Books: The Psychology of Beauty

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

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<1> _Problemes de l'Esthetique Contemporaine_ 1902, p. 77.

The diffusion of stimulation, the equilibrium of impulses, life-
enhancement through repose!--this is the aesthetic experience.
But how, then, it will be asked, are we to interpret the temporal
arts? A picture or a statue maybe understood through this formula,
but hardly a drama or a symphony. If the form of the one is
symmetry, hidden or not, would not the form of the other be
represented by a straight line? That which has beginning, middle,
and end is not static but dynamic.

Let us consider once more the concept of equilibrium. Inhibition
of action through antagonistic impulses, or action returning upon
itself, we have defined it; and the line cannot be drawn sharply
between these types. The visual analogue for equilibrium may be
either symmetrical figure or circle; the excursion from the
centre may be either the swing of the pendulum or the sweep of
the planet. The RETURN is the essential. Now it is a commonplace
of criticism--though the significance of the dictum has never been
sufficiently seen--that the great drama, novel, or symphony does
return upon itself. The excursion is merely longer, of a different
order of impulses from that of the picture. The last note is the
only possible answer to the first; it contains the first. The
last scene has meaning only as the satisfaction of the first. The
measure of the perfection of a work of temporal art is thus its
IMPLICIT character. The end is contained in the beginning--that
is the meaning of "inevitableness."

That the constraining power of drama or symphony is just this
sense of urgency, of compulsion, from one point to another, is
but confirmation of this view. The temporal art tries ever to
pass from first to last, which is first. It yearns for unity.
The dynamic movement of the temporal arts is cyclic, which is
ultimately static, of the nature of equilibrium. It is only in
the wideness of the sweep that the dynamic repose of poetry and
music differs from the static activity of picture and statue.

Thus the Nature of Beauty is in the relation of means to an end;
the means, the possibilities of stimulation in the motor, visual,
auditory, and purely ideal fields; the end, a moment of perfection,
of self-complete unity of experience, of favorable stimulation
with repose. Beauty is not perfection; but the beauty of an
object lies in its permanent possibility of creating the perfect
moment. The experience of this moment, the union of stimulation
and repose, constitutes the unique aesthetic emotion.

III
THE AESTHETIC REPOSE

III
THE AESTHETIC REPOSE

THE popular interest in scientific truth has always had its
hidden spring in a desire for the marvelous. The search for
the philosopher's stone has done as much for chemistry as the
legend of the elixir of life for exploration and geographical
discovery. From the excitements of these suggestions of the
occult, the world settled down into a reasonable understanding
of the facts of which they were but the enlarged and grotesque
shadows.

So it has been with physics and physiology, and so also,
preeminently, with the science of mental life. Mesmerism,
hypnotism, the facts of the alteration, the multiplicity, and
the annihilation of personality have each brought us their
moments of pleasurable terror, and passed thus into the field
of general interest. But science can accept no broken chains.
For all the thrill of mystery, we may not forget that the
hypnotic state is but highly strung attention,--at the last
turn of the screw,--and that the alternation of personality is
after all no more than the highest power of variability of
mood. In regard to the annihilation of the sense of personality,
it may be said that no connection with daily experience is at
first apparent. Scientists, as well as the world at large,
have been inclined to look on the loss of the sense of personality
as pathological; and yet it may be maintained that it is
nevertheless the typical form of those experiences we ourselves
regard as the most valuable.

The loss of personality! In that dread thought there lies, to
most of us, all the sting of death and the victory of the grave.
It seems, with such a fate in store, that immortality were
futile, and life itself a mockery. Yet the idea, when dwelt
upon, assumes an aspect of strange familiarity; it is an old
friend, after all. Can we deny that all our sweetest hours are
those of self-forgetfulness? The language of emotion, religious,
aesthetic, intellectually creative, testifies clearly to the
fading of the consciousness of self as feeling nears the white
heat. Not only in the speechless, stark immobility of the
pathological "case," but in all the stages of religious ecstasy,
aesthetic pleasure, and creative inspiration, is to be traced
what we know as the loss of the feeling of self. Bernard of
Clairvaux dwells on "that ecstasy of deification in which the
individual disappears in the eternal essence as the drop of
water in a cask of wine." Says Meister Eckhart, "Thou shalt
sink away from they selfhood, though shalt flow into His self-
possession, the very thought of Thine shall melt into His Mine;"
and St. Teresa, "The soul, in thus searching for its God,
feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is
fainting almost quiet away."

Still more striking is the language of aesthetic emotion.
Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal
experience. Says Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale:"--

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness."

And in Schopenhauer we read that he who contemplates the
beautiful "forgets even his individuality, his will, and only
continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of
the object."

But not only the religious enthusiast and the worshiper of
beauty "lose themselves" in ecstasy. The "fine frenzy" of the
thinker is typical. From Archimedes, whose life paid the
forfeit of his impersonal absorption; from Socrates, musing in
one spot from dawn to dawn, to Newton and Goethe, there is but
one form of the highest effort to penetrate and to create.
Emerson is right in saying of the genius, "His greatness
consists in the fullness in which an ecstatic state is realized
in him."

The temporary evaporation of the consciousness of one's own
Personality is then decidedly not a pathological experience.
It seems the condition, indeed, and recognized as such in
popular judgment, of the deepest feeling and the highest
achievement. Perhaps it is the very assumption of this condition
in our daily thoughts that has veiled the psychological problem
it presents. We opine, easily enough, that great deeds are done
in forgetfulness of self. But why should we forget ourselves
in doing great deeds? Why not as well feel in every act its
reverberation on the self,--the renewed assurance that it is
I who can? Why not, in each aesthetic thrill, awake anew to
the consciousness of myself as ruler in a realm of beauty? Why
not, in the rush of intellectual production, glory that "my
mind to me a kingdom is"? And yet the facts are otherwise:
in proportion to the intensity and value of the experience is
its approach to the objective, the impersonal, the ecstatic
state. Then how explain this anomaly? Why should religious,
aesthetic, and intellectual emotion be accompanied in varying
degrees by the loss of self-consciousness? Why should the
sense of personality play us so strange a trick as to vanish,
at the moment of seemingly greatest power, in the very shadow
of its own glory?

If now we put the most obvious question, and ask, in explanation
of its escapades, what the true nature of this personality is,
we shall find ourselves quite out of our reckoning on the vast
sea of metaphysics. To know what personality IS, "root and all,
and all in all," is to "know what God and man is." Fortunately,
our problem is much more simple. It is not the personality,
its reality, its meaning, that vanishes; no, nor even the
psychological system of dispositions. We remain, in such a
moment of ecstasy, as persons, what we were before. It is the
FEELING of personality that has faded; and to find out in what
this will-o'-the-wisp feeling of personality resides is a task
wholly within the powers of psychological analysis. Let no one
object that the depth and value of experience seem to disintegrate
under the psychologist's microscope. The place of the full-orbed
personality in a world of noble ends is not affected by the
possibility that the centre of its conscious crystallization may
be found in a single sensation.

The explanation, then, of this apparent inconsistency--the fading
away of self in the midst of certain most important experiences--
must lie in the nature of the feeling of personality. What is
that feeling? On what is it based? How can it be described?
The difficulties of introspection have led many to deny the
possibility of such self-fixation. The fleeting moment passes,
and we grasp only an idea or a feeling; the Ego has slipped away
like a drop of mercury under the fingers. Like the hero of the
German poet, who wanted his queue in front,

"Then round and round, and out and in,
All day that puzzled sage did spin;
In vain; it mattered not a pin;
The pigtail hung behind him,"

when I turn round upon myself to catch myself in the act of
thinking, I can never lay hold on anything but a sensation. I
may peel off, like the leaves of an artichoke, my social self,--
my possessions and positions, my friends, my relatives; my
active self,--my books and implements of work; my clothes; even
my flesh, and sit in my bones, like Sydney Smith,--the I in me
retreating ever to an inner citadel; but I must stop with the
feeling that something moves in there. That is not what my
self IS, but what the elusive sprite feels like when I have got
my finger on him. In daily experience, however, it is
unnecessary to proceed to such extremities. The self, at a
given moment of consciousness, is felt as one group of elements
which form a foreground. The second group is, we say, before
the attention, and is not at that moment felt as self; while
the first group is vague, undifferentiated, not attended to,
but felt. Any element in this background can detach itself
and come into the foreground of attention. I become conscious
at this moment, for instance, of the weight of my shoulders
as they rest on the back of my chair: that sensation, however,
belongs to my self no more than does the sensation of the
smoothness of the paper on which my hand rests. I know I am a
self, because I can pass, so to speak, between the foreground
and the background of my consciousness. It is the feeling of
transition that gives me the negative and positive of my
circuit; and this feeling of transition, hunted to its lair,
reveals itself as nothing more nor less than a motor sensation
felt in the sense organs which adapt themselves to the new
conditions. I look on that picture and on this, and know that
they are two, because the change in the adaptation of my sense
organs to their objects has been felt. I close my eyes and
think of near and far, and it is the change in the sensations
from my eye muscles that tells me I have passed between the
two; or, to express it otherwise, that it is in me the two
have succeeded each other. While the self in its widest sense,
therefore, is co-extensive with consciousness, the distinctive
feeling of self as opposed to the elements in consciousness
which represent the outer world is based on those bodily
sensations which are connected with the relations of objects.
My world--the foreground of my consciousness--would fall in on
me and crush me, if I could not hold it off by just this power
to feel it different from my background; and it is felt as
different through the motor sensations involved in the change
of my sense organs in passing from one to the other. The
condition of the feeling of transition, and hence of the
feeling of personality, is then the presence in consciousness
of at least two possible objects of attention; and the formal
consciousness of self might be schematized as a straight line
connecting two points, in which one point represents the
foreground, and the other the background, of consciousness.

If we now accept this view, and ask under what conditions the
sense of self may be lost, the answer is at once suggested.
It will happen when the "twoness" disappears, so that the line
connecting and separating the two objects in our scheme drops
out or is indefinitely decreased. When background or foreground
tends to disappear or to merge either into the other, or when
background or foreground makes an indissoluble unity or
unbreakable circle, the content of consciousness approaches
absolute unity. There is no "relating" to be done, no
"transition" to be made. The condition, then, for the feeling
of personality is no longer present, and there results a
feeling of complete unity with the object of attention; and if
this object of attention is itself without parts or differences,
there results an empty void, Nirvana.

Suppose that I gaze, motionless, at a single bright light until
all my bodily sensations have faded. Then one of the "points"
in our scheme has dropped out. In my mind there reigns but one
thought. The transition feeling goes, for there is nothing to
be "related." Now "it is one blaze, about me and within me;"
I am that light, and myself no longer. My consciousness is a
unit or a blank, as you please. If you say that I am self-
hypnotized, I may reply that I have simply ceased to feel
myself different from the content of my consciousness, because
that content has ceased to allow a transition between its terms.

This is, however, not the only possible form of the disappearance
of our "twoness," and the resulting loss of the self-feeling.
When the sequence of objects in consciousness is so rapid that
the feeling of transition, expressed in motor terms, drops below
the threshold of sensation, the feeling of self again fades.
Think, for instance, of the Bacchanal orgies. The votary of
Dionysus, dancing, shrieking, tearing at his hair and at his
garments, lost in the lightning change of his sensations all
power of relating them. His mind was ringed in a whirling
circle, every point of which merged into the next without
possibility of differentiation. And since he could feel no
transition periods, he could feel HIMSELF no longer; he was
one with the content of his consciousness, which consciousness
was no less a unit than our bright light aforesaid, just as a
circle is as truly a unit as a point. The priest of Dionysus
must have felt himself only a dancing, shouting thing, one
with the world without, "whirled round in earth's diurnal course
with rocks and stones and trees." And how perfectly the ancient
belief fits our psychophysical analysis! The Bacchic enthusiast
believed himself possessed with the very ecstasy of the spirit
of nature. His inspired madness was the presence of the god
who descended upon him,--the god of the vine, of spring; the
rising sap, the rushing stream, the bursting leaf, the rippling
song, all the life of flowing things, they were he! "Autika ga
pasa zoreusei," was the cry,--"soon the whole earth will dance
and sing!"

Yes, this breaking down of barriers, this melting of the
personality into its surroundings, this strange and sweet self-
abandonment must have its source in just the disappearance of
the sensation of adjustment, on which the feeling of personality
is based. But how can it be, we have to ask, that a principle
so barren of emotional significance should account for the
ecstasy of religious emotion, of aesthetic delight, of creative
inspiration? It is not, however, religion or beauty or genius
that is the object of our inquiry at this moment, but simply
the common element in the experience of each of these which
we know as the disappearance of self-feeling. How the
circumstances peculiar to religious worship, aesthetic appreciation,
and intellectual creation bring about the formal conditions of
the loss of personal feeling must be sought in a more detailed
analysis, and we shall then be able to trace the source of the
intensity of emotion in these experiences. What, then, first
of all, are the steps by which priest and poet and thinker have
passed into the exaltation of selfless emotion? Fortunately,
the passionate pilgrims of all three realms of deep experience
have been ever prodigal of their confessions. The religious
ecstasy, however, embodies the most complete case, and allows
the clearest insight into the nature of the experience; and will
therefore be dealt with at greatest length.

The typical religious enthusiast is the mystic. From Plotinus
to Buddha, from Meister Eckhart to Emerson, the same doctrine
has brought the same fruits of religious rapture. There is one
God, and in contemplation of Him the soul becomes of his
essence. Whether it is held, as by the Neoplatonists, that
Being and Knowledge are one, that the procedure of the world
out of God is a process of self-revelation, and the return of
things into God a process of higher and higher intuition, and
so the mystic experience an apprehension of the highest rather
than a form of worship; or whether it is expressed as by the
humble Beguine, Mechthild,--"My soul swims in the Being of God
as a fish in water,'--the kernel of the mystic's creed is the
same. In ecstatic contemplation of God, and, in the higher
states, in ecstatic union with Him, in sinking the individuality
in the divine Being, is the only true life. Not all, it is
true, who hold the doctrine have had the experience; not all can
say with Eckhart or with Madame Guyon, "I have seen God in my
own soul," or "I have become one with God." It is from the
narratives and the counsels of perfection of these, the chosen,
the initiate, who have passed beyond the veil, that light may
be thrown on the psychological conditions of mystic ecstasy.

The most illuminating account of her actual mystical experiences
is given by Madame Guyon, the first of the sect or school of the
Quietists. This gentle Frenchwoman had a gift for psychological
observation, and though her style is neither poetic nor
philosophical, I may be pardoned for quoting at some length her
naive and lucid revelations. The following passages, beginning
with an early religious experience, are taken almost at random
from the pages of her autobiography:--

"These sermons made such an impression on my mind, and absorbed
me so strongly in God, that I could not open my eyes nor hear
what was said." "To hear Thy name, O my God, could put me into
a profound prayer....I could not see any longer the saints nor
the Holy Virgin outside of God; but I saw them all in Him,
scarcely being able to distinguish them from Him....I could
not hear God nor our Lord Jesus Christ spoken of without being,
as it were, outside of myself [hors de moi]....Love seized me
so strongly that I remained absorbed, in a profound silence and
a peace that I cannot describe. I made ever new efforts, and
I passed my life in beginning my prayers without being able to
carry them through....I could ask nothing for myself nor for
another, nor wish anything but this divine will....I do not
believe that there could be in the world anything more simple
and more unified....It is a state of which one can say nothing
more, because it evades all expression,--a state in which the
creature is lost, engulfed. All is God, and the soul perceives
only God. It has to strive no more for perfection, for growth,
for approach to Him, for union. All is consummated in the unity,
but in a manner so free, so natural, so easy, that the soul
lives from the air which it breathes....The spirit is empty, no
more traversed by thoughts; nothing fills the void, which is no
longer painful, and the soul finds in itself an immense capacity
that nothing can either limit or destroy."

Can we fail to trace in these simple words the shadow of all
religious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madame Guyon
is strung to a higher key than most of this dull and relaxed
world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative
worship. Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit.
Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St.
Teresa, the countless mystics of the Middle Age, and of the
followers of Buddhism in its various shades, from the Ganges to
the Charles. Two characteristics disengage themselves to view:
the insistence on the unity of God--IN whom alone the Holy
Virgin and the saints are seen--from a psychological point of
view only; and the mind's emptiness of thought in a state of
religious ecstasy. But without further analysis, we may ask,
as the disciples of the mystics have always done, how this
state of blissful union is to be reached. They have always
been minute in their prescriptions, and it is possible to
derive therefrom what may be called the technique of the mystic
procedure.

"The word mystic," to quote Walter Pater, "has been derived from
a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips,
brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the Platonists themselves
derive it rather from the act of shutting the eyes, that one may
see the more, inwardly." Of such is the counsel of St. Luis de
Granada, "Imitate the sportsman who hoods the falcon that it be
made subservient to his rule;" and of another Spanish mystic,
Pedro de Alcantara: "In meditation, let the person rouse himself
from things temporal, and let him collect himself within himself
....Here let him hearken to the voice of God...as though there
were no other in the world save God and himself." St. Teresa
found happiness only in "shutting herself up within herself."
Vocal prayer could not satisfy her, and she adopted mental
prayer. The four stages of her experience--which she named
"recollectedness," "quietude" (listening rather than speaking),
"union" (blissful sleep with the faculties of the mind still),
"ecstasy or rapture"--are but progressive steps in the sealing
of the senses. The yoga of the Brahmins, which is the same as
the "union" of the Cabalists, is made to depend upon the same
conditions,--passivity, perseverance, solitude. The novice
must arrest his breathing, and may meditate on mystic symbols
alone, by way of reaching the formless, ineffable Buddha. But
it is useless to heap up evidence; the inference is sufficiently
clear.

The body is first brought into a state either of nervous
instability or irritability by ascetic practices, or of nervous
insensibility by the persistent withdrawal of all outer
disturbance; and the mind is fixed upon a single object,--the
one God, the God eternal, absolute, indivisible. Recalling our
former scheme for the conditions of the sense of personality,
we shall see that we have here the two poles of consciousness.
Then, as the tension is sharpened, what happens? Under the
artificial conditions of weakened nerves, of blank surroundings,
the self-background drops. The feeling of transition disappears
with the absence of related terms; and the remaining, the
positive pole of consciousness, is an undifferentiated Unity,
with which the person must feel himself one. The feeling of
personality is gone with that on which it rests, and its loss
is joined with an overwhelming sense of union with the One, the
Absolute, God!

The object of mystic contemplation is the One indivisible. But
we can also think the One as the unity of all differences, the
Circle of the Universe. Those natures also which, like Amiel's,
are "bedazzled with the Infinite" and thirst for "totality"
attain in their reveries to the same impersonal ecstasy. Amiel
writes of a "night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched
at full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky
Way. Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal,
cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's
breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!" The
reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted
by Matthew Arnold, reveals the same emotion: "Vast consciousness
of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere
impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious
self-abandonment." In the coincidence of outer circumstance--
the lake, the North Sea, night, the attitude of repose--may we
not trace a dissolution of the self-background, similar to that
of the mystic worshiper? And in the Infinite, no less than in
the One, must the soul sink and melt into union with it, because
within it there is no determination, no pause, and no change.

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