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

particular place and point of view. And similarly if you had made him look through stained glass which changed the pale blue, pale lilac and faded russet into emerald green and blood red. He would have exclaimed at the loss of those exquisite colours when you showed him the monochrome, and perhaps have sworn that all his pleasure was spoilt when you forced him to look through that atrocious glass. But he would have identified the aspect as the one he had seen before; just as even the least musical person would identify "God save the King" whether played with three sharps on the flute or with four flats on the trombone.

There is therefore in an Aspect something over and above the quality of the colours (or in a piece of music, of the sounds) in which that aspect is, at any particular moment, embodied for your senses; something which can be detached from the particular colours or sounds and re-embodied in other colours or sounds, existing meanwhile in a curious potential schematic condition in our memory. That something is Shape.

It is Shape which we contemplate; and it is only because they enter into shapes that colours and sounds, as distinguished from temperatures, textures, tastes and smells, can be said to be contemplated at all. Indeed if we apply to single isolated colour or sound-qualities (that blue or russet, or the mere timbre of a voice or an orchestra) the adjective beautiful while we express our liking for smells, tastes, temperatures and textures merely by the adjectives agreeable, delicious; this difference in our speech is doubtless due to the fact that colours or sounds are more often than not connected each with other colours or other sounds into a Shape and thereby become subject to contemplation more frequently than temperatures, textures, smells and tastes which cannot themselves be grouped into shapes, and are therefore objects of contemplation only when associated with colours and sounds, as for instance, the smell of burning weeds in a description of autumnal sights, or the cool wetness of a grotto in the perception of its darkness and its murmur of waters.

On dismissing the practical and the scientific man because they were thinking away from aspects to things, I attempted to inventory the aspect in whose contemplation their aesthetic companion had remained absorbed. There were the colours, that delicious recently-washed blue, that lilac and russet, which gave the man his immediate shock of passive and (as much as smell and taste) bodily pleasure. But besides these my inventory contained another kind of item: what I described as a fan-like arrangement of sharply convergent lines and an exquisitely phrased sky-line of hills, picked up at rhythmical intervals into sharp crests and dropping down merely to rush up again in long rapid concave curves. And besides all this, there was the outline of a distant mountain, rising flamelike against the sky. It was all these items made up of lines (skyline, outline, and lines of perspective!) which remained unchanged when the colours were utterly changed by looking through stained glass, and unchanged also when the colouring was reduced to the barest monochrome of a photograph or a pencil drawing; nay remained the same despite all changes of scale in that almost colourless presentment of them. Those items of the aspect were, as we all know, Shapes. And with altered colours, and colours diminished to just enough for each line to detach itself from its ground, those Shapes could be contemplated and called beautiful.

CHAPTER V

PERCEPTION OF RELATIONS

WHY should this be the case? Briefly, because colours (and sounds) as such are forced upon us by external stimulation of our organs of sight and hearing, neither more nor less than various temperatures, textures, tastes and smells are forced upon us from without through the nervous and cerebral mechanism connected with our skin, muscle, palate and nose. Whereas shapes instead of being thus nilly willy seen or heard, are, at least until we know them, looked at or listened to, that is to say taken in or grasped, by mental and bodily activities which meet, but may also refuse to meet, those sense stimulations. Moreover, because these mental and bodily activities, being our own, can be rehearsed in what we call our memory without the repetition of the sensory stimulations which originally started them, and even in the presence of different ones.

In terms of mental science, colour and sound, like temperature, texture, taste and smell, are sensations; while shape is, in the most complete sense, a perception. This distinction between sensation and perception is a technicality of psychology; but upon it rests the whole question why shapes can be contemplated and afford the satisfaction connected with the word beautiful, while colours and sounds, except as grouped or groupable into shapes, cannot. Moreover this distinction will prepare us for understanding the main fact of all psychological aesthetics: namely that the satisfaction or the dissatisfaction which we get from shapes is satisfaction or dissatisfaction in what are, directly or indirectly, activities of our own.

Etymologically and literally, perception means the act of grasping or taking in, and also the result of that action. But when we thus perceive a shape, what is it precisely that we grasp or take in? At first it might seem to be the sensations in which that form is embodied. But a moment's reflection will show that this cannot be the case, since the sensations are furnished us simply without our performing any act of perception, thrust on us from outside, and, unless our sensory apparatus and its correlated brain centre were out of order, received by us passively, nilly willy, the Man on the Hill being invaded by the sense of that blue, that lilac and that russet exactly as he might have been invaded by the smell of the hay in the fields below. No: what we grasp or take in thus actively are not the sensations themselves, but the relations between these sensations, and it is of these relations, more truly than of the sensations themselves, that a shape is, in the most literal sense, made up. And it is this making up of shapes, this grasping or taking in of their constituent relations, which is an active process on our part, and one which we can either perform or not perform. When, instead of merely seeing a colour, we look at a shape, our eye ceases to be merely passive to the action of the various light-waves, and becomes active, and active in a more or less complicated way; turning its differently sensitive portions to meet or avoid the stimulus, adjusting its focus like that of an opera glass, and like an opera glass, turning it to the right or left, higher or lower.

Moreover, except in dealing with very small surfaces, our eye moves about in our head and moves our head, and sometimes our whole body, along with it. An analogous active process undoubtedly distinguishes listening from mere hearing; and although psycho-physiology seems still at a loss for the precise adjustments of the inner ear corresponding to the minute adjustments of the eye, it is generally recognised that auditive attention is accompanied by adjustments of the vocal parts, or preparations for such adjustments, which account for the impression of following a sequence of notes as we follow the appearance of colours and light, but as we do not follow, in the sense of connecting by our activity, consecutive sensations of taste or smell. Besides such obvious or presumable bodily activities requisite for looking and listening as distinguished from mere seeing and hearing, there is moreover in all perception of shape, as in all grasping of meaning, a mental activity involving what are called attention and memory. A primer of aesthetics is no place for expounding any of the various psychological definitions of either of these, let us call them, faculties. Besides I should prefer that these pages deal only with such mental facts as can be found in the Reader's everyday (however unnoticed) experience, instead of requiring for their detection the artificial conditions of specialised introspection or laboratory experiment. So I shall give to those much fought over words attention and memory merely the rough and ready meaning with which we are familiar in everyday language, and only beg the Reader to notice that, whatever psychologists may eventually prove or disprove attention and memory to be, these two, let us unscientifically call them faculties, are what chiefly distinguishes perception from sensation. For instance, in grasping or taking stock of a visible or an audible shape we are doing something with our attention, or our attention is doing something in us: a travelling about, a returning to starting points, a summing up. And a travelling about not merely between what is given simultaneously in the present, but, even more, between what has been given in an immediately proximate past, and what we expect to be given in an immediately proximate future; both of which, the past which is put behind us as past, and the past which is projected forwards as future, necessitate the activity of memory. There is an adjustment of our feelings as well as our muscles not merely to the present sensation, but to the future one, and a buzz of continuing adjustment to the past. There is a holding over and a holding on, a reacting backwards and forwards of our attention, and quite a little drama of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment, or as psychologists call them, of tensions and relaxations. And this little drama involved in all looking or listening, particularly in all taking stock of visible or audible (and I may add intellectual or verbal) shape, has its appropriate accompaniment of emotional changes: the ease or difficulty of understanding producing feelings of victory or defeat which we shall deal with later. And although the various perceptive activities remain unnoticed in themselves (so long as easy and uninterrupted), we become aware of a lapse, a gap, whenever our mind's eye (if not our bodily one!) neglects to sweep from side to side of a geometrical figure, or from centre to circumference, or again whenever our mind's ear omits following from some particular note to another, just as when we fall asleep for a second during a lecture or sermon: we have, in common parlance, missed the hang of some detail or passage. What we have missed, in that lapse of attention, is a relation, the length and direction of a line, or the span of a musical interval, or, in the case of words, the references of noun and verb, the co-ordination of tenses of a verb. And it is such relations, more or less intricate and hierarchic, which transform what would otherwise be meaningless juxtapositions or sequences of sensations into the significant entities which can be remembered and recognised even when their constituent sensations are completely altered, namely shapes. To our previous formula that beautiful denotes satisfaction in contemplating an aspect, we can now add that an aspect consists of sensations grouped together into relations by our active, our remembering and foreseeing, perception.

CHAPTER VI

ELEMENTS OF SHAPE

LET us now examine some of these relations, not in the genealogical or hierarchic order assigned to them by experimental psychology, but in so far as they constitute the elements of shape, and more especially as they illustrate the general principle which I want to impress on the Reader, namely: That the perception of Shape depends primarily upon movements which we make, and the measurements and comparisons which we institute.

And first we must examine mere extension as such, which distinguishes our active dealings with visual and audible sensations from our passive reception of the sensations of taste and smell. For while in the case of the latter a succession of similar stimulations affects us as "more taste of strawberry" or "more smell of rose" when intermittent, or as a vague "there is a strong or faint taste of strawberry" and a "there is