The Psychology of Beauty, Ethel D. Puffer [the ebook reader .txt] 📗

Thus what we are wont to call the inspired madness of the Delphic priestesses was less the expression of ecstasy than the means of its excitation. Perpetual motion, as well as eternal rest, may bring about the engulfment of the self in the object. The most diverse types of religious emotions, IN SO FAR AS THEY

PRESENT VARIATIONS IN THE DEGREE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, are thus seen to be reducible to the same psychological basis.

The circle, no less than the point, is the symbol of the One, and the “devouring unity” that lays hold on consciousness from the loss of the feeling of transition comes in the unrest of enthusiasm no less than in the blissful nothing of Nirvana.

 

At this point, I am sure, the reader will interpose a protest.

Is, then, the mystery of self-abandonment to the highest to be shared with the meanest of fanatics? Are the rapture of Dante and the trance of the Omphalopsychi sprung from the same root? There is no occasion, however, for the revolt of sentiment because we fail to emphasize here the important differences in the emotional character and value of the states in question. What interests us is only one aspect which they have in common, the surrender of the sense of personality.

That is based on formal relations of the elements of consciousness, and the explanation of its disappearance applies as well to the whirling dervish as to the converts of a revivalist preacher.

 

The mystic, then, need only shut his senses to the world, and contemplate the One. Subject fuses with object, and he feels himself melt into the Infinite. But each experience is not the exclusive property of the religious enthusiast. The worshiper of beauty has given evidence of the same feelings.

And yet, in his aesthetic rapture, the latter dwells with deliberation on his delights, and while luxuriating in the infinite labyrinths of beauty can scarcely be described as musing on an undifferentiated Unity. So far, at least, it does not appear that our formula applies to aesthetic feeling.

 

Aesthetic feeling arises in the contemplation of a beautiful object. But what makes an object beautiful? To go still further back, just what, psychologically, does contemplation mean? To contemplate an object is to dwell on the idea or image of it, and to dwell upon an idea means to carry it out incipiently. We may go even further, and say it is the carrying out by virtue of which we grasp the idea. How do we think of a tall pine-tree? By sweeping our eyes up and down its length, and out to the ends of its branches; and if we are forbidden to use our eye muscles even infinitesimally, then we cannot think of the visual image. In short, we perceive an object in space by carrying out its motor suggestions; more technically expressed, by virtue of a complex of motor impulses aroused by it; more briefly, by incipiently imitating it. Contemplation is inner imitation.

 

Now a beautiful object is first of all a unified object; why this must be so has been considered in the preceding chapter.

In it all impulses of soul and sense are bound to react upon one another, and to lead back to one another. And all the elements, which in contemplation we reproduce in the form of motor impulses, are bound to make a closed circle of these suggested energies. The symmetrical picture calls out a set of motor impulses which “balance,”—a system of energies reacting on one centre; the sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhythm and of thought, to bring us back on another to the same point; the sonata does the same in melody. In the “whirling circle” of the drama, not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before and after. Thus the unity of a work of art makes of the system of suggested energies which form the foreground of attention an impregnable, an invulnerable circle.

 

Not only, however, are we held in equilibrium in the object of attention; we cannot connect with it our self-background, for the will cannot act on the object of aesthetic feeling.

We cannot eat the grapes of Apelles or embrace the Galatea of Pygmalion; we cannot rescue Ophelia or enlighten Juliet; and of impulse to interfere, to connect the scene with ourselves, we have none. But this is a less important factor in the situation. That the house is dark, the audience silent, and all motor impulses outside of the aesthetic circle stifled, is, too, only a superficial, and, so to speak, a negative condition.

The real ground of the possibility of a momentary self-annihilation lies in the fact that all incitements to motor impulse—except those which belong to the indissoluble ring of the object itself—have been shut out by the perfection of unity to which the aesthetic object (here the drama) has been brought. The background fades; the foreground satisfies, incites no movement; and with the disappearance of the possibility of action which would connect the two, fades also that which dwells in this feeling of transition,—the sense of personality. The depth of aesthetic feeling lies not in the worthy countryman who interrupts the play with cries for justice on the villain, but in him who creates the drama again with the poet, who lives over again in himself each of the thrills of emotion passing before him, and loses himself in their web. The object is a unity or our whirling circle of impulses, as you like to phrase it. At any rate, out of that unity the soul does not return upon itself; it remains one with it in the truest sense.

 

The loss of the sense of personality is an integral part of the aesthetic experience; and we have seen how it is a necessary psychological effect of the unity of the object.

From another point of view it may be said that the unity of the object is constituted just by the inhibition of all tendency to movement through the balance or centrality of impulses suggested by it. In other words, the balance of impulses makes us feel the object a unity. And this balance of impulses, this inhibition of movement, corresponding to unity, is what we know as aesthetic repose. Thus the conditions of aesthetic repose and of the loss of self-feeling are the same. In fact, it might be said that, within this realm, the two conceptions are identical. The true aesthetic repose is just that perfect rest in the beautiful object which is the essence of the loss of the sense of personality.

 

Subtler and rarer, again, than the raptures of mysticism and of beauty worship is the ecstasy of intellectual production; yet the “clean, clear joy of creation,” as Kipling names it, is not less to be grouped with those precious experiences in which the self is sloughed away, and the soul at one with its content. I speak, of course, of intellectual production in full swing, in the momentum of success. The travail of soul over apparently hopeless difficulties or in the working out of indifferent details takes place not only in full self-consciousness, but in self-disgust; there we can take Carlyle to witness. But in the higher stages the fixation of truth and the appreciation of beauty are accompanied by the same extinction of the feeling of individuality. Of testimony we have enough and to spare. I need not fill these pages with confessions and anecdotes of the ecstatical state in which all great deeds of art and science are done. The question is rather to understand and explain it on the basis of the formal scheme to which we have found the religious and the aesthetic attitudes to conform.

 

Jean Paul says somewhere that, however laborious the completion of a great work, its conception came as a whole,—in one flash.

We remember the dreams of Schiller in front of his red curtain and the resulting musikalische Stimmung,—formless, undirected, out of which his poem shaped itself; the half-somnambulic state of Goethe and his frantic haste in fixation of the vision, in which he dared not even stop to put his paper straight, but wrote over the corners quite ruthlessly. Henner once said to a painter who mourned that he had done nothing on his picture for the Salon, though he saw it before him, “What! You see your picture! Then it is done. You can paint it in an hour.”

If all these traditions be true, they are significant; and the necessary conditions of such composition seem to be highly analogous to those of the aesthetic emotion. We have, first of all, a lack of outward stimulation, and therefore possible disappearance of the background. How much better have most poets written in a garret than in a boudoir! Goethe’s bare little room in the garden house at Weimar testifies to the severe conditions his genius found necessary. Tranquillity of the background is the condition of self-absorption, or—

and this point seems to me worth emphasizing—a closed circle of outer activities. I have never believed, for instance, in the case of the old tale of Walter Scott and the button, that it was the surprise of his loss that tied the tongue of the future author’s rival. The poor head scholar had simply made for himself a transitionless experience with that twirling button, and could then sink his consciousness in its object,—

at that moment the master’s questions. It is with many of us a familiar experience, that of not being able to think unless in constant motion. Translated into our psychological scheme, the efficiency of these movements would be explained thus: Given the “whirling circles,”—the background of continuous movement sensations, which finally dropped out of consciousness, and the foreground of continuous thought,—the first protected, so to speak, the second, since they were mutually exclusive, and what broke the one destroyed the other.

 

But to return from this digression, a background fading into nothingness, either as rest or as a closed circle of automatic movements, is the first condition of the ecstasy of mental production. The second is given in the character of its object. The object of high intellectual creation is a unity,—

a perfect whole, revealed, as Jean Paul says, in a single movement of genius. Within the enchanted circle of his creation, the thinker is absorbed, because here too all his impulses are turned to one end, in relation to which nothing else exists.

 

I am aware that many will see a sharp distinction here between the work of the creator or discoverer in science and the artist.

They may maintain, in Schopenhauer’s phrase, that the aim and end of science is just the connection of objects in the service of the will of the individual, and hence transition between the various terms is constant; while art, on the other hand, indeed isolates its object, and so drops transitions. But I think where we speak of “connection” thus, we mean the larger sweep of law. If the thinker looks beyond his special problem at all, it is, like Buddha, to “fix his eyes upon the chain of causation.” The scientist of imagination sees his work under the form of eternity, as one link of that endless chain, one atom in that vortex of almighty purposes, which science will need all time to reveal. For him it is either one question, closed within itself by its own answer, or it is the Infinite Law of the Universe,—the point or the circle. From all points of view, then, the object of creation in art or science is a girdle of impulses from which the mind may not stray. The two conditions of our formal scheme are given: a term which disappears, and one which is a perfect whole. Transition between background and foreground has dropped. Between the objects of attention in the