Books: The Psychology of Beauty
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Ethel D. Puffer >> The Psychology of Beauty
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One school asserts that the real pleasure in perception comes
only from form. The given object is beautiful, through its
original qualities of line, color, or sound, which strike the
special senses in a way that is pleasing to them; and through
its combinations of these qualities, which affect the whole
human organism in a directly pleasurable way. What is outside
of the given object of art--is meant, suggested, or recalled
by it--belongs, it is said, to absolutely unaesthetic processes,
as is shown by the fact that many things, which we are the first
to acknowledge as ugly, are the exciting cause of great thoughts
and delightful associations. The opposed school maintains that
the meanings of a work of art are all that it exists for. The
presentation of an idea, by whatever sensuous means, so only
that they be transparent, and the joy of the soul in contemplating
this idea, must be the object and the end of art. The later
idealists admit value to the form only in so far a it may
express, convey, symbolize, or suggest the content, whether as
pure idea, or as a shadowing forth of the Divine World-Meaning.
These theories are certainly intelligible; but the results of
applying them with logical consistency are rather terrifying.
Andrew Lang says somewhere that the logical consequence of the
formal theory of art in all its nakedness would make Tennyson
the youth, Swinburne, and Edgar Poe the greatest poets of the
world, and those delicious effusions of Edward Lear, "The
Jumblies" and "On the Coast of Coromandel," masterpieces. Yet
if we allow the idealists to pass sentence, what shall become
of our treasures in "Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln," or
"La Nuit de Decembre"? The results of such a judgment day
would be even more appalling to the true lover of poetry.
Moreover, if the idea, the end of art, need not reside in the
object itself, but may arise therefrom by subtle suggestion,
the complications of poetry or painting are unnecessary. A
geometric figure may remind us of the constitution of the
world of space, a sundial, of the transitoriness of human
existence, and with a "chorus-ending from Euripedes," the whole
sweep of the cosmic meanings is upon us. In the words of Fra
Lippo Lippi:--
"Why, for this,
What need of art at all? A skull and bones,
Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or what's best,
A bell to chime the hours with, does as well."
II
In spite of this, however, a place for ideas must clearly be
found in our definition of beauty; and yet it must be so
limited and bound to the beautiful form that corollaries such
as we have just drawn will be impossible. An interesting
attempt to reconcile these two points of view--to establish
an organic relation between form and idea--is found in "The
Sense of Beauty" by Professor George Santayana. The central
point of this writer's theory is his definition of beauty as
the objectification of pleasure. Aesthetic experience, he
says, is based partly on form, partly on expression, but the
pleasure felt is always projected into the object, and is
felt as a quality of it. All kinds of external associations
may connect themselves with the work of art, but so long as
they remain external, and keep, so to speak, their values
for themselves, they cannot be said to add beauty to the
object. But when they are present only in their effect,--
a diffused feeling of pleasure,--that diffused feeling is
attributed directly to the object, is felt as if it inheres
therein, and so the object becomes more beautiful, for beauty
is objectified pleasure. Professor Santayana designates form
as beauty in the first term, and expression as beauty in the
second term. Beauty in the first term can exist alone,--not
so beauty in the second term. It must have a little beauty
of the first term to graft itself upon. "A map, for instance,
is not usually thought of as an aesthetic object, and yet,
let the tints of it be a little subtle, let the lines be a
little delicate, and the masses of land and sea somewhat
balanced, and we really have a beautiful thing, the charm of
which consists almost entirely in its meaning.
Now here, it seems to me, is a weak point in Professor
Santanaya's armor. If such wonderful elements of beauty can
be projected into a fairly colorless object by virtue of its
fringe of suggestiveness, why should not beauty of the second
term be felt in objects without that little bit of intrinsic
worth of form? Is not such indeed the fact? What else is
the meaning of the story of "Beauty and the Beast"? The squat
and hideous Indian idol, the scarabaeus, the bit of Aztec
pottery, become attractive and desired for themselves by virtue
of their halo of pleasure from dim associations. And all these
values are felt as completely OBJECTIFIED, and so fulfill the
requirements for "beauty in the second term." That small
amount of intrinsic beauty on which to graft the beauty of the
second term is, therefore, not a necessary condition, so that
we are left, on Professor Santayana's theory, with the strange
paradox of so-called beautiful objects which are, nevertheless,
confessedly ugly.
What, then, is the flaw in this definition? While we concede
the objectification of pleasure in all these cases, we cannot,
it would seem, admit a corresponding change from non-aesthetic
to aesthetic feelings. The personal attitude towards an object,
based on sentiments objectified in it, and the aesthetic
attitude are two different things. The truth is, that all this
objectified tone-feeling is directly dependent on the original
real existence of the object that calls it up, and on our
practical personal relation to it, and is thus, by universal
agreement, definitely non-aesthetic. I enjoy the cast of the
great Venus very nearly as much as the original,--but who cares
for casts of the Aztec gods, or of the prehistoric carvings of
the reindeer period? Who wants an imitation scarabaeus? To
have the real thing, to see it, to touch it, to know that it
has had real experiences that would fill me with wonder and with
awe, "to love it for the danger it has passed,"--to feel that
I myself am through it actually linked with its mysterious
history,--that is the value it has for me; not a pleasure of
perception at all, but a very definite, practical interest in
my own personality. If the pleasure lay only in disinterested
perception, any representation of the object ought to have the
same value.
What, then, the author of "The Sense of Beauty" calls "the
beauty of the second term,"--the power to suggest feeling
through the medium of associated ideas,--we may deny to impart
any aesthetic character whatever. Professor Santayana has,
indeed, mediated between the formalists and the idealists;
but his theory would lead us to attributions of beauty from
which common sense revolts; and we have seen the secret of its
deficiency to lie in the confusion of the personal with the
aesthetic attitude. If now we amend his definition, "Beauty
is objectified pleasure," to "Beauty is objectified aesthetic
pleasure," we are advanced no further.
III
The problem stands, then: how to provide for the presence of
ideas in the work of art, and the definite emotions aroused by
it, either by bringing them somehow into the definition of beauty
in itself, or by showing how their presence is related to the
full aesthetic experience. But, first of all, we have to ask
how the aesthetic pleasure even in formal beauty is constituted,
and to what extent expression belongs to the beauty of pure
form. Form is impressive, or directly beautiful, through its
harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of
sight and hearing, and through the harmony of its combinations
of suggestions and impulses with the entire organism. I enjoy
a well-composed picture like Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love,"
because the good composition means such a balanced relation of
impulses of attention, of incipient movements, as harmonizes
with such an organism as mine, tending to move toward both
sides, and yet unified and stable; and because the combination
of colors is at once stimulating and soothing to my eyes. So
much for IMPRESSION, beauty of the first term. But it is not
only that harmonious state of my visual and motor functions
that I get out of the form of a picture. No, I have, besides
all this pleasure, a real exhilaration or emotion, a definite
mood of repose or gayety or triumph, without any fringe of
association, which yet certainly contributes to my feeling of
the beauty of the experience, and so of the work of art. How
did it come out of the form?
Well, this very harmonious excitation of the organism has
brought with it just such an organic reverberation as, the
current theory of emotion asserts, must be at the bottom of
all our emotional states. A certain sequence of nervous shocks
and of vasomotor changes, certain stimulations and relations
and contractions of the internal organs have been set up as the
"diffusive wave" from the sense-stimulations, and a particular
emotional tinge is the result. That is a direct impression,
but an expression too. Take the same case on a much lower
level. A glass of wine makes me cheerful, not because it
arouses cheerful ideas directly, but because the organic changes
it sets up are such as belong to the MOTIVATED expression of
joy, and have the same effect. A deep, slow movement played by
an orchestra can affect me in two ways. It may be that I have
usually connected that sort of music with religious experiences,
and all the profound and inspiring feelings belonging thereto;
and so I transfer those feelings to the music and give it those
adjectives. Or the slowness of the rhythmic pulse that is set
up in me, the largeness, the volume, the depth of sound, all
bring about in me the kind of nervous state that belongs to a
reposeful and yet deeply moved feeling. The second experience
is expression through impression, through the inward changes
that the form itself sets up. The first is expression through
the medium of something external,--an idea which brings with it
a feeling,--something that does not belong to the music itself,
but to my own individual experiences.
This distinction between internal and external expressiveness
is perfectly clear for music, and also for architecture. In
painting, too, it can easily be traced. We know the effect
that is produced by broken lines, by upward moving ones,--like
the "always aspiring" of the Gothic cathedral. The low-lying,
wide expanses of some of the old Dutch landscapists give us
repose, not because they remind us of the peaceful happiness
of the land, but because we cannot melt ourselves into all
those horizontal lines without that restful feeling which
accompanies such relaxation; and our emotion is read into the
picture as AESTHETIC pleasure, because it came out of the
abstract forms,--the PAINTING in the picture.
The beauty of form is thus seen to be inseparably allied with
a certain degree of emotional expressiveness in a way that
does not distract, like the association of ideas, from the
pure aesthetic experience. This quality of expressiveness
should not, however, become a part of the definition of beauty,
so that it should be said that the greater the emotional
expressiveness, the more beautiful the object. For if that
were true, such music, for instance, as all acknowledge quite
mediocre, would be felt as most beautiful by those who find in
it a strong and definite emotion; and a Strauss waltz, which
makes us more merry than one by Mendelssohn, should be in so
far more beautiful. This, of course, we are not ready to
concede; and it seems, therefore, most logical to regard the
special emotional effects of formal beauty rather as a corollary
to, than as a part of, the essential aesthetic mood. But if we
give the name emotion to that perfectly vague but unmistakable
excitement with which we respond to purely formal beauty,--that
indescribable exaltation with which we listen to "absolute"
music,--then we must say that that emotion is but another name
for aesthetic pleasure. Objectively, we have formal beauty;
subjectively, on the physiological side, a harmonious action
of the organism, and on the mental side the undefined exaltation
which is known as aesthetic pleasure.
IV
Up to this point, however, we have considered only the relation
between purely formal beauty and the various shades of emotional
response to it; now we may turn to the original question which
we set ourselves, how to provide, in our definition of beauty,
for the presence of ideas in the work of art. No one will deny
that the full aesthetic experience cannot be dismissed with the
treatment of formal beauty; and, although Professor Santayana's
"beauty in the second term" may be rejected as a pure individual,
arbitrary, interested, and hence unaesthetic element, the
explicit content of a work of art cannot be ignored. The
suggested ideas aroused by an old rose garden may be no addition
to its beauty, but the same cannot be said of the great ideas
contained directly in Shakespeare's poetry. Yet great ideas
alone do not make great art, else we must count Aristotle and
Spinoza and Kant great poets too. Must we then be satisfied to
rest in the dualism of those who maintain that great creations
of art are the expression of great truths under the laws of
poetic form? Is the aesthetic expression indeed the recognition
of truth plus the feeling of beauty of form, or is it a fusion
of these into a third undivided pulse of aesthetic emotion? Is
there no way of overcoming, for those arts which do express
ideas, this dualism of form and content in our theory of the
beautiful?
Let us analyze a little more closely this notion of the content.
Music and architecture cannot properly be said to have any
content, although they have a meaning according to their uses,
like a funeral dirge and a hymn of joy, a prison and a temple.
But this meaning is extraneous. It is given by the work itself
only in so far as the form induces the emotion which belongs to
the idea,--as the dirge, sadness; the temple, awe. The idea of
burial or of worship is nowhere to be found in the work of art.
In the hierarchy of arts, paining and sculpture show the first
trace of a content. This content, however, is at once seen to
be susceptible of farther analysis. The "Sistine Madonna"
pictures a mother and child worshiped, which may be called the
subject,--but this does not exhaust the content. The real
meaning of the picture, to which may be given the name of THEME,
is the divine element in maternal love. The subjects of
Donatello's "John the Baptist" and "Saint George," of Michael
Angelo's "David" and "Moses," can be described only as men of
Different types in different attitudes; their themes, however,
are moral ideas, expressing the moral significance of each
personality. The subject of "The Angelus" is given in its
name; its theme is humble piety. From the infinite number of
possible examples one more will suffice,--the well-known "War"
by Franz Stuck, in the Neue Pinacothek,--the subject a youth,
under a lurid sky, trampling under his horse's feet the bodies
of the slain. The theme is again a moral idea,--the horrors of
war.
If we now ask whether we can attribute beauty to the ideas of
painting and sculpture, a negative answer is at once suggested.
It is manifestly impossible to establish an order of aesthetic
excellence between these subjects. The idea of peasants telling
their beads is more beautiful than the idea of a ruthless
destroyer only in so far as it is morally higher; and this
distinction, therefore, has reference to the theme and not to
the subject. How far, however, moral and aesthetic excellence
are coincident is a question for which we are not yet ready.
At this point we care only to point out that the mere idea of
a picture is neither aesthetic nor the reverse.
But, it may be objected, is not our first thought in stopping
before a picture like the "War," "What a wonderful idea"? It
is the idea and not the form which strikes us, it may be said,
even though we may be quite unimpressed by the value of its
moral significance. Nevertheless, this view of our own mental
processes may be held to the illusory. What really strikes us
is the UNITY of the conception. The lurid sky, the dark, livid
faces of the dead--the whole color scheme, in short, is so
contrived as to impress directly, as previously explained,
without the medium of an idea, with that particular tinge of
emotional tone which ought to be also the accompaniment of the
idea of the horrors of war. The emotion is thus the enveloping
unity which binds the subject and theme and the pictorial form
together. In this sense, when we say, "What a wonderful idea!"
we really mean, what a wonderful fitness of form to idea,--
which is the same as saying, what a wonderful form, or more
technically, what a wonderful unity. That part of the effect
of beauty in a picture which is due to the idea is thus the
fundamental but merely abstract element of unity, contributing
to the complex aesthetic state only the simplest condition.
The case of literature presents an entirely new problem, for
the material of literature is itself, first of all, idea.
Literature deals with words, and words exist only by virtue of
their meanings. Even the sound of words is of importance
primarily for the additional meanings which it suggests, as the
word liquid first means a fluid substance, and then by its
sound suggests ease and smoothness, and only last of all is
noted as melodious. Thus since meanings, ideas, are the
material of literature, we can speak of the beauty of ideas
in literature only by an artificial sundering of elements that
are properly in fusion. Yet as we may speak of a motive or
musical idea and its working out, although strictly the idea
involves its own working out, so we may conceive of the central
thought of a literary work, and of its development. But the
relation here is not of content and form, like the content and
form of a picture; rather that of concentrated and diluted
form. So, too, as in music, we may distinguish form and
structure. Structure is offered to the intellect--it clears
and vivifies understanding; it is not felt, it is perceived.
Anything which is made up of parts--beginning, middle, and end,
climax and resolution--possesses structure. But form in the
intimate sense is the intrinsic, inevitable relation of cause
and effect; in this sense, it is seen to be truly content also.
In literature, as to structure, it is the relation of parts:
as to form, it is the succession of events, the movement,
combination and resolution of separate ideas and emotions,
which give us aesthetic pleasure or the reverse. As action
must follow excitement, or despair satiety, so the relation
of parts, the order of presentation, must be adapted to mutual
reinforcement. Thus the porter's scene in "Macbeth" is related
to the neighboring scenes, as De Quincey has shown in his famous
essay. And just as in music the feeling of "rightness" ensues
when the awaited note slips into place, so the feeling of
"rightness" comes when the inevitable consequences follow the
premise of a plot.
The particular separate ideas of such a development partake of
beauty, then, in so far as they minister to the movement of the
whole, just as the separate lines in a swaying, swirling robe
of one of Botticelli's women minister to the whole conception.
The catastrophe, in other words, must be as inevitably related
to the sequence of ideas as the final chords of a symphony to
the sequence of notes. The attitude of mind with which we
welcome it is the same, whether on the plane of the responses
of the psychological organism or of the ideal understanding.
V
But before finally relegating the idea to its place in the
aesthetic scheme, we must ask whether the specific emotional
content can claim independent aesthetic value; for we can
scarcely ignore the fact that almost all naive response to
literature, and indeed to all forms of art, is, or is believed
to be, specifically emotional. Maupassant, in his introduction
to "Pierre et Jean," distinguishes thus between the demand of
the critic--"Make me something fine according to your temperament,"
--and the cry of the public--"Move me, terrify me, make we weep!"
And yet to the assertion of common sense that the desire of the
naive enjoyer of art is definite emotional excitement, we may
venture to oppose a negative. The average person who weeps at
the theatre, or over a novel, would no doubt repudiate the
suggestion that it is not primarily the emotion of terror, or
pity, that he feels. But a closer interpretation shows that
it is almost impossible to disengage, in such an experience, the
particular emotions. What is felt is rather pleasurable excitement,
pleasure raised to the pitch of exaltation, with a fringe of
emotional association. The notion of specific emotions is
illusory in the same sense that our notion of pleasure from
specific emotions in listening to music is illusory. The ordinary
descriptions of music are all couched in emotional or even
ideational terms,--from the musical adventures of "Charles
Auchester" down,--and yet we know, as Gurney says, that when, in
listening to music, we think we are yearning after the unutterable,
we are really yearning after the next note; and when we think it
is the yearning that gives us pleasure, it is really the triumphant
acceptance of the melodic rightness of that next note. So the
much-discussed Katharsis, or emotion of Tragedy, is not the
experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but
rather pleasure in the experience of ideas, tinged with emotion,
which belong to each other with precisely that musical rightness.
Katharsis is indeed not the mark of Tragedy alone, although in
Tragedy it has a very great relative intensity; it is ultimately
only a designation for the specific aesthetic pleasure, to which
I can give no better name than the oft-repeated one of triumphant
acquiescence in the rightness of relations. We think we feel a
situation directly, but what we really feel is pleasure in the
rightness of the manner of the event, and in the moment of perfect
experience it gives us. Such specific emotion as may be detected
in any aesthetic experience is, then, covered by the definition
of beauty only in so far as it has become form rather than content,
--is valuable only in its relations rather than in itself. The
experience of pity or fear, even though generalized, unselfish,
etc.,--after the various formulas of the expounders of dramatic
emotion,--does not impart aesthetic character of itself; it
becomes aesthetic only if it appears at such a point in the
tragedy, linked in such a way to the developing plot, that it
belongs to the unified and reciprocally harmonious circle of
experiences.
VI
But we have up to this time consistently neglected the central
idea of the work of art, and its claim to be included in the
aesthetic formula. We have defined beauty as that which brings
about a state of harmonious completeness, of repose in activity,
in the psychophysical and psychological realms. This harmonious
repose can exist only with a disinterested attitude toward the
objects which have brought this state about. Whether the Melian
Venus or "Hamlet" or "Lohengrin" live, we care not; only that
if they live, it shall be SO. In this sense, our attitude is
interested, our will is active, but only toward the existence
of the form. But with the introduction of the central theme, we
cease to be disinterested,--our hypothetical is changed to an
affirmative. The moral idea we must accept or reject, for it
bears a direct relation to our personality. We will, or do not
will, that, in the real world in which we ourselves have to live
and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,--that there
shall be the beauty of health, as in the "Discobolus;" material
love which is divine, as in the "Sistine Madonna;" that war shall
be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over
love, as in "The Statue and the Bust;" that defiance of the
social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in "Anna
Karenina." The person or the combination of events expressing
this idea we do not seek in our personal experience, but we do
demand for our own a world in which this idea rules. Thus it
must be admitted that there is, strictly speaking, at the core
of every aesthetic response to a work of art containing an idea,
a non-aesthetic element, an element of personal and interested
judgment.
On the other hand, this affirmation or acceptance of a moral idea
implies the quietude of the will; just that state of harmony, of
repose, which we have found to be the mark of the aesthetic on
the lower planes of being. In so far, then, as we accept the
moral idea which a work of art presents, in so far that idea has
the power of bringing us to the state of harmony, and in so far
it is beautiful. And vice versa, works of art which leave us in
a state of moral rebellion are unbeautiful, not because they are
immoral, but because they are disturbing to the moral sense.
Literature which ignores the fundamental moral principle of the
freedom of the will, like the works of Flaubert, Maupassant, much
of Zola, Loti, and Thomas Hardy, fails of beauty, inasmuch as it
fails of the perfect reposeful harmony of human nature in its
entirety.
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