Books: The Psychology of Beauty

E >> Ethel D. Puffer >> The Psychology of Beauty

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II

Now the word is nothing in itself; it is not sound primarily,
but thought. The word is but a sign, a negligible quantity
in human intercourse--a counter in which the coins are ideas
and emotions--merely legal tender, of no value save in
exchange. What we really experience in the sound of a
sentence, in the sight of a printed page, is a complex
sequence of visual and other images, ideas, emotions, feelings,
logical relations, swept along in the stream of consciousness,
--differing, indeed, in certain ways from daily experience,
but yet primarily of the web of life itself. The words in
their nuances, march, tempo, melody add certain elements to
this flood--hasten, retard, undulate, or calm it; but it is
the THOUGHT, the understood experience, that is the stuff of
literature.

Words are first of all meanings, and meanings are to be
understood and lived through. We can hardly even speak of
the meaning of a word, but rather of what it is, directly,
in the mental state that is called up by it. Every definition
of a word is but a feeble and distant approximation of the
unique flash of experience belonging to that word. It is not
the sound sensation nor the visual image evoked by the word
which counts, but the whole of the mental experience, to
which the word is but an occasion and a cue. Therefore, since
literature is the art of words, it is the stream of thought
itself that we must consider as the material of literature.
In short, literature is the dialect of life--as Stevenson
said; it is by literature that the business of life is
carried on. Some one, however, may here demur: visual signs,
too, are the dialect of life. We understand by what we see,
and we live by what we understand. The curve of a line, the
crescendo of a note, serve also for wordless messages. Why
are not, then, painting and music the vehicles of experience,
and to be judged first as evocation of life, and only
afterward as sight and hearing? This conceded, we are thrown
back on that view of art as "the fixed quantity of imaginative
thought supplemented by certain technical qualities,--of
color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in
poetry," from which is has been the one aim of the preceding
arguments of this book to free us.

The holders of this view, however, ignore the history and
significance of language. Our sight and hearing are given
to us prior to our understanding or use of them. In a way,
we submit to them--they are always with us. We dwell in
them through passive states, through seasons of indifference;
moreover when we see to understand, we do not SEE, and when
we hear to understand we do not hear. Only shreds of
sensation, caught up in our flight from one action to another,
serve as signals for the meanings which concern us. In
proportion as action is prompt and effective, does the cue
as such tend to disappear, until, in all matters of skill,
piano-playing, fencing, billiard-playing, the sight or sound
which serves as cue drops almost together out of consciousness.
So far as it is vehicle of information, it is no longer sight
or sound as such--interest has devoured it. But language
came into being to supplement the lacks of sight and sound.
It was created by ourselves, to embody all active outreaching
mental experience, and it comes into particular existence to
meet an insistent emergency--a literally crying need. In
short, it is CONSTITUTED by meanings--its essence is
communication. Sight and sound have a relatively independent
existence, and may hence claim a realm of art that is largely
independent of meanings. Not so the art of words, which can
be but the art of meanings, of human experience alone.

And yet again, were the evocation of life the means and
material of all art, that art in which the level of imaginative
thought was low, the range of human experience narrow, would
take a low place in the scale. What, then, of music and
architecture? Inferior arts, they could not challenge
comparison with the poignant, profound, all-embracing art of
literature. But this is patently not the fact. There is no
hierarchy of the arts. We may not rank St. Paul's Cathedral
below "Paradise Lost." Yet is the material of all experience
is the material of all art, they must not only be compared,
but "Paradise Lost" must be admitted incomparably the
greater. No--we may not admit that all the arts alike deal
with the material of expression. The excellence of music
and architecture, whatever it may be, cannot depend on this
material. Yet by hypothesis it must be through the use of
its material that the end of beauty is reached by every art.
A picture has lines and masses and colors, wherewith to play
with the faculty of vision, to weave a spell for the whole man.
Beauty is the power to enchant him through the eye and all
that waits upon it, into a moment of perfection. Literature
has "all thoughts, all passions, all delights"--the treasury
of life--to play with, to weave a spell for the whole man.
Beauty in literature is the power to enchant him, through
the mind and heart, across the dialect of life, into a moment
of perfection.

III

The art of letters, then, is the art whose material is life
itself. Such, indeed, is the implication of the approval
theories of style. Words, phrases, sentences, chapters, are
excellent in so far as they are identical with thought in
all its shades of feeling. "Economy of attention," Spencer's
familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation
of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another
name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself,
an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching.
"All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or
identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is
associated to its import. The term is right, and has its
essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it
signifies, as with the names of simple sensations."<1> He
quotes therewith De Maupassant on Flaubert: "Among all the
expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression,
there is but ONE--one form, one mode--to express what I want
to say." And adds, "The one word for the one thing, the one
thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just
do: the problem of style was there!--the unique word, phrase,
sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the
single mental presentation or vision within."...

<1> _Appreciations: An Essay on Style._

Thought in words is the matter of literature; and words exist
but for thought, and get their excellence as thought; yet, as
Flaubert says, the idea only exists by virtue of the form.
The form, or the word, IS the idea; that is, it carries along
with it the fringe of suggestion which crystallizes the floating
possibility in the stream of thought. A glance at the history
of language shows how this must have been so. Words in their
first formation were doubtless constituted by their imitative
power. As Taine has said,<1> at the first they arose in contact
with the objects; they imitated them by the grimaces of mouth
and nose which accompanied their sound, by the roughness,
smoothness, length, or shortness of this sound, by the rattle
or whistle of the throat, by the inflation or contraction of
the chest.

<1> H. Taine, _La Fontaine et ses Fables_, p. 288.

This primitive imitative power of the word survives in the
so-called onomatapoetic words, which aim simply at reproducing
the sounds of nature. A second order of imitation arises through
the associations of sensations. The different sensations,
auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, motor, and organic have
common qualities, which they share with other more complex
experiences; of form, as force or feebleness; of feeling, as
harshness, sweetness, and so on. It is, indeed, another case
of the form-qualities to which we recurred so often in the
chapter on music. Clear and smooth vowels will give the
impression of volatility and delicacy; open, broad ones of
elevation or extension (airy, flee; large, far). The consonants
which are hard to pronounce will give the impression of effort,
of shock, of violence, of difficulty, of heaviness,--"the round
squat turret, black as the fool's heart;" those which are easy
of pronunciation express ease, smoothness, fluidity, calm,
lightness, (facile, suave, roulade);--"lucent syrops, tinct with
cinnamon," a line like honey on the tongue, of which physical
organ, indeed, one becomes, with the word "tinct," definitely
conscious.

In fact, the main point to notice in the enumeration of the
expressive qualities of sounds, is that it is the movement in
utterance which characterizes them. That movement tends to
reproduce itself in the hearer, and carries with it its feeling-
tone of ease or difficulty, explosiveness or sweetness long
drawn out. It is thus by a kind of sympathetic induction rather
than by external imitation that these words of the second type
become expressive.

Finally, the two moments may be combined, as in such a word as
"roaring," which is directly imitative of a sound, and by the
muscular activity it calls into play suggests the extended
energy of the action itself.

The stage in which the word becomes a mere colorless, algebraic
sign of object or process never occurs, practically, for in any
case it has accumulated in its history and vicissitudes a fringe
of suggestiveness, as a ship accumulates barnacles. "Words carry
with them all the meanings they have worn," says Walter Raleigh
in his "Essay on Style." "A slight technical implication, a
faint tinge of archaism in the common turn of speech that you
employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours
the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of
ticket-holders with closed doors." Manifold may be the
implications and suggestions of even a single letter. Thus a
charming anonymous essay on the word "Grey." "Gray is a quiet
color for daylight things, but there is a touch of difference,
of romance, even, about things that are grey. Gray is a color
for fur, and Quaker gowns, and breasts of doves, and a gray
day, and a gentlewoman's hair; and horses must be gray....Now
grey is for eyes, the eyes of a witch, with green lights in
them and much wickedness. Gray eyes would be as tender and
yielding and true as blue ones; a coquette must have eyes of
grey."

Words do not have meanings, they ARE meanings through their
power of direct suggestion and induction. They may become
what they signify. Nor is this power confined to words alone;
on its possession by the phrase, sentence, or verse rests the
whole theory of style. The short, sharp staccato, the bellowing
turbulent, the swimming melodious circling sentence ARE truly
what they mean, in their form as in the objective sense of
their words. The sound-values of rhythm and pace have been in
other chapters fully dwelt upon; the expressive power of breaks
and variations is worth noting also. Of the irresistible
significance of rhythm, even against content, we have an
example amusingly commented on by Mr. G.K. Chesterton in his
"Twelve Types." "He (Byron) may arraign existence on the most
deadly charges, he may condemn it with the most desolating
verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk in a
spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the
blood alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes
away,
When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull
decay.'

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism
of Byron."

IV

Such, then, are some of the means by which language becomes
identical with thought, and most truly the dialect of life.
The genius will have ways, to which these briefly outlined
ones will seem crude and obvious, but they will be none the
less of the same nature. Shall we then conclude that the
beauty of literature is here? that, in the words of Pater,
from the essay I have quoted, "In that perfect justice (of
the unique word)...omnipresent in good work, in function at
every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole
book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual
beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes
it a fine art."

In its last analysis, such a conception of literature amounts
to the unimpeded intercourse of mind with mind. Literature
would be a language which dispenses with gesture, facial
expression, tone of voice; which is, in its halts, accelerations
and retardations, emphases and concessions, the apotheosis
of conversation. But this clearness,--in the sublime sense,
including the ornate and the subtle,--this luminous lucidity,--
is it not quite indeterminate? Clearness is said of a medium.
WHAT is it that shines through?

Were this clearness the beauty we are seeking, whatever in
the world that wanted to get itself said, would, if it were
perfectly said, become a final achievement of literature. All
that the plain man looks for, we must think rightly, in poetry
and prose, might be absent, and yet we should have to
acknowledge its excellence. Let us then consider this quality
by which the words become what they signify as the specific
beauty rather of style than of literature; the mere refining
of the gold from which the work of art has yet to be made.
Language is the dialect of life; and the most perfect language
can be no more than the most perfect truth of intercourse. It
must then be through the treatment of life, or the sense of
life itself, that we are somehow to attain the perfect moment
of beauty.

The sense of life! In what meaning are these words to be
taken? Not the completest sense of all, because the essence
of life is in personal responsibility to a situation, and this
is exactly what in our experience of literature disappears.
First of all, then, before asking how the moment of beauty is
to be attained, we must see how it is psychologically possible
to have a sense of life that is yet purged of the will to live.

All experience of life is a complication of ideas, emotions,
and attitudes or impulses to action in varying proportions.
The sentiment of reality is constituted by our tendency to
interfere, to "take a hand." Sometimes the stage of our
consciousness is so fully occupied by the images of others
that our own reaction is less vivid. Finally, all conditions
and possibilities of reaction may be so minimized that the
only attitude possible is our acceptance or rejection of a
world in which such things can be. What does it "matter" to
me whether or not "the old, unhappy, far-off things" really
happened? The worlds of the Borgias, of Don Juan, and of the
Russian war stand on the same level of reality. Aucassin and
Nicolette are as near to me as Abelard and Heloise. For in
relation to these persons my impulse is NIL. I submit to
them, I cannot change or help them; and because I have no
impulse to interfere, they are not vividly real to me. And,
in general, in so far as I am led to contemplate or to dwell
on anything in idea, in so far does my personal attitude tend
to parallel this impersonal one toward real persons temporally
or geographically out of reach.

Now in literature all conditions tend to the enormous
preponderance of the ideal element in experience. My mind
in reading is completely filled with ideas of the appearance,
ways, manners, and situation of the people concerned. I leave
them a clear field. My emotions are enlisted only as the
inevitable fringe of association belonging to vivid ideas--
the ideas of their emotions. So far as all the possibilities
of understanding are fulfilled for me, so far as I am in
possession of all the conditions, so far do I "realize" the
characters, but realize them as ideas tinged with feeling.

Here there will be asseverations to the contrary. What! feel
no real emotion over Little Nell, or Colonel Newcome? no
emotion in that great scene of passion and despair, the parting
of Richard Feverel and Lucy,--a scene which none can read save
with tight throat and burning eyes! Even so. It is not real
emotion. You have the vivid ideas, so vivid that a fringe of
emotional association accompanies them, as you might shudder
remembering a bad dream. But the real emotion arises only
from the real impulse, the real responsibility.

The sense of life that literature gives might be described as
life in its aspect as idea. That this fact is the cause of
the peace and painlessness of literature--since it is by his
actions, as Aristotle says, that man is happy or the reverse--
need not concern us here. For the beauty of literature, and
our joy in it, lie not primarily in its lack of power to hurt
us. The point is that literature gives none the less truly a
sense of life because it happens to be one extreme aspect of
life. The literary way is only one of the ways in which life
can be met.

To give the sense of life perfectly--to create the illusion
of life--is this, then, the beauty of literature? But we are
seeking for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. Why
should the perfect illusion of life give this, any more than
life itself does? So the "vision" of a picture might be
intensely clear, and yet the picture itself unbeautiful. Such
a complete "sense of life," such clear "vision," would show
the artist's mastery of technique, but not his power to create
beauty. In the art of literature, as in the art of painting,
the normal function is but the first condition, the state of
perfection is the end at which to aim.

It is just this distinction that we can properly make between
the characteristic or typical in the sense of differentiated,
and the great or excellent in literature. In the theory of
some writers, perfect fidelity to the type is the only
originality. To paint the Russian peasant or the French
bourgeois as he is, to catch the exact shade of exquisite
soullessness in Oriental loves, to reproduce the Berserker
rage or the dull horror of battle, is indeed to give the
perfect sense of life. But the perfect, or the complete,
sense of life is not the moment of perfect life.

Yet to this assertion two answers might be made. The authors
of "Bel-Ami," or "Madame Chrysantheme," or "The Triumph of
Death," might claim to be saved by their form. The march of
events, the rounding climax, the crystal-clear unity of the
finished work, they might say, gives the indispensable union,
for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. No syllable
in the slow unfolding of exquisite cadences but is supremely
placed from the first page to the last. As note calls to
note, so thought calls to thought, and feeling to feeling,
and the last word is an answer to the first of the inevitable
procession. A writer's donnee, they would say, is his own.
The reader may only bed--Make me something fine after your
own fashion!

And they would have to be acknowledged partly in the right.
In that inevitable unity of form there is indeed a necessary
element of the perfect moment; but it is not a perfect unity.
For the matter of their art should be, in the last analysis,
life itself; and the unity of life itself, the one basic
unity of all, they have missed. It is a hollow sphere they
present, and nothing solid. Henry James has spent the whole
of a remarkable essay on D'Annunzio's creations in determining
the meaning of "the fact that their total beauty somehow
extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts,
and that something is all the while at work undermining that
bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of
their own office to throw up." The secret is, he avers, that
the themes, the "anecdotes," could find their extension and
consummation only in the rest of life. Shut out, as they are,
from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and
assimilation, and so from all hope of dignity, they lose
absolutely their power to sway us.

It might be simpler to say that these works lack the first
beauty which literature as the dialect of life can have--they
lack the repose of centrality; they have no identity with the
meaning of life as a whole. It could not be said of them, as
Bagehot said of Shakespeare: "He puts things together, he
refers things to a principle; rather, they group themselves
in his intelligence insensibly around a principle;...a cool
oneness, a poised personality, pervades him." But in these
men there is no cool oneness, no reasonable soul, and so they
miss the central unity of life, which can give unity to
literature. Even the apparent structural unity fails when
looked at closely; the actions of the characters are seen to
be mechanical--their meaning is not inevitable.

The second answer to our assertion that the "sense of life" is
not the beauty of literature might call attention to the fact
that SENSE of life may be taken as understanding of life. A
complete sense of life must include the conditions of life, and
the conditions of life involve this very "energetic identity"
on which we have insisted. And this contention we must admit.
So long as the sense of life is taken as the illusion of life,
our words hold good. But if to that is added understanding of
life, the door is open to the profoundest excellences of
literature. Henry James has glimpsed this truth in saying that
no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.
Stevenson has gone further. "But the truth is when books are
conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power,
nine time heated and electrified by effort, the conditions
of our being seized with such an ample grasp, that even should
the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty
cannot fail to be expressed."

V

The conditions of our being! If we accept, affirm, profoundly
rest in what is presented to us, we have the first condition of
that repose which is the essence of the aesthetic experience.
And from this highest demand can be viewed the hierarchy of the
lesser perfections which go to make up the "perfect moment" of
literature. Instead of reaching this point by successive
eliminations, we might indeed have reached it in one stride.
The perfect moment across the dialect of life, the moment of
perfect life, must be in truth that in which we touch the
confines of our being, look upon our world, all in all, as
revealed in some great moment, and see that it is good--that
we grasp it, possess it, that it is akin to us, that it is
identical with our deepest wills. The work that grasps the
conditions of our being gives ourselves back to us completed.

In the conditions of our being in a less profound sense may
be found the further means to the perfect moment. Thus the
progress of events, the development of feelings, must be in
harmony with our natural processes. The development, the
rise, complication, expectation, gratification, the suspense,
climax, and drop of the great novel, correspond to the natural
functioning of our mental processes. It is an experience that
we seek, multiplied, perfected, expanded--the life moment of
a man greater than we. This, too, is the ultimate meaning of
the demands of style. Lucidity, indeed, there must be,--
identity with the thought; but besides the value of the thought
in its approximation to the conditions of our being, we seek
the vividness of that thought,--the perfect moment of
apprehension, as well as of experience. It is the beauty of
style to be lucid; but the beauty of lucidity is to reinforce
the springs of thought.

Even to the minor elements of style, the tone-coloring, the
rhythm, the melody,--the essence of beauty, that is, of the
perfect moment, is given by the perfecting of the experience.
The beauty of liquids is their ease and happiness of utterance.
The beauty of rhythm is its aiding and compelling power, on
utterance and thought. There is a sensuous pleasure in a
great style; we love to mouth it, for it is made to mouth.
As Flaubert says somewhat brutally, "Je ne said qu'une phrase
est bonne qu'apres l'avoir fait passer par mon gueuloir."

In the end it might be said that literature gives us the
moment of perfection, and is thus possessed of beauty, when
it reveals ourselves to ourselves in a better world of
experience; in the conditions of our moral being, in the
conditions of our utterance and our breathing;--all these,
concentric circles, in which the centre of repose is given
by the underlying identity of ourselves with this world.
Because it goes to the roots of experience, and seeks to give
the conditions of our being as they really are, literature
may be truly called a criticism of life. Yet the end of
literature is not the criticism of life; rather the
appreciation of life--the full savour of life in its entirety.
The final definition of literature is the art of experience.

VI

But then literature would give only the perfect moments of
existence, would ignore the tragedies, ironies, pettiness of
life! Such an interpretation is a quite mistaken one. As
the great painting uses the vivid reproduction of an ugly
face, a squalid hovel, to create a beautiful picture, beautiful
because all the conditions of seeing are made to contribute to
our being made whole in seeing; so great literature can attain
through any given set of facts to the deeper harmony of life,
can touch the one poised, unconquerable soul, and can reinforce
the moment of self-completeness by every parallel device of
stimulation and concentration. And because it is most often
in the tragedies that the conditions of our being are laid
bare, and the strings which reverberate to the emotions most
easily played upon, it is likely that the greatest books of all
will be the tragedies themselves. The art of experience needs
contrasts no less than does the visual or auditory art.

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