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

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?

 

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,