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

Literature deals with words, and words exist only by virtue of their meanings. Even the sound of words is of importance primarily for the additional meanings which it suggests, as the word liquid first means a fluid substance, and then by its sound suggests ease and smoothness, and only last of all is noted as melodious. Thus since meanings, ideas, are the material of literature, we can speak of the beauty of ideas in literature only by an artificial sundering of elements that are properly in fusion. Yet as we may speak of a motive or musical idea and its working out, although strictly the idea involves its own working out, so we may conceive of the central thought of a literary work, and of its development. But the relation here is not of content and form, like the content and form of a picture; rather that of concentrated and diluted form. So, too, as in music, we may distinguish form and structure. Structure is offered to the intellect—it clears and vivifies understanding; it is not felt, it is perceived.

Anything which is made up of parts—beginning, middle, and end, climax and resolution—possesses structure. But form in the intimate sense is the intrinsic, inevitable relation of cause and effect; in this sense, it is seen to be truly content also.

In literature, as to structure, it is the relation of parts: as to form, it is the succession of events, the movement, combination and resolution of separate ideas and emotions, which give us aesthetic pleasure or the reverse. As action must follow excitement, or despair satiety, so the relation of parts, the order of presentation, must be adapted to mutual reinforcement. Thus the porter’s scene in “Macbeth” is related to the neighboring scenes, as De Quincey has shown in his famous essay. And just as in music the feeling of “rightness” ensues when the awaited note slips into place, so the feeling of “rightness” comes when the inevitable consequences follow the premise of a plot.

The particular separate ideas of such a development partake of beauty, then, in so far as they minister to the movement of the whole, just as the separate lines in a swaying, swirling robe of one of Botticelli’s women minister to the whole conception.

The catastrophe, in other words, must be as inevitably related to the sequence of ideas as the final chords of a symphony to the sequence of notes. The attitude of mind with which we welcome it is the same, whether on the plane of the responses of the psychological organism or of the ideal understanding.

But before finally relegating the idea to its place in the aesthetic scheme, we must ask whether the specific emotional content can claim independent aesthetic value; for we can scarcely ignore the fact that almost all naive response to literature, and indeed to all forms of art, is, or is believed to be, specifically emotional. Maupassant, in his introduction to “Pierre et Jean,” distinguishes thus between the demand of the critic—“Make me something fine according to your temperament,”

—and the cry of the public—“Move me, terrify me, make we weep!”

And yet to the assertion of common sense that the desire of the naive enjoyer of art is definite emotional excitement, we may venture to oppose a negative. The average person who weeps at the theatre, or over a novel, would no doubt repudiate the suggestion that it is not primarily the emotion of terror, or pity, that he feels. But a closer interpretation shows that it is almost impossible to disengage, in such an experience, the particular emotions. What is felt is rather pleasurable excitement, pleasure raised to the pitch of exaltation, with a fringe of emotional association. The notion of specific emotions is illusory in the same sense that our notion of pleasure from specific emotions in listening to music is illusory. The ordinary descriptions of music are all couched in emotional or even ideational terms,—from the musical adventures of “Charles Auchester” down,—and yet we know, as Gurney says, that when, in listening to music, we think we are yearning after the unutterable, we are really yearning after the next note; and when we think it is the yearning that gives us pleasure, it is really the triumphant acceptance of the melodic rightness of that next note. So the much-discussed Katharsis, or emotion of Tragedy, is not the experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but rather pleasure in the experience of ideas, tinged with emotion, which belong to each other with precisely that musical rightness.

Katharsis is indeed not the mark of Tragedy alone, although in Tragedy it has a very great relative intensity; it is ultimately only a designation for the specific aesthetic pleasure, to which I can give no better name than the oft-repeated one of triumphant acquiescence in the rightness of relations. We think we feel a situation directly, but what we really feel is pleasure in the rightness of the manner of the event, and in the moment of perfect experience it gives us. Such specific emotion as may be detected in any aesthetic experience is, then, covered by the definition of beauty only in so far as it has become form rather than content, —is valuable only in its relations rather than in itself. The experience of pity or fear, even though generalized, unselfish, etc.,—after the various formulas of the expounders of dramatic emotion,—does not impart aesthetic character of itself; it becomes aesthetic only if it appears at such a point in the tragedy, linked in such a way to the developing plot, that it belongs to the unified and reciprocally harmonious circle of experiences.

But we have up to this time consistently neglected the central idea of the work of art, and its claim to be included in the aesthetic formula. We have defined beauty as that which brings about a state of harmonious completeness, of repose in activity, in the psychophysical and psychological realms. This harmonious repose can exist only with a disinterested attitude toward the objects which have brought this state about. Whether the Melian Venus or “Hamlet” or “Lohengrin” live, we care not; only that if they live, it shall be SO. In this sense, our attitude is interested, our will is active, but only toward the existence of the form. But with the introduction of the central theme, we cease to be disinterested,—our hypothetical is changed to an affirmative. The moral idea we must accept or reject, for it bears a direct relation to our personality. We will, or do not will, that, in the real world in which we ourselves have to live and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,—that there shall be the beauty of health, as in the “Discobolus;” material love which is divine, as in the “Sistine Madonna;” that war shall be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over love, as in “The Statue and the Bust;” that defiance of the social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in “Anna Karenina.” The person or the combination of events expressing this idea we do not seek in our personal experience, but we do demand for our own a world in which this idea rules. Thus it must be admitted that there is, strictly speaking, at the core of every aesthetic response to a work of art containing an idea, a non-aesthetic element, an element of personal and interested judgment.

On the other hand, this affirmation or acceptance of a moral idea implies the quietude of the will; just that state of harmony, of repose, which we have found to be the mark of the aesthetic on the lower planes of being. In so far, then, as we accept the moral idea which a work of art presents, in so far that idea has the power of bringing us to the state of harmony, and in so far it is beautiful. And vice versa, works of art which leave us in a state of moral rebellion are unbeautiful, not because they are immoral, but because they are disturbing to the moral sense.

Literature which ignores the fundamental moral principle of the freedom of the will, like the works of Flaubert, Maupassant, much of Zola, Loti, and Thomas Hardy, fails of beauty, inasmuch as it fails of the perfect reposeful harmony of human nature in its entirety.

Thus a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the aesthetic experience in its simplest and most sensuous form has given us a principle,—the principle of unity in harmonious functioning,—

which has enabled us to follow the track of beauty into the more complex realms of ideas and of moral attitudes, and to discover that there also the law of internal relation and of fitness for imitative response holds for all embodiments of beauty. That harmonious, imitative response, the psychophysical state known on its feeling side as aesthetic pleasure, we have seen to be, first, a kind of physiological equilibrium, a “coexistence of opposing impulses which heightens the sense of being while it prevents action,” like the impulses to movement corresponding to geometrical symmetry; secondly, a psychological equilibrium, in which the flow of ideas and impulses is a circle rounding upon itself, all associations, emotions, expectations indissolubly linked with the central thought and leading back only to it, and proceeding in an irrevocable order, which it yet adapted to the possibilities of human experience; and thirdly, a quietude of the will, in the acceptance of the given moral attitude for the whole scheme of life. Thus is given, in the fusion of these three orders of mental life, the perfect moment of unity and self-completeness.

End of Project Gutenberg Etext The Psychology of Beauty, by Ethel D. Puffer