The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel D. Puffer (good non fiction books to read TXT) 📕

the very ones to insist that music is merely the language of emotion, are utterly and essentially wrong. Nor has it been attempted to prove them so. The beauty of music, we have sought to show, grows and flowers out of tone-relations alone, consists in tone-sequences alone. But it has not been said that music did not arouse emotion, nor that it might not on occasion even express it.

 

It is in fact now rather a commonplace in musical theory, to show the emotional means which music has at its command; and I shall therefore be very brief in my reference to them. They may be shortly classed as expressive by association and by direct induction. Expressive by association are passages of direct imitation: the tolling of bells, the clash of arms, the roar of wind, the hum of spinning wheels, even to the bleating of sheep and the whirr of windmills; the cadence of the voice in pleading, laughter, love; from such imitations we are REMINDED of a fact or an emotion. More intimate is the expression by induction; emotion is aroused by activities which themselves form part of the emotions in question. Thus the differences in tempo, reproduced in nervous response, call up the gayety, sadness, hesitation, firmness, haste, growing excitement, etc., of which whole experiences these movement types form a part.

 

These emotions, as has often been shown, are absolutely general and indefinite in their character, and are, on the whole, even in their intensity, no measure of the beauty of the music which arouses them. Indeed, we can get intense emotion from sound which is entirely unmusical. So, too, loudness, softness, crescendo, diminuendo, volume, piercingness, have their emotional accompaniments. It is to Hanslick that we owe the general summing up of these possibilities of expression as “the dynamic figures of occurrences.” How this dynamic skeleton is filled out through association, or that special form of association which we know as direct induction, is not hard to understand on psychological grounds.

It is not necessary to repeat here the reasons for the literally “moving” appeal of sound-stimulations, which have been already detailed under the subject of rhythm.

 

Yet there still remains a residue of emotion not entirely accounted for. It has been said that these, the emotions expressed, or aroused, are more or less independent of the intrinsic musical beauty. But it cannot be denied that there is an intense emotion which grows with the measure of the beauty of a piece of music, and which music lovers are yet loth to identify with the so-called general aesthetic emotion, or with the “satisfaction of expectation,” different varieties of which, in fusion, we have tried to show as the basis of the musical experience. The aesthetic emotion from a picture is not like this, they say, and a mere satisfaction of expectation is unutterably tame. This is unique, aesthetic, individual!

 

I believe that the clue to this objection in the natural impulse of mankind to confuse the intensity of an experience with a difference in kind. But first of all, there must be added to our list of definite emotions from music, those which attach themselves to the internal relations of the notes. Gurney has said that when we feel ourselves yearning for the next unutterable, we are really yearning for the next note. That is the secret! Each one of those tendencies, demands, leanings, strivings, returns, as between tone and tone in a melody, is necessarily accompanied by the feeling-tone which belongs to such an attitude. And it is to be noted that all the more poignant emotions we get from music are always stated in terms of urgency, of strain, of effort. That is because these emotions, and these alone, are inescapable in music since they are founded on the intrinsic relations of the notes themselves.

It is just for this reason, too, that music, just in proportion to its beauty, is felt, as some one says, like vinegar on a wound, by those in grief or anxiety.

 

“I shall loathe sweet tunes, where a note grown strong Relents and recoils, and climbs and closes.”

 

It is the yearning that is felt most strongly, the more vividly are the real musical relations of the notes brought out.

 

Music expresses and causes tension, strain, yearning, through its inner, its “absolute” nature. But it does more; it satisfies these yearnings. It not only creates an expectation to satisfy it, but the expectation itself is of a poignant, emotional, personal character. What is the emotion that is aroused by such a satisfaction?

 

The answer to this question takes us back again to that old picturesque theory of Schopenhauer—that music is the objectification of the will. Schopenhauer meant this in a metaphysical, and to us an inadmissible sense; but I believe that the psychological analysis of the musical experience which we have just completed shows that there is another sense in which it is absolutely true.

 

The best psychological theory of the experience of volition makes it the imaging of a movement or action, followed by feelings of strain, and then of the movement carried out.

The anticipation is the essential. Without anticipation, as in the reflex, winking, the action appears involuntary.

Without the feeling of effort or strain, as in simply raising the empty hand, the self-feeling is weaker. When all these three elements, IMAGE, EFFORT, SUCCESS, are present most vividly, the feeling is of triumphant volition. Now my thesis is—the thesis toward which every though of the preceding has pointed—that the fundamental facts of the musical experience are supremely fitted to bring about the illusion and the exaltation of the triumphant will.

 

The image, dimly foreshadowed, is given in the half-consciousness of each note as it appears, and in that sense of coming integration already recognized. The proof is the shock and disappointment when the wrong note is sounded; if we had not some anticipation of the right, the wrong one would not shock.

The strain we have in the effort of the organism to reach the note, the tendency to which is implicit in the preceding. The success is given in the coming of the note itself.

 

All this is no less true of rhythm—but there the expectation is more mechanical, less conscious, as has been fully shown.

The more beautiful, that is, the more inevitably, irresistibly right the music, the more powerful the influence to this illusion of the triumphant will. The exaltation of musical emotion is thus the direct measure of the perfection of the relations—the beauty of the music. This, then, is the only intimate, immediate, intrinsic emotion of music—the illusion of the triumphant will!

 

One word more on the interpretation of music in general aesthetic terms. All that has been said goes to show that music possesses to the very highest degree the power of stimulation. Can we attribute to it repose in any other sense than that of satisfying a desire that it arouses? We can do so in pointing out that music ever returns upon itself—that its motion is cyclic. Music is the art of auditory implications; but more than this, its last note returns to its first. It is as truly a unity as if it were static. We may say that the beauty of a picture is only entered into when the eye has roved over the whole canvas, and holds all the elements indirectly while it is fixated upon one point. In exactly the same way music is not beauty unless it is ALL there; at every point a fusion of the heard tone with the once heard tones in the order of their hearing. The melody, as a set of implications, is as ESSENTIALLY timeless as the picture. By melody too, then, is given the perfect moment, the moment of unity and completeness, of stimulation and repose.

 

The aesthetic emotion for music is then the favorable stimulation of the sense of hearing and those other senses that are bound up with it, together with the repose of perfect unity. It has a richer color, a more intense exaltation in the illusion of the triumphant will, which is indeed the peculiar moment for the self in action.

VI THE BEAUTY OF LITERATURE VI THE BEAUTY OF LITERATURE I

THAT in the practice and pleasure of art for art’s sake there lurks an unworthy element, is a superstition that recurs in every generation of critics. A most accomplished and modern disciple of the gay science but yesterday made it a reproach to the greatest living English novelist, that he, too, was all for beauty, all for art, and had no great informing purpose. “Art for art’s sake” is clearly, to this critic’s mind, compatible with the lack of something all desirable for novels. Yet if there is indeed a characteristic excellence of the novel, if there is something the lack of which in a novel is rightly deplored, then the real art for art’s sake is bound to include this characteristic excellence. If an informing purpose is needed, no true artist can dispense with it. Otherwise art for art’s sake is a contradiction in terms.

 

The critic I have quoted merely voices the lingering Puritan distrust of beauty as an end in itself, and so repudiates the conception of beauty as containing all the excellences of a work of art. He thinks of beauty as cut up into small snips and shreds of momentary sensations; as the sweet sound of melodious words and cadences; or as something abstract, pattern-like, imposed from without,—a Procrustes-bed of symmetry and proportion; or as a view of life Circe-like, insidious, a golden languor, made of “the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace.” All these, apart or together, are thought of as the “beauty,” at which the artist “for art’s sake” aims, and to that is opposed the nobler informing purpose. But the truer view of beauty makes it simply the epitome of all which a work of art ought to be, and thus the only end and aim of every work of art.

The beauty of literature receives into itself all the precepts of literature: there is no “ought” beyond it.

And art for art’s sake is but art conscious of its aim, the production of that all-embracing beauty.

 

What, then, is the beauty of literature? How may we know its characteristic excellences? It is strange how, in all serious discussion, to the confounding of some current ideas of criticism, we are thrown back, inevitably, on this concept of excellence! The most ardent of impressionists wakes up sooner or later to the idea that he has been talking values all his life. The excellences of literature! They must lie within the general formula for beauty, yet they must be conditioned by the possibilities of the special medium of literature. The general formula, abstract and metaphysical as it must be, may not be applied directly; for abstract thought will fit only that art which can convey it; hence the struggle of theorists with painting, music, and architecture, and the failure of Hegel, for instance, to show how beauty as “the expression of the Idea” resides in these arts. But if the general formula is always translated relatively to the sense-medium through which beauty must reach the human being, it may be preserved, while yet affirming all the special demands of the particular art.

Beauty is a constant function of the varying medium. The end of Beauty is always the same, the perfect moment of unity and self-completeness, of repose in excitement. But this end is attained by different means furnished by different media: through vision and its accompanying activities; through hearing and its accompanying activities; and for literature, through hearing in the special sense of communication by word. It is the nature of this medium that we must further discover.

II

Now the word is nothing