The Beautiful, Vernon Lee [good ebook reader TXT] 📗

of turning into a particular fruit, with the possibility of our finding that fruit bitter and non-edible; of being developed from cuttings, pressed in a book, made a present of or cultivated for lucre. Only one of these groups of possibilities may occupy our thoughts, the rest not glanced at, or only glanced at subsequently; but if, on trial, any of these grouped possibilities disappoint us, we decide that this is not a real rose, but a paper rose, or a painted one, or no rose at all, but some other thing. For, so far as our consciousness is concerned, things are merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, trams and funiculars in the future, volcanoes and icecaps in the past, having entirely altered all that; only the material constituents and the geographical locality remaining as the unshifted item in those much pulled about bundles of thoughts of possibilities.

Every thing may have a great number of very different Aspects; and some of these Aspects may invite contemplation, as that landscape invited the third man to contemplate it; while other aspects (say the same place after a proper course of tramways and funiculars and semi-detached residences, or before the needful volcanic and glacial action) may be such as are dismissed or slurred as fast as possible. Indeed, with the exception of a very few cubes not in themselves especially attractive, I cannot remember any things which do not present quite as many displeasing aspects as pleasing ones. The most beautiful building is not beautiful if stood on its head; the most beautiful picture is not beautiful looked at through a microscope or from too far off; the most beautiful melody is not beautiful if begun at the wrong end. . . . Here the Reader may interrupt: "What nonsense! Of course the building is a building only when right side up; the picture isn't a picture any longer under a microscope; the melody isn't a melody except begun at the beginning"—all which means that when we speak of a building, a picture, or a melody, we are already implicitly speaking, no longer of a Thing, but of one of the possible Aspects of a thing; and that when we say that a thing is beautiful, we mean that it affords one or more aspects which we contemplate with satisfaction. But if a beautiful mountain or a beautiful woman could only be contemplated, if the mountain could not also be climbed or tunnelled, if the woman could not also get married, bear children and have (or not have!) a vote, we should say that the mountain and the woman were not real things. Hence we come to the conclusion, paradoxical only as long as we fail to define what we are talking about, that what we contemplate as beautiful is an Aspect of a Thing, but never a Thing itself. In other words: Beautiful is an adjective applicable to Aspects not to Things, or to Things only, inasmuch as we consider them as possessing (among other potentialities) beautiful Aspects. So that we can now formulate: The word beautiful implies the satisfaction derived from the contemplation not of things but of aspects.

This summing up has brought us to the very core of our subject; and I should wish the Reader to get it by heart, until he grow familiarised therewith in the course of our further examinations. Before proceeding upon these, I would, however, ask him to reflect how this last formula of ours bears upon the old, seemingly endless, squabble as to whether or not beauty has anything to do with truth, and whether art, as certain moralists contend, is a school of lying. For true or false is a judgment of existence; it refers to Things; it implies that besides the qualities and reactions shown or described, our further action or analysis will call forth certain other groups of qualities and reactions constituting the thing which is said to exist. But aspects, in the case in which I have used that word, are what they are and do not necessarily imply anything beyond their own peculiarities. The words true or false can be applied to them only with the meaning of aspects truly existing or not truly existing; i.e. aspects of which it is true or not to say that they exist. But as to an aspect being true or false in the sense of misleading, that question refers not to the aspect itself, but to the thing of which the aspect is taken as a part and a sign. Now the contemplation of the mere aspect, the beauty (or ugliness) of the aspect, does not itself necessitate or imply any such reference to a thing. Our contemplation of the beauty of a statue representing a Centaur may indeed be disturbed by the reflexion that a creature with two sets of lungs and digestive organs would be a monster and not likely to grow to the age of having a beard. But this disturbing thought need not take place. And when it takes place it is not part of our contemplation of the aspect of that statue; it is, on the contrary, outside it, an excursion away from it due to our inveterate (and very necessary) habit of interrupting the contemplation of Aspects by the thinking and testing of Things. The Aspect never implied the existence of a Thing beyond itself; it did not affirm that anything was true, i.e. that anything could or would happen besides the fact of our contemplation. In other words the formula that beautiful is an adjective applying only to aspects, shows us that art can be truthful or untruthful only in so far as art (as is often the case) deliberately sets to making statements about the existence and nature of Things. If Art says "Centaurs can be born and grow up to man's estate with two sets of respiratory and digestive organs"—then Art is telling lies. Only, before accusing it of being a liar, better make sure that the statement about the possibility of centaurs has been intended by the Art, and not merely read into it by ourselves.

But more of this when we come to the examination of Subject and Form.

CHAPTER IV

SENSATIONS

IN the contemplation of the Aspect before him, what gave that aesthetic man the most immediate and undoubted pleasure was its colour, or, more correctly speaking, its colours. Psycho-Physiologists have not yet told us why colours, taken singly and apart from their juxtaposition, should possess so extraordinary a power over what used to be called our animal spirits, and through them over our moods; and we can only guess from analogy with what is observed in plants, as well as from the nature of the phenomenon itself, that various kinds of luminous stimulation must have some deep chemical repercussion throughout the human organism. The same applies, though in lesser degree, to sounds, quite independent of their juxtaposition as melodies and harmonies. As there are colours which feel, i.e. make us feel, more or less warm or cool, colours which are refreshing or stifling, depressing or exhilarating quite independent of any associations, so also there are qualities of sound which enliven us like the blare of the trumpet, or harrow us like the quaver of the accordion. Similarly with regard to immediacy of effect: the first chords of an organ will change our whole mode of being like the change of light and colour on first entering a church, although the music which that organ is playing may, after a few seconds of listening, bore us beyond endurance; and the architecture of that church, once we begin to take stock of it, entirely dispel that first impression made by the church's light and colour. It is on account of this doubtless physiological power of colour and sound, this way which they have of invading and subjugating us with or without our consent and long before our conscious co-operation, that the Man-on-the-Hill's pleasure in the aspect before him was, as I have said, first of all, pleasure in colour. Also, because pleasure in colour, like pleasure in mere sound-quality or timbre, is accessible to people who never go any further in their aesthetic preference. Children, as every one knows, are sensitive to colours, long before they show the faintest sensitiveness for shapes. And the timbre of a perfect voice in a single long note or shake used to bring the house down in the days of our grandparents, just as the subtle orchestral blendings of Wagner entrance hearers incapable of distinguishing the notes of a chord and sometimes even incapable of following a modulation.

The Man on the Hill, therefore, received immediate pleasure from the colours of the landscape. Received pleasure, rather than took it, since colours, like smells, seem, as I have said, to invade us, and insist upon pleasing whether we want to be pleased or not. In this meaning of the word we may be said to be passive to sound and colour quality: our share in the effects of these sensations, as in the effect of agreeable temperatures, contacts and tastes, is a question of bodily and mental reflexes in which our conscious activity, our voluntary attention, play no part: we are not doing, but done to by those stimulations from without; and the pleasure or displeasure which they set up in us is therefore one which we receive, as distinguished from one which we take.

Before passing on to the pleasure which the Man on the Hill did take, as distinguished from thus passively receiving, from the aspect before him, before investigating into the activities to which this other kind of pleasure, pleasure taken, not received, is due, we must dwell a little longer on the colours which delighted him, and upon the importance or unimportance of those colours with regard to that Aspect he was contemplating.

These colours—particularly a certain rain-washed blue, a pale lilac and a faded russet—gave him, as I said, immediate and massive pleasure like that of certain delicious tastes and smells, indeed anyone who had watched him attentively might have noticed that he was making rather the same face as a person rolling, as Meredith says, a fine vintage against his palate, or drawing in deeper draughts of exquisitely scented air; he himself, if not too engaged in looking, might have noticed the accompanying sensations in his mouth, throat and nostrils; all of which, his only active response to the colour, was merely the attempt to receive more of the already received sensation. But this pleasure which he received from the mere colours of the landscape was the same pleasure which they would have given him if he had met them in so many skeins of silk; the more complex pleasure due to their juxtaposition, was the pleasure he might have had if those skeins, instead of being on separate leaves of a pattern-book, had been lying tangled together in an untidy work-basket. He might then probably have said, "Those are exactly the colours, and in much the same combination, as in that landscape we saw such and such a day, at such and such a season and hour, from the top of that hill." But he would never have said (or been crazy if he had) "Those skeins of silk are the landscape we saw in that particular place and oh that particular occasion." Now the odd thing is that he would have used that precise form of words, "that is the landscape," etc. etc., if you had shown him a pencil drawing or a photograph taken from that