Books: The Psychology of Beauty
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Ethel D. Puffer >> The Psychology of Beauty
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This is no less true of the first great French plays. It is
certainly not the resistless movement of the intrigue which
makes the "Misanthrope," "Tartufe," the "Precieuses Ridicules,"
masterpieces of comedy as well as of literature. Their dramatic
value lies in their piquancy of confrontation. The tug-of-war
between Alceste and Celimene, between Rodrigue and Chimene in
"Le Cid," is what we think of as dramatic; and it is this same
element which is found as well in the complicated and overflowing
English plays. And in modern French drama, for all its "logic,"
the dominating factor is the "scene a faire,"--what I have called
the scene of confrontation. The notoriously successful scene in
the English drama of to-day, the duel of Sophy and Lord Quex--
tolerably empty of real feeling or significance though it is--
becomes successful merely through the consummate handling of
the face-to-face element. Only by admitting this aesthetic
moment of arrest can we allow dramatic value to such a play as
"Les Affaires sont les Affaires"--a truly static drama. The
hero of this is, in the words of a reviewer, "essentially the
same force in magnitude and direction from the rise to the fall
of the curtain. It does not move; it is we who are taken around
it so that we may see its various facets. It is not moulded by
the successive incidents of the play, but only disclosed by
them; sibi constat." Yet we cannot deny to the play dramatic
power; and the reason for this is, as I believe, because it
does, after all, possess the dramatic essential--not action, but
tension.
V
It will be demanded, however, what place there is then for a
temporal factor, if the typical dramatic experience depends upon
the great scene? It cannot be denied that the drama is a work
of art developed in time, like music and poetry. It comes to a
climax and a resolution; it evolves its harmonies like the
symphony, in irrevocable order. We cannot afford to neglect,
in such an aesthetic analysis, what is an undoubted element in
dramatic effect, the so-called inevitable march of events. In
answer to this objection we may hold that the temporal factor
is a corollary of the primary demand for confrontation. It is
necessary that the confrontation or conflict should be vividly
imagined, with all possible associative reinforcements--that
it should be brought up to the turn of the screw, as it were.
For this, then, motivation is absolutely necessary. An attitude
is only clearly "realized" when it is made to seem inevitable.
It takes complete possession of our minds only when it inhibits
all other possibilities. At any given scene, the power of a
part to reproduce itself in us is measured by the convincing
quality given it by motivation, and for this there must be a
full body of associations to draw on, to round out and complete
understanding. The villain of the play is, for instance, less
completely "suggested" to us, because our associations are
supposedly less rich for such characters; as a beggar hypnotized
and made to feel himself a king has meagre mental equipment for
the part. Now, this inner possession can come about only
through the compelling force of a long course of preparation.
In providing such an accumulation of impulses, none was greater
than the younger Dumas--and none had to be greater! To make
his audience accept--that is, identify itself with--the action
of the hero in "Denise," or the mother's decision in "Les Idees
de Mms. Aubray," so subversive of general social feeling, and
thereby to experience fully the great dramatic moment in each
play, there had to go the effect of innumerable small impulses.
And to realize some situations is even beyond the scope of a
play's development. It is an acute remark of Mr. G.K.
Chesterton's, that many plays nowadays turn on problems of
marriage: which subject is one for slow years of adjustment,
patience, adaptation, endeavor; while the drama requires quick
decisions, bouleversements, etc., and would do wisely to
confine itself to fields in which such bouleversements can be
made credible. At any rate, motivation is desirable for the
dramatic confrontation, and time--the working-out--is an
essential condition of motivation. To make the dramatic
conflict ever sharper and deeper, until it either melts into
harmony, or ceases through the destruction of one element, is
the whole duty of the development, and makes it necessary.
That development is temporal, is, dramatically, only a device
for damming the flood that it may break at last with greater
force.
This, too, is an answer to the objection that if confrontation
is the dramatic essential, bare opposition, because the clearest
confrontation, would be the greatest drama, and the "Suppliants"
of Euripedes be indeed an example of it. Bare opposition is
never real confrontation in our sense, for that must be an
arrest, a mutual antagonism of all impulses of soul and sense.
It must possess the whole man. It needs to take in "all
thoughts, all passions, all delights," to be complete, and the
measure of its completeness is the measure of its aesthetic
value.
In the same way, the demand for profound truth and significance
in the drama is clearly to be reached from the purely dramatic
need. Inner "possession," the condition for our dramatic
tension, depends not alone on the cumulation of suggestions--
suggestion in its, so to speak, quantitative aspect. The
attitude of a character must be necessary in itself: that is,
it must be true to the great and general laws of life. If it
is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest
preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter
into it. Thus we see that the one central requirement, the
dramatic germ, leads to the most far-reaching demands for
logic, sanity, and morality in the ideas of a play.
This should not be interpreted as exhausting the aesthetic
value of logic and morality in the drama. The drama is a
species of literature: and these qualities, apart from the
fact that they are necessary to the full dramatic moment,
have also an aesthetic effect proper to themselves. Thus
the development ha the beauty which lies in a necessary
progress; but this beauty is common to the epic, the novel,
and the symphony, while the unity given by the confrontation
and tension of simultaneous forces belongs to the drama alone.
It is therefore development as serving the dramatic end that
I have deduced.
Yet we may well recall here the other aspect of the experience.
Analogous to the pleasure in rhythm and in music, in which the
awaited beat or tone slips, as it were, into a place already
prepared for it, with the satisfaction of harmonious nervous
adjustment, is the pleasure in an inevitable and irrevocable
progress. For it is not felt as inevitable unless the whole
crystallization of the situation makes such, and only such,
an action or thought necessary at a certain point in the
structure, makes it to a certain extent anticipated, and so
recognized with acclaim on its appearance. We will an event
in anticipating and accepting it; and we realize it as it
comes. Nothing more is to be found in the psychological
analysis of the will itself--theoretically, the two states
are nearly identical. Thus this continual anticipation and
"coming true" takes on the feeling-tone of all volition; and
so in music, as I have shown at length, and in drama, and to
a degree in all forms of literature, we have the illusion of
the triumphant will. This is the secret of that creative joy
felt by the spectator at a drama, which has been so often
noted. It is this illusion of the triumphant will, too, which
enters largely into our acceptance of the tragic end. Much
has been said, in the "dispute over tragedy," of the so-called
"Resignation" of the tragic hero, and of the audience in relation
to his fate. But I believe that these writers are wrong in
connecting this resignation primarily with a moral attitude.
What is foreseen as perfectly inevitable, is sufficiently
"accepted" in the psychological sense--that is, vividly imagined
and awaited,--to contribute to this illusion of volition. Hence
arise, for the catastrophe of drama, that exaltation and stern
joy which are indissolubly connected with the experience of
will in real life.
VI
We have spoken of the dramatic, and have desired to show that
its peculiar aesthetic experience arises out of the tension or
balance of emotion in the confrontation of opposing forces. If
this is a fruitful theory, it should throw light on the
distinction between the different forms of the drama, and on
the principal issues of that "Dispute over Tragedy" which is
always with us.
The possible results of a meeting of two forces are these.
Both forces, or one force, may be destroyed; or, short of
destruction, the two may melt into harmony, or one may give
way before the other. I think it may be said that these
alternatives represent the distinctions of Tragedy and Comedy.
When two aims are absolutely irreconcilable, and when the forces
tending to them are important,--that is, powerful,--there must
be somewhere destruction, and we have tragedy. When they are
reconcilable, if they are important, we have serious comedy;
when not important, or not envisaged as important, we have
light comedy. Thus Tragedy and Comedy are closely related,--
more closely than we are prone to think. In the words of the
late Professor Everett, in "Poetry, Comedy, and Duty:" "The
tragic is, like the comic, simply the incongruous. The great
Tragedy of Nature, which is called the Struggle for Existence,
results simply from a greater or less incongruousness between
any form of life and its surroundings....The comic is found
in an incongruous relation considered merely as to its FORM,
while the tragic is found in an incongruous relation taken as
to its reality." For this word incongruity I would substitute
collision or conflict. When there is no way out, we have
Tragedy; when there is a way out, we have Comedy. And when
things are taken superficially enough, there always is a way
out, for we can at least always agree to disagree. In any case,
the end of the conflict is a period, repose, unity. This seems
to be borne out by immediate introspection. The feelings with
which we come from a great tragedy or a great comedy are indeed
almost identical. The excitement, tension, sunk into repose,
are common to both; the satisfaction with a good ending is
strangely paralleled by our resignation to a bad one,--
significant of our real indifference to the fact, so long as
the Aesthetic Unity is reached.
In George Meredith's wonderful little essay on the Comic Spirit,
this view is rather remarkably confirmed. He has defined
Comedy as the contrast of the middle way, the way of common
sense, with our human vagaries, "Comme un point fixe fait
remarquer l'emportement des autres." Comedy, he says, teaches
the world to understand what ails it...."Comedy is the fountain
of sound sense," and again, "the use of the true comedy is to
awaken thoughtful laughter." "Men's future upon earth does
not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present
does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown,
affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic,
fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or
hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into
vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly,
plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their
professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws
binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they
offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or
moved with conceit, individually or in the bulk--the Spirit
overhead will look humorously malign and cast an oblique light
on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is
the Comic Spirit." The Comic Spirit is the just common sense,
the subconscious wisdom of the ages. There IS a golden mean,
the Comic Spirit shows it to us in the light of our flashing
laughter at the deviation therefrom. And because there is,
even the unreconciled--reconcilable--difference or conflict
is not serious. That is why true Comedy seems to find its
best field in a developed social life. The incongruities of
human nature hurt is they are pressed too deep, because they
are irreconcilable; they too quickly edge the tragic gulf.
But the incongruities of the conventional life do not hurt
when pressed. To change our metaphor, adjustment to the
middle way is here so easily credible and possible, that it
is the very hunting-ground for the Comic Spirit.
The reputed masterpiece of Moliere shows us Alceste and Celimene
in the end still at odds. But light-heartedness and sincerity
are not to common sense incompatible, and thus we are rightly
led up to the impasse by paths of laughter. Wherever the
middle way is divined, there is the possible entrance of the
Spirit of Comedy. It is certainly a detriment to the purely
Tragic effect of Pinero's greatest play, that the middle way,
the possibility of reconciliation, is shadowed forth in the
last word,--the cry of the stepdaughter of the Second Mrs.
Tanqueray, "If I had only been more merciful!" Dumas fils
would never have allowed that. He would have written his play
around that thought, and made it indeed a reconciling drama--
or he would have suppressed the cry. The end of Romeo and
Juliet--date I confess it?--has always hovered for me close
to that border which is not sublime. For the hapless lovers
missed all for want of a little common sense. There was naught
inevitable in their plight. I see the Comic Spirit leaning
across to stay the hand of the impetuous Romeo. Why not take
a moment's sober thought? she murmurs.
Tragedy ensues when there is no way out. It is not that ruin
or death for those in whom these forces are embodied is of the
essence of the situation; only that in the complete destruction
of a force or purpose when it has been embodied in a strong
desperate character, the death of that character is usually
involved. There is no solution but to cut the knot. The
tragic has been defined as "that quality of experience whereby,
in and through some serious collision, followed by fatal
catastrophe or inner ruin, something valuable in personality
becomes manifest, either as sublime or admirable in the hero,
or as triumph of an idea." But "Lear," "Macbeth," "Hamlet,"
"Oedipus King," "Othello," exist to contravene this view. No,
the tragic (in its first sense, in the sense derived from the
dramatic form from which it is named) is in the collision
itself; it is the profound and, to our vision, the irreconcilable
antagonism of different elements in life. And in life we
accept it because we must; we transcend it because, as moral
beings, we may. The sublime in actual tragic experience is the
reaction of the unconquerable Soul. In tragic literature
another appears. We are helped in transcending the essential
contradictions of life presented to us, because the conditions
of literature in "preparing" an event create for us the illusion
of volition, the acceptance of fate. And in the tragic drama,
to all these elements of the complex experience, there is added
the exaltation of the aesthetic "arrest," the tension of
confrontations.
The question of the "highest" or "most tragic" form of tragedy
seems to have been settled by general agreement. It has been
held that the tragic of the justified opposing force is the
more full of meaning and importance, for the reason that more
interesting and complex feelings are called into play on each
side than in the case of the unjustified opposing force. But
the definition of the tragic drama we have won seems further
to illuminate our undoubted preference for this type. We
demand aesthetically all that will make the confrontation,
the dramatic tension, more clearly felt; and we cannot realize
fully a side which should be unjustified. In such a play as
Maeterlinck's "Aglavaine and Selysette" there is no movement,
and even the conflict is subterranean; yet, as all the
characters are in their way noble, and in their way justified,
we find it among the most poignant of his plays. Nay, more,
in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be
absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life
as we know it,--completely justified, or at least FELT as
inevitable on both sides,--the more are we shaken by the
distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to one's
self and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies. Luther,
as Freytag well shows, is a really tragic figure from the
moment when we conceive of the inner connection of his
intolerance with all that is good and great in his nature.
As the expression of such a conflict of impulses good in
themselves, "Magda" is a great tragedy than the "Joy of
Living;" "Ghosts" than "Hedda Gabler;" the story of "Francesca
Da Rimini" (I do not mean D'Annunzio's play) than "La Citta
Morta."
What, then, shall be said of the so-called tragic "Guilt," in
which the hero rushes on impiously to his doom? It is clear
that this question is closely related to the much-debated
"Greatness" of the tragic hero. If there is guilt, there must
be also greatness, to impress that side of the canvas on our
vision. It is, indeed, almost a quantitative problem.
Strength, energy, depth of passion, breadth of vision, power
and place, ravish our attention and our unconscious imitation.
What is lacking in extensity of associative reproduction must
be added in intensity. And, in fact, we find that it is the
giants who bear the tragic "Schuld." Hamlet is not guilty;
rather "one like ourselves," in Aristotle's phrase, and
therefore he need not be great. I agree with Volkelt's view
that even the traditional tremendous will of the tragic hero
may be dispensed with. No doubt it is most often strength
of will which brings out the original conflict. But that
conflict once given, as it is given, for example, in "Hamlet,"
the main point is to increase the weight of each side, which
can indeed be done by other elements of greatness. On the
other hand, I disagree with Volkelt's reason for thus
exempting will, which is, that the contrast feeling of "how
great a fall was there" may be given by other qualities in
the hero than that of will. As I have urged, it is not the
catastrophe which is of the tragic essence, and therefore
not for the sake of the catastrophe that we should marshal
our elements. The climax of tragedy and of our feeling is
in the deadlock of forces, and whatever is not absolutely
essential thereto may be done without.
VII
The phenomenon of our aesthetic reaction on the so-called
painful experiences of the drama has then been discussed at
length and accounted for. There is an undoubted emotional
experience of great intensity; and yet that emotion turns
out to be not the emotion IN the drama, but rather the
emotion FROM the drama,--a unique independent emotion of
tension, otherwise a form of the characteristic aesthetic
emotion with which we have been before engaged. The playwright
who scornfully rejects the spectator supposed to be aesthetic,
ideally contemplative and emotionally indifferent, is
vindicated. There must be a vivid emotional effect, but it
is the spectator's very own, and not a copy of the hero's
emotion, because it is the product of the essential form of
the drama itself, the confrontation of forces.
Secondly, that confrontation of forces has revealed itself
as indeed essential. This is not the time-honored view of
tragedy as collision, which has been arrived at simply by
observing that great tragic dramas are mostly collisions,
making the drama a picture thereof, but not explaining why
it must be such. I have tried, on the contrary, to show that confrontation is a necessary product of the bare form of
dramatic representation,--two people face to face. But if
this bare form or scheme of confrontation is understood and
interpreted as profoundly as possible, then all the other characteristics of the tragic drama are seen to flow from it;
and thus for the first time to be really explained by being
accounted for. The tragic drama not only is, but must be,
collision, because confrontation, understood as richly as
possible, must be collision. It must be "inevitable," and
it must have movement, because only so is the confrontation
reinforced.
In brief, others have said that the drama, or tragedy, is
conflict, the perfect opposition of two forces. We should
rather say that the drama is first of all picture, living
representation of colloquy; as such, it is balance,
confrontation; and confrontation to its ideal degree of
intensity is conflict. No drama can dispense with picture;
and so no drama is free from the obligation to add unto itself
these other qualities also. The acting play is the play of
confrontations.
VIII
THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS
VIII
THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS
I
THE Idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of
Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in
variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; to-day we hold
that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty
of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing
is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its
power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable;
and that the definition of beauty should have been extended
to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive,
or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience,
all that emotionally stirs us in representation. But while
this view is a natural development, it is not of necessity
unassailable; and it is open to question whether the addition
of an independent element of expression to the older definition
of beauty can be justified by its consequences for art.
Such an inquiry, however, cannot stop with the relation of the
deeper meanings of modern art to the conception of beauty. It
must go further and find out what elements, the sensuous form
or the ideas that are bound up with it, in a work of art, of
the classical as well as of the idealistic type, really
constitute its aesthetic value. What is it that makes the
beauty of the "Venus of Milo"? Is it the pose and the modeling,
or the idea of the eternal feminine that it expresses to us?
What is it that makes the beauty of St. Mark's or of Giotto's
tower? the relation of the lines and masses or the sacred
significance of the edifices they go to form? What is it that
makes the beauty of the Ninth Symphony? the perfection of the
melodic sequence, or the Hymn of Joy, the message from the
Infinite which they are meant to utter?
The antithesis between these two points of view is, of course,
not the same as that other antithesis between "art for art's
sake" and art in the light of its moral meanings and effects.
What we now call romantic or expressive art can certainly be
made the more fruitful in moral suggestions; but this fact
bears not at all on the question of what belongs fundamentally
to the nature of beauty. We know, moreover, that on this
matter the camps of the formalists and the romanticists are
divided. The Greeks, the lovers of formal beauty, were so
alive to the moral effects of art that their theories were in
danger of being quite overwhelmed by this view. On the other
hand, the lovers of ideas in art, the natural enemies, as one
would have thought, of art for art's sake, have been most often
impatient of any consideration of its moral elements or effects.
This second question, then, of art as pleasure or as moral
influence can be once for all excluded from the discussion. So
far as yet appears, the issue is between form and expression.
There is, perhaps, some point of common agreement from which
to survey and distinguish more exactly these two diverging
tendencies. Such a coign of vantage is offered by the nature
of the aesthetic attitude,--for since Kant there has been among
aestheticians no essential difference of opinion on this point.
The aesthetic attitude, all agree, is disinterested. We care
for the image or appearance of the object, for the way its
form affects us, and not for the actual existence of the object
itself. If I delight aesthetically in a cluster of grapes, I
do not want to eat them, but only to enjoy their image, and my
feeling of pleasure, as aesthetic, would not be changed if
before me were only a mirage, an hallucination, or a picture.
It is just the pleasure in perception that appeals to me,--
therein both schools agree,--and the only matter at issue is
the question of what this disinterested pleasure of perception
includes. Is that pleasure bound up with the mechanisms of
perception itself, or does it come from the end of the process
and the ease with which it is reached,--from the IDEA, in the
contemplation of which we delight?
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