outlines of a great picture, the curve of a Greek
vase, the arches of a cathedral, every line is lived over again
in my own frame. And when rhythm and melody and forms and
colors give me pleasure, it is because the imitating impulses
and movements that have arisen in me are such as suit, help,
heighten my physical organization in general and in particular.
It may seem somewhat trivial to say that a curved line is
pleasing because the eye is so hung as to move best in it;
but we may take it as one instance of the numberless conditions
for healthy action which a beautiful form fulfills. A well-
composed picture calls up in the spectator just such a balanced
relation of impulses of attention and incipient movements as
suits an organism which is also balanced--bilateral--in its
own impulses to movement, and at the same time stable; and it
is the correspondence of the suggested impulses with the
natural movement that makes the composition good. Besides the
pleasure from the tone relations,--which doubtless can be
eventually reduced to something of the same kind,--it is the
balance of nervous and muscular tensions and relaxations, of
yearnings and satisfactions, which are the subjective side of
the beauty of a strain of music. The basis, in short, of any
aesthetic experience--poetry, music, painting, and the rest--
is beautiful through its harmony with the conditions offered
by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through
the harmony of the suggestions and impulses it arouses with
the whole organism.
But the sensuous beauty of art does not exhaust the aesthetic
experience. What of the special emotions--the gayety or
triumph, the sadness or peace or agitation--that hang about
the work of art, and make, for many, the greater part of their
delight in it? Those among these special emotions which belong
to the subject-matter of a work--like our horror at the picture
of an execution--need not here be discussed. To understand the
rest we may venture for a moment into the realm of pure
psychology. We are told by psychology that emotion is dependent
on the organic excitations of any given idea. Thus fear at the
sight of a bear is only the reverberation in consciousness of
all nervous and vascular changes set up instinctively as a
preparation for flight. Think away our bodily feelings, and
we think away fear, too. And set up the bodily changes and the
feeling of them, and we have the emotion that belongs to them
even without the idea, as we may see in the unmotived panics
that sometimes accompany certain heart disturbances. The same
thing, on another level, is a familiar experience. A glass of
wine makes merriment, simply by bringing about those organic
states which are felt emotionally as cheerfulness. Now the
application of all this to aesthetics is clear. All these
tensions, relaxations,--bodily "imitations" of the form,--have
each the emotional tone which belongs to it. And so if the
music of a Strauss waltz makes us gay, and Handel's Largo
serious, it is not because we are reminded of the ballroom or
of the cathedral, but because the physical response to the
stimulus of the music is itself the basis of the emotion.
What makes the sense of peace in the atmosphere of the Low
Countries? Only the tendency, on following those level lines
of landscape, to assume ourselves the horizontal, and the
restfulness which belongs to that posture. If the crimson of
a picture by Bocklin, or the golden glow of a Giorgione, or
the fantastic gleam of a Rembrandt speaks to me like a human
voice, it is not because it expresses to me an idea, but
because it impresses that sensibility which is deeper than
ideas,--the region of the emotional response to color and to
light. What is the beauty of the "Ulalume," or "Kubla Khan,"
or "Ueber allen Gipfeln"? It is the way in which the form
in its exquisite fitness to our senses, and the emotion
belonging to that particular form as organic reverberation
therefrom, in its exquisite fitness to thought, create in us
a delight quite unaccounted for by the ideas which they
express. This is the essence of beauty,--the possession of
a quality which excites the human organism to functioning
harmonious with its own nature.
We can see in this definition the possibility of an aesthetic
which shall have objective validity because founded in the
eternal properties of human nature, while it yet allows us to
understand that in the limits within which, by education and
environment, the empirical man changes, his norms of beauty
must vary, too. Ideas can change in interest and in value,
but these energies lie much deeper than the idea, in the
original constitution of mankind. They belong to the
instinctive, involuntary part of our nature. They are
changeless, just as the "eternal man" is changeless; and as
the basis of aesthetic feeling they can be gathered into a
system of laws which shall be subject to no essential
metamorphosis. So long as we laugh when we are joyful, and
weep when we are sick and sorry; so long as we flush with
anger, or grow pale with fear, so long shall we thrill to a
golden sunset, the cadence of an air, or the gloomy spaces
of a cathedral.
The study of these forms of harmonious functioning of the
human organism has its roots, of course, in the science of
psychology, but comes, nevertheless, to a different flower,
because of the grafting on of the element of aesthetic value.
It is the study of the disinterested human pleasures, and,
although as yet scarcely well begun, capable of a most
detailed and definitive treatment.
This is not the character of those studies so casually alluded
to by the author of "Impressionism and Appreciation," when he
enjoins on the appreciative critic not to neglect the literature
of aesthetics: "The characteristics of his [the artist's]
temperament have been noted with the nicest loyalty; and
particularly the play of his special faculty, the imagination,
as this faculty through the use of sensations and images and
moods and ideas creates a work of art, has been followed out
with the utmost delicacy of observation." But these are not
properly studies in aesthetics at all. To find out what is
beautiful, and the reason for its being beautiful, is the
aesthetic task; to analyze the workings of the poet's mind,
as his conception grows and ramifies and brightens, is no part
of it, because such a study takes no account of the aesthetic
value of the process, but only of the process itself. The
same fallacy lurks here, indeed, as in the confusion of the
scientific critic between literary evolution and poetic
achievement, and the test of the fallacy is this single fact:
the psychological process in the development of a dramatic
idea, for instance, is, and quite properly should be, from
the point of view of such analysis, exactly the same for a
Shakespeare and for the Hoyt of our American farces.
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