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

in itself; it is not sound primarily, but thought. The word is but a sign, a negligible quantity in human intercourse—a counter in which the coins are ideas and emotions—merely legal tender, of no value save in exchange. What we really experience in the sound of a sentence, in the sight of a printed page, is a complex sequence of visual and other images, ideas, emotions, feelings, logical relations, swept along in the stream of consciousness, —differing, indeed, in certain ways from daily experience, but yet primarily of the web of life itself. The words in their nuances, march, tempo, melody add certain elements to this flood—hasten, retard, undulate, or calm it; but it is the THOUGHT, the understood experience, that is the stuff of literature.

 

Words are first of all meanings, and meanings are to be understood and lived through. We can hardly even speak of the meaning of a word, but rather of what it is, directly, in the mental state that is called up by it. Every definition of a word is but a feeble and distant approximation of the unique flash of experience belonging to that word. It is not the sound sensation nor the visual image evoked by the word which counts, but the whole of the mental experience, to which the word is but an occasion and a cue. Therefore, since literature is the art of words, it is the stream of thought itself that we must consider as the material of literature.

In short, literature is the dialect of life—as Stevenson said; it is by literature that the business of life is carried on. Some one, however, may here demur: visual signs, too, are the dialect of life. We understand by what we see, and we live by what we understand. The curve of a line, the crescendo of a note, serve also for wordless messages. Why are not, then, painting and music the vehicles of experience, and to be judged first as evocation of life, and only afterward as sight and hearing? This conceded, we are thrown back on that view of art as “the fixed quantity of imaginative thought supplemented by certain technical qualities,—of color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry,” from which is has been the one aim of the preceding arguments of this book to free us.

 

The holders of this view, however, ignore the history and significance of language. Our sight and hearing are given to us prior to our understanding or use of them. In a way, we submit to them—they are always with us. We dwell in them through passive states, through seasons of indifference; moreover when we see to understand, we do not SEE, and when we hear to understand we do not hear. Only shreds of sensation, caught up in our flight from one action to another, serve as signals for the meanings which concern us. In proportion as action is prompt and effective, does the cue as such tend to disappear, until, in all matters of skill, piano-playing, fencing, billiard-playing, the sight or sound which serves as cue drops almost together out of consciousness.

So far as it is vehicle of information, it is no longer sight or sound as such—interest has devoured it. But language came into being to supplement the lacks of sight and sound.

It was created by ourselves, to embody all active outreaching mental experience, and it comes into particular existence to meet an insistent emergency—a literally crying need. In short, it is CONSTITUTED by meanings—its essence is communication. Sight and sound have a relatively independent existence, and may hence claim a realm of art that is largely independent of meanings. Not so the art of words, which can be but the art of meanings, of human experience alone.

 

And yet again, were the evocation of life the means and material of all art, that art in which the level of imaginative thought was low, the range of human experience narrow, would take a low place in the scale. What, then, of music and architecture? Inferior arts, they could not challenge comparison with the poignant, profound, all-embracing art of literature. But this is patently not the fact. There is no hierarchy of the arts. We may not rank St. Paul’s Cathedral below “Paradise Lost.” Yet is the material of all experience is the material of all art, they must not only be compared, but “Paradise Lost” must be admitted incomparably the greater. No—we may not admit that all the arts alike deal with the material of expression. The excellence of music and architecture, whatever it may be, cannot depend on this material. Yet by hypothesis it must be through the use of its material that the end of beauty is reached by every art.

A picture has lines and masses and colors, wherewith to play with the faculty of vision, to weave a spell for the whole man.

Beauty is the power to enchant him through the eye and all that waits upon it, into a moment of perfection. Literature has “all thoughts, all passions, all delights”—the treasury of life—to play with, to weave a spell for the whole man.

Beauty in literature is the power to enchant him, through the mind and heart, across the dialect of life, into a moment of perfection.

III

The art of letters, then, is the art whose material is life itself. Such, indeed, is the implication of the approval theories of style. Words, phrases, sentences, chapters, are excellent in so far as they are identical with thought in all its shades of feeling. “Economy of attention,” Spencer’s familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself, an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching.

“All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple sensations.”<1> He quotes therewith De Maupassant on Flaubert: “Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but ONE—one form, one mode—to express what I want to say.” And adds, “The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!—the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within.”…

 

<1> Appreciations: An Essay on Style.

 

Thought in words is the matter of literature; and words exist but for thought, and get their excellence as thought; yet, as Flaubert says, the idea only exists by virtue of the form.

The form, or the word, IS the idea; that is, it carries along with it the fringe of suggestion which crystallizes the floating possibility in the stream of thought. A glance at the history of language shows how this must have been so. Words in their first formation were doubtless constituted by their imitative power. As Taine has said,<1> at the first they arose in contact with the objects; they imitated them by the grimaces of mouth and nose which accompanied their sound, by the roughness, smoothness, length, or shortness of this sound, by the rattle or whistle of the throat, by the inflation or contraction of the chest.

 

<1> H. Taine, La Fontaine et ses Fables, p. 288.

 

This primitive imitative power of the word survives in the so-called onomatapoetic words, which aim simply at reproducing the sounds of nature. A second order of imitation arises through the associations of sensations. The different sensations, auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, motor, and organic have common qualities, which they share with other more complex experiences; of form, as force or feebleness; of feeling, as harshness, sweetness, and so on. It is, indeed, another case of the form-qualities to which we recurred so often in the chapter on music. Clear and smooth vowels will give the impression of volatility and delicacy; open, broad ones of elevation or extension (airy, flee; large, far). The consonants which are hard to pronounce will give the impression of effort, of shock, of violence, of difficulty, of heaviness,—“the round squat turret, black as the fool’s heart;” those which are easy of pronunciation express ease, smoothness, fluidity, calm, lightness, (facile, suave, roulade);—“lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon,” a line like honey on the tongue, of which physical organ, indeed, one becomes, with the word “tinct,” definitely conscious.

 

In fact, the main point to notice in the enumeration of the expressive qualities of sounds, is that it is the movement in utterance which characterizes them. That movement tends to reproduce itself in the hearer, and carries with it its feeling-tone of ease or difficulty, explosiveness or sweetness long drawn out. It is thus by a kind of sympathetic induction rather than by external imitation that these words of the second type become expressive.

 

Finally, the two moments may be combined, as in such a word as “roaring,” which is directly imitative of a sound, and by the muscular activity it calls into play suggests the extended energy of the action itself.

 

The stage in which the word becomes a mere colorless, algebraic sign of object or process never occurs, practically, for in any case it has accumulated in its history and vicissitudes a fringe of suggestiveness, as a ship accumulates barnacles. “Words carry with them all the meanings they have worn,” says Walter Raleigh in his “Essay on Style.” “A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors.” Manifold may be the implications and suggestions of even a single letter. Thus a charming anonymous essay on the word “Grey.” “Gray is a quiet color for daylight things, but there is a touch of difference, of romance, even, about things that are grey. Gray is a color for fur, and Quaker gowns, and breasts of doves, and a gray day, and a gentlewoman’s hair; and horses must be gray….Now grey is for eyes, the eyes of a witch, with green lights in them and much wickedness. Gray eyes would be as tender and yielding and true as blue ones; a coquette must have eyes of grey.”

 

Words do not have meanings, they ARE meanings through their power of direct suggestion and induction. They may become what they signify. Nor is this power confined to words alone; on its possession by the phrase, sentence, or verse rests the whole theory of style. The short, sharp staccato, the bellowing turbulent, the swimming melodious circling sentence ARE truly what they mean, in their form as in the objective sense of their words. The sound-values of rhythm and pace have been in other chapters fully dwelt upon; the expressive power of breaks and variations is worth noting also. Of the irresistible significance of rhythm, even against content, we have an example amusingly commented on by Mr. G.K. Chesterton in his “Twelve Types.” “He (Byron) may arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating: ‘Oh, there’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,

When the glow of early youth declines in beauty’s dull decay.’

 

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.”