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The Principles of Aesthetics

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Title: The Principles of Aesthetics

Author: De Witt H. Parker


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6366]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS ***




Produced by Scott Pfenninger, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS

BY

DEWITT H. PARKER

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN



PREFACE

This book has grown out of lectures to students at the University of
Michigan and embodies my effort to express to them the nature and
meaning of art. In writing it, I have sought to maintain scientific
accuracy, yet at the same time to preserve freedom of style and
something of the inspiration of the subject. While intended primarily
for students, the book will appeal generally, I hope, to people who
are interested in the intelligent appreciation of art.

My obligations are extensive,--most directly to those whom I have cited
in foot-notes to the text, but also to others whose influence is too
indirect or pervasive to make citation profitable, or too obvious to
make it necessary. For the broader philosophy of art, my debt is
heaviest, I believe, to the artists and philosophers during the period
from Herder to Hegel, who gave to the study its greatest development,
and, among contemporaries, to Croce and Lipps. In addition, I have
drawn freely upon the more special investigations of recent times, but
with the caution desirable in view of the very tentative character of
some of the results. To Mrs. Robert M. Wenley I wish to express my
thanks for her very careful and helpful reading of the page proof.

The appended bibliography is, of course, not intended to be in any
sense adequate, but is offered merely as a guide to further reading;
a complete bibliography would itself demand almost a volume.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER    I. Introduction: Purpose and Method

CHAPTER   II. The Definition of Art

CHAPTER  III. The Intrinsic Value of Art

CHAPTER   IV. The Analysis of the Aesthetic Experience: The Elements of
                the Experience

CHAPTER    V. The Analysis of the Aesthetic Experience: The Structure of
                the Experience

CHAPTER   VI. The Problem of Evil in Aesthetics, and Its Solution
through
                the Tragic, Pathetic, and Comic

CHAPTER  VII. The Standard of Taste

CHAPTER VIII. The Aesthetics of Music

CHAPTER   IX. The Aesthetics of Poetry

CHAPTER    X. Prose Literature

CHAPTER   XI. The Dominion of Art over Nature: Painting

CHAPTER  XII. The Dominion of Art over Nature: Sculpture

CHAPTER XIII. Beauty in the Industrial Arts: Architecture

CHAPTER  XIV. The Function of Art: Art and Morality

CHAPTER   XV. The Function of Art: Art and Religion

BIBLIOGRAPHY




THE PRINCIPLES OF AESTHETICS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: PURPOSE AND METHOD

Although some feeling for beauty is perhaps universal among men, the
same cannot be said of the understanding of beauty. The average man,
who may exercise considerable taste in personal adornment, in the
decoration of the home, or in the choice of poetry and painting, is
at a loss when called upon to tell what art is or to explain why he
calls one thing "beautiful" and another "ugly." Even the artist and
the connoisseur, skilled to produce or accurate in judgment, are often
wanting in clear and consistent ideas about their own works or
appreciations. Here, as elsewhere, we meet the contrast between feeling
and doing, on the one hand, and knowing, on the other. Just as practical
men are frequently unable to describe or justify their most successful
methods or undertakings, just as many people who astonish us with their
fineness and freedom in the art of living are strangely wanting in
clear thoughts about themselves and the life which they lead so
admirably, so in the world of beauty, the men who do and appreciate
are not always the ones who understand.

Very often, moreover, the artist and the art lover justify their
inability to understand beauty on the ground that beauty is too subtle
a thing for thought. How, they say, can one hope to distill into clear
and stable ideas such a vaporous and fleeting matter as Aesthetic
feeling? Such men are not only unable to think about beauty, but
skeptical as to the possibility of doing so,--contented mystics, deeply
feeling, but dumb.

However, there have always been artists and connoisseurs who have
striven to reflect upon their appreciations and acts, unhappy until
they have understood and justified what they were doing; and one meets
with numerous art-loving people whose intellectual curiosity is rather
quickened than put to sleep by just that element of elusiveness in
beauty upon which the mystics dwell. Long acquaintance with any class
of objects leads naturally to the formation of some definition or
general idea of them, and the repeated performance of the same type
of act impels to the search for a principle that can be communicated
to other people in justification of what one is doing and in defense
of the value which one attaches to it. Thoughtful people cannot long
avoid trying to formulate the relation of their interest in beauty,
which absorbs so much energy and devotion, to other human interests,
to fix its place in the scheme of life. It would be surprising,
therefore, if there had been no Shelleys or Sidneys to define the
relation between poetry and science, or Tolstoys to speculate on the
nature of all art; and we should wonder if we did not everywhere hear
intelligent people discussing the relation of utility and goodness to
beauty, or asking what makes a poem or a picture great.

Now the science of aesthetics is an attempt to do in a systematic way
what thoughtful art lovers have thus always been doing haphazardly.
It is an effort to obtain a clear general idea of beautiful objects,
our judgments upon them, and the motives underlying the acts which
create them,--to raise the aesthetic life, otherwise a matter of
instinct and feeling, to the level of intelligence, of understanding.
To understand art means to find an idea or definition which applies
to it and to no other activity, and at the same time to determine its
relation to other elements of human nature; and our understanding will
be complete if our idea includes all the distinguishing characteristics
of art, not simply enumerated, but exhibited in their achieved
relations.

How shall we proceed in seeking such an idea of art? We must follow
a twofold method: first, the ordinary scientific method of observation,
analysis, and experiment; and second, another and very different method,
which people of the present day often profess to avoid, but which is
equally necessary, as I shall try to show, and actually employed by
those who reject it. In following the first method we treat beautiful
things as objects given to us for study, much as plants and animals
are given to the biologist. Just as the biologist watches the behavior
of his specimens, analyzes them into their various parts and functions,
and controls his studies through carefully devised experiments, arriving
at last at a clear notion of what a plant or an animal is--at a
definition of life; so the student of aesthetics observes works of art
and other well-recognized beautiful things, analyzes their elements
and the forms of connection of these, arranges experiments to facilitate
and guard his observations from error and, as a result, reaches the
general idea for which he is looking,--the idea of beauty.

A vast material presents itself for study of this kind: the artistic
attempts of children and primitive men; the well-developed art of
civilized nations, past and present, as creative process and as
completed work; and finally, the everyday aesthetic appreciations of
nature and human life, both by ourselves and by the people whom we
seek out for study. Each kind of material has its special value. The
first has the advantage of the perspicuity which comes from simplicity,
similar for our purposes to the value of the rudimentary forms of life
for the biologist. But this advantage of early art may be overestimated;
for the nature of beauty is better revealed in its maturer
manifestations, even as the purposes of an individual are more fully,
if not more clearly, embodied in maturity than in youth or childhood.

Yet a purely objective method will not suffice to give us an adequate
idea of beauty. For beautiful things are created by men, not passively
discovered, and are made, like other things which men make, in order
to realize a purpose. Just as a saw is a good saw only when it fulfills
the purpose of cutting wood, so works of art are beautiful only because
they embody a certain purpose. The beautiful things which we study by
the objective method are selected by us from among countless other
objects and called beautiful because they have a value for us, without
a feeling for which we should not know them to be beautiful at all.
They are not, like sun and moon, independent of mind and will and
capable of being understood in complete isolation from man. No world
of beauty exists apart from a purpose that finds realization there.
We are, to be sure, not always aware of the existence of this purpose
when we enjoy a picture or a poem or a bit of landscape; yet it is
present none the less. The child is equally unaware of the purpose of
the food which pleases him, yet the purpose is the ground of his
pleasure; and we can understand his hunger only through a knowledge
of it.

The dependence of beauty upon a relation to purpose is clear from the
fact that in our feelings and judgments about art we not only change
and disagree, but correct ourselves and each other. The history of
taste, both in the individual and the race, is not a mere process, but
a progress, an evolution. "We were wrong in calling that poem
beautiful," we say; "you are mistaken in thinking that picture a good
one"; "the eighteenth century held a false view of the nature of
poetry"; "the English Pre-Raphaelites confused the functions of poetry
and painting"; "to-day we understand what the truly pictorial is better
than Giotto did"; and so on. Now nothing can be of worth to us, one
thing cannot be better than another, nor can we be mistaken as to its
value except with reference to some purpose which it fulfills or does
not fulfill. There is no growth or evolution apart from a purpose in
terms of which we can read the direction of change as forward rather
than backward.

This purpose cannot be understood by the observation and analysis, no
matter how careful, of beautiful _things_; for it exists in the
mind primarily and only through mind becomes embodied in things; and
it cannot be understood by a mere inductive study of aesthetic
experiences--the mind plus the object--just as they come; because, as
we have just stated, they are changeful and subject to correction,
therefore uncertain and often misleading. The aesthetic impulse may
falter and go astray like any other impulse; a description of it in
this condition would lead to a very false conception. No, we must
employ a different method of investigation--the Socratic method of
self-scrutiny, the conscious attempt to become clear and consistent
about our own purposes, the probing and straightening of our aesthetic
consciences. Instead of accepting our immediate feelings and judgments,
we should become critical towards them and ask ourselves, What do we
really seek in art and in life which, when found, we call beautiful?
Of course, in order to answer this question we cannot rely on an
examination of our own preferences in isolation from those of our
fellow-men. Here, as everywhere, our purposes are an outgrowth of the
inherited past and are developed in imitation of, or in rivalry with,
those of other men. The problem is one of interpreting the meaning of
art in the system of culture of which our own minds are a part.
Nevertheless, the personal problem remains. Aesthetic value is
emphatically personal; it must be felt as one's own. If I accept the
standards of my race and age, I do so because I find them to be an
expression of my own aesthetic will. In the end, my own will to beauty
must be cleared up; its darkly functioning goals must be brought to
light.

Now, unless we have thought much about the matter or are gifted with
unusual native taste, we shall find that our aesthetic intentions are
confused, contradictory, and entangled with other purposes. To become
aware of this is the first step towards enlightenment. We must try to
distinguish what we want of art from what we want of other things,
such as science or morality; for something unique we must desire from
anything of permanent value in our life. In the next place we should
come to see that we cannot want incompatible things; that, for example,
we cannot want art to hold the mirror up to life and, at the same time,
to represent life as conforming to our private prejudices; or want a
picture to have expressive and harmonious colors and look exactly like
a real landscape; or long for a poetry that would be music or a
sculpture that would be pictorial. Finally, we must make sure that our
interpretation of the aesthetic purpose is representative of the actual
fullness and manysidedness of it; we should observe, for example, that
sensuous pleasure is not all that we seek from art; that truth of some
kind we seek besides; and yet that in some sort of union we want both.

This clearing up can be accomplished only in closest touch with the
actual experience of beauty; it must be performed upon our working
preferences and judgments. It must be an interpretation of the actual
history of art. There is no a priori method of establishing aesthetic
standards. Just as no one can discover his life purpose apart from the
process of living, or the purpose of another except through sympathy;
so no one can know the meaning of art except through creating and
enjoying and entering into the aesthetic life of other artists and art
lovers.

This so-called normative--perhaps better, critical--moment in aesthetics
introduces an inevitable personal element into every discussion of the
subject. Even as every artist seeks to convince his public that what
he offers is beautiful, so every philosopher of art undertakes to
persuade of the validity of his own preferences. I would not make any
secret of this with regard to the following pages of this book. Yet
this intrusion of personality need not be harmful, but may, on the
contrary, be valuable. It cannot be harmful if the writer proceeds
undogmatically, making constant appeals to the judgment of his readers
and claiming no authority for his statements except in so far as they
find favor there. Influence rather than authority is what he should
seek. In presenting his views, as he must, he should strive to stimulate
the reader to make a clear and consistent formulation of his own
preferences rather than to impose upon him standards ready made. And
the good of the personal element comes from the power which one strong
preference or conviction has of calling forth another, and compelling
it to the discovery and defense of its grounds.

In so far as aesthetics is studied by the objective method it is a
branch of psychology. Aesthetic facts are mental facts. A work of art,
no matter how material it may at first seem to be, exists only as
perceived and enjoyed. The marble statue is beautiful only when it
enters into and becomes alive in the experience of the beholder. Keys
and strings and vibrations of the air are but stimuli for the auditory
experience which is the real nocturne or etude. Ether vibrations and
the retina upon which they impinge are nothing more than instruments
for the production of the colors which, together with the interpretation
of them in terms of ideas and feelings, constitute the real picture
which we appreciate and judge. The physical stimuli and the
physiological reactions evoked by them are important for our purpose
only so far as they help us to understand the inner experiences with
which they are correlated. A large part of our work, therefore, will
consist in the psychological analysis of the experience of art and the
motives underlying its production. We shall have to distinguish the
elements of mind that enter into it, show their interrelations, and
differentiate the total experience from other types of experience.
Since, moreover, art is a social phenomenon, we shall have to draw
upon our knowledge of social psychology to illumine our analysis of
the individual's experience. Art is a historical, even a technical,
development; hence the personal enjoyment of beauty itself is
conditioned by factors that spring from the traditions of groups of
artists and art lovers. No one can understand his pleasure in beauty
apart from the pleasure of others.

In so far, on the other hand, as aesthetics is an attempt to define
the purpose of art and so to formulate the standards presupposed in
judgments of taste, it is closely related to criticism. The relation
is essentially that between theory and the application of theory. It
is the office of the critic to deepen and diffuse the appreciation of
particular works of art. For this purpose he must possess standards;
but he need not be, and in fact often is not, aware of them. A fine
taste may serve his ends. Not infrequently, however, the critic
endeavors to make clear to himself and his readers the principles he
is employing. Now, on its normative side, aesthetics is ideally the
complete rationale of criticism, the systematic achievement, for its
own sake, of what the thoughtful critic attempts with less exactness
and for the direct purpose of appreciation. It is beyond the province
of aesthetics to criticize any particular work of art, except by way
of illustration. The importance of illustration for the sake of
explaining and proving general principles is, however, fundamental;
for, as we have seen, a valuable aesthetic theory is impossible unless
developed out of the primary aesthetic life of enjoyment and estimation,
a life of contact with individual beautiful things. No amount of
psychological skill in analysis or philosophical aptitude for definition
can compensate for want of a real love of beauty,--of the possession
of something of the artistic temperament. People who do not love art,
yet study it from the outside, may contribute to our knowledge of it
through isolated bits of analysis, but their interpretations of its
more fundamental nature are always superficial. Hence, just as the
wise critic will not neglect aesthetics, so the philosopher of art
should be something of a critic. Yet the division of labor is clear
enough. The critic devotes himself to the appreciation of some special
contemporary or historical field of art--Shakespearean drama,
Renaissance sculpture, Italian painting, for example; while the
philosopher of art looks for general principles, and gives attention
to individual works of art and historical movements only for the purpose
of discovering and illustrating them. And, since the philosopher of
art seeks a universal idea of art rather than an understanding of this
or that particular work of art, an intimate acquaintance with a few
examples, through which this idea can be revealed to the loving eye,
is of more importance than a wide but superficial aesthetic culture.

In our discussion thus far, we have been assuming the possibility of
aesthetic theory. But what shall we say in answer to the mystic who
tells us that beauty is indefinable? First of all, I think, we should
remind him that his own thesis can be proved or refuted only through
an attempt at a scientific investigation of beauty. Every attempt to
master our experience through thought is an adventure; but the futility
of adventures can be shown only by courageously entering into them.
And, although the failure of previous efforts may lessen the
probabilities of success in a new enterprise, it cannot prove that
success is absolutely impossible. Through greater persistence and
better methods the new may succeed where the old have failed. Moreover,
although we are ready to grant that the pathway to our goal is full
of pitfalls, marked by the wreckage of old theories, yet we claim that
the skeptic or the mystic can know of their existence only by traveling
over the pathway himself; for in the world of the inner life nothing
can be known by hearsay. If, then, he would really know that the road
to theoretical insight into beauty is impassable, let him travel with
us and see; or, if not with us, alone by himself or with some one wiser
than we as guide; let him compare fairly and sympathetically the results
of theoretical analysis and construction with the data of his firsthand
experience and observe whether the one is or is not adequate to the
other.

Again, the cleft between thought and feeling, even subtle and fleeting
aesthetic feeling, is not so great as the mystics suppose. For, after
all, there is a recognizable identity and permanence even in these
feelings; we should never call them by a common name or greet them as
the same despite their shiftings from moment to moment if this were
not true. Although whatever is unique in each individual experience
of beauty, its distinctive flavor or nuance, cannot be adequately
rendered in thought, but can only be felt; yet whatever each new
experience has in common with the old, whatever is universal in all
aesthetic experiences, can be formulated. The relations of beauty,
too, its place in the whole of life, can be discovered by thought
alone; for only by thought can we hold on to the various things whose
relations we are seeking to establish; without thought our experience
falls asunder into separate bits and never attains to unity. Finally,
the mystics forget that the life of thought and the life of feeling
have a common root; they are both parts of the one life of the mind
and so cannot be foreign to each other.

The motive impelling to any kind of undertaking is usually complex,
and that which leads to the development of aesthetic theory is no
exception to the general rule. A disinterested love of understanding
has certainly played a part. Every region of experience invites to the
play of intelligence upon it; the lover of knowledge, as Plato says,
loves the whole of his object. Yet even intelligence, insatiable and
impartial as it is, has its predilections. The desire to understand
a particular type of thing has its roots in an initial love of it. As
the born botanist is the man who finds joy in contact with tree and
moss and mushroom, so the student of aesthetics is commonly a lover
of beauty. And, although the interest which he takes in aesthetic
theory is largely just the pleasure in possessing clear ideas, one may
question whether he would pursue it with such ardor except for the
continual lover's touch with picture and statue and poem which it
demands. For the intelligent lover of beauty, aesthetic theory requires
no justification; it is as necessary and pleasurable for him to
understand art as it is compulsive for him to seek out beautiful things
to enjoy. To love without understanding is, to the thoughtful lover,
an infidelity to his object. That the interest in aesthetic theory is
partly rooted in feeling is shown from the fact that, when developed
by artists, it takes the form of a defense of the type of art which
they are producing. The aesthetic theory of the German Romanticists
is an illustration of this; Hebbel and Wagner are other striking
examples. These men could not rest until they had put into communicable
and persuasive form the aesthetic values which they felt in creation.
And we, too, who are not artists but only lovers of beauty, find in
theory a satisfaction for a similar need with reference to our
preferences.[Footnote: Compare Santayana: The Sense of Beauty, p. 11.]

More important to the average man is the help which aesthetic theory
may render to appreciation itself. If to the basal interest in beauty
be added an interest in understanding beauty, the former is quickened
and fortified and the total measure of enjoyment increased. Even the
love of beauty, strong as it commonly is, may well find support through
connection with an equally powerful and enduring affection. The
aesthetic interest is no exception to the general truth that each part
of the mind gains in stability and intensity if connected with the
others; isolated, it runs the risk of gradual decay in satiety or
through the crowding out of other competing interests, which if joined
with it, would have kept it alive instead. Moreover, the understanding
of art may increase the appreciation of particular works of art. For
the analysis and constant attention to the subtler details demanded
by theory may bring to notice aspects of a work of art which do not
exist for an unthinking appreciation. As a rule, the appreciations of
the average man are very inadequate to the total possibilities offered,
extending only to the more obvious features. Often enough besides,
through a mere lack of understanding of the purpose of art in general
and of the more special aims of the particular arts, people expect to
find what cannot be given, and hence are prejudiced against what they
might otherwise enjoy. The following pages will afford, I hope, abundant
illustrations of this truth.

Finally, aesthetic theory may have a favorable influence upon the
creation of art. Not that the student of aesthetics can prescribe to
the artist what he shall or shall not do; for the latter can obey, for
better or worse, only the inner imperative of his native genius. Yet,
inevitably, the man of genius receives direction and cultivation from
the aesthetic sentiment of the time into which he is born and grown;
even when he reacts against it, he nevertheless feels its influence;
a sound conception of the nature and purpose of art may save him from
many mistakes. The French classical tradition in sculpture and painting,
which is not merely academic, having become a part of public taste,
prevented the production of the frightful crudities which passed for
art in Germany and England during the present and past centuries. By
helping to create a freer and more intelligent atmosphere for the
artist to be born and educated in, and finer demands upon him when
once he has begun to produce and is seeking recognition, the student
of aesthetics may indirectly do not a little for him. And surely in our
own country, where an educated public taste does not exist and the
fiercest prejudices are rampant, there is abundant opportunity for
service.




CHAPTER II

DEFINITION OF ART


Since it is our purpose to develop an adequate idea of art, it might
seem as if a definition were rather our goal than our starting point;
yet we must identify the field of our investigations and mark it off
from other regions; and this we can do only by means of a preliminary
definition, which the rest of our study may then enrich and complete.

We shall find it fruitful to begin with the definition recently revived
by Croce: [Footnote: Benedetto Croce: _Estetica_, translated into
English by Douglas Ainslie, under title _Aesthetic_, chap. i.] art
is expression; and expression we may describe, for our own ends, as
the putting forth of purpose, feeling, or thought into a sensuous
medium, where they can be experienced again by the one who expresses
himself and communicated to others. Thus, in this sense, a lyric poem
is an expression--a bit of a poet's intimate experience put into words;
epic and dramatic poetry are expressions--visions of a larger life
made manifest in the same medium. Pictures and statues are also
expressions; for they are embodiments in color and space-forms of the
artists' ideas of visible nature and man. Works of architecture and
the other industrial arts are embodiments of purpose and the well-being
that comes from purpose fulfilled.

This definition, good so far as it goes, is, however, too inclusive;
for plainly, although every work of art is an expression, not every
expression is a work of art. Automatic expressions, instinctive
overflowings of emotion into motor channels, like the cry of pain or
the shout of joy, are not aesthetic. Practical expressions also, all
such as are only means or instruments for the realization of ulterior
purposes--the command of the officer, the conversation of the market
place, a saw--are not aesthetic. Works of art--the _Ninth Symphony_, the
_Ode to the West Wind_--are not of this character.

No matter what further purposes artistic expressions may serve, they
are produced and valued for themselves; we linger in them; we neither
merely execute them mechanically, as we do automatic expressions, nor
hasten through them, our minds fixed upon some future end to be gained
by them, as is the case with practical expressions. Both for the artist
and the appreciator, they are ends in themselves. Compare, for example,
a love poem with a declaration of love.[Footnote: Contrast Croce's use
of the same illustration: Esthetic, p. 22, English translation.] The
poem is esteemed for the rhythmic emotional experience it gives the
writer or reader; the declaration, even when enjoyed by the suitor,
has its prime value in its consequences, and the quicker it is over
and done with and its end attained the better. The one, since it has
its purpose within itself, is returned to and repeated; the other,
being chiefly a means to an end, would be senseless if repeated, once
the end that called it forth is accomplished. The value of the love
poem, although written to persuade a lady, cannot be measured in terms
of its mere success; for if beautiful, it remains of worth after the
lady has yielded, nay, even if it fails to win her. Any sort of
practical purpose may be one motive in the creation of a work of art,
but its significance is broader than the success or failure of that
motive. The Russian novel is still significant, even now, alter the
revolution. As beautiful, it is of perennial worth and stands out by
itself. But practical expressions are only transient links in the
endless chain of means, disappearing as the wheel of effort revolves.
Art is indeed expression, but free or autonomous expression.

The freedom of aesthetic expression is, however, only an intensification
of a quality that may belong to any expression. For, in its native
character, expression is never merely practical; it brings its own
reward in the pleasure of the activity itself. Ordinarily, when a man
makes something embodying his need or fancy, or says something that
expresses his meaning, he enjoys himself in his doing. There is
naturally a generous superfluity in all human behavior. The economizing
of it to what is necessary for self-preservation and dominion over the
environment is secondary, not primary, imposed under the duress of
competition and nature. Only when activities are difficult or their
fruits hard to get are they disciplined for the sake of their results
alone; then only does their performance become an imperative, and
nature and society impose upon them the seriousness and constraint of
necessity and law. But whenever nature and the social organization
supply the needs of man ungrudgingly or grant him a respite from the
urgency of business, the spontaneity of his activities returns. The
doings of children, of the rich, and of all men on a holiday illustrate
this. Compare, for example, the speech of trade, where one says the
brief and needful thing only, with the talk of excursionists, where
verbal expression, having no end beyond itself, develops at length and
at leisure; where brevity is no virtue and abundant play takes the
place of a narrow seriousness.

But we have not yet so limited the field of expression that it becomes
equivalent to the aesthetic; for not even all of free expression is
art. The most important divergent type is science. Science also is
expression,--an embodiment in words, diagrams, mathematical symbols,
chemical formula, or other such media, of thoughts meant to portray
the objects of human experience. Scientific expressions have, of course,
a practical function; concepts are "plans of action" or servants of
plans, the most perfect and delicate that man possesses. Yet scientific
knowledge is an end in itself as well as a utility; for the mere
construction and possession of concepts and laws is itself a source
of joy; the man of science delights in making appropriate formulations
of nature's habits quite unconcerned about their possible uses.

In science, therefore, there is much free expression; but beauty not
yet. No abstract expression such as Euclid's _Elements_, Newton's
_Principia_, or Peano's _Formulaire_, no matter how rigorous and
complete, is a work of art. We admire the mathematician's formula
for its simplicity and adequacy; we take delight in its clarity and
scope, in the ease with which it enables the mind to master a thousand
more special truths, but we do not find it beautiful. Equally removed
from the sphere of the beautiful are representations or descriptions
of mere things, whether inaccurate or haphazard, as we make them in
daily life, or accurate and careful as they are elaborated in the
empirical sciences. No matter how exact and complete, the botanist's
or zoologist's descriptions of plant and animal life are not works of
art. They may be satisfactory as knowledge, but they are not beautiful.
There is an important difference between a poet's description of a
flower and a botanist's, or between an artistic sketch and a photograph,
conferring beauty upon the former, and withholding it from the latter.

The central difference is this. The former are descriptions not of
things only, but of the artist's reactions to things, his mood or
emotion in their presence. They are expressions of total, concrete
experiences, which include the self of the observer as well as the
things he observes. Scientific descriptions, on the other hand, render
objects only; the feelings of the observer toward them are carefully
excluded. Science is intentionally objective,--from the point of view
of the artistic temperament, dry and cold. Even the realistic novel
and play, while seeking to present a faithful picture of human life
and to eliminate all private comment and emotion, cannot dispense with
the elementary dramatic feelings of sympathy, suspense, and wonder.
sthetic expression is always integral, embodying a total state of
mind, the core of which is some feeling; scientific expression is
fragmentary or abstract, limiting itself to thought. Art, no less than
science, may contain truthful images of things and abstract ideas, but
never these alone; it always includes their life, their feeling tones,
or values. Because philosophy admits this element of personality, it
is nearer to art than science is. Yet some men of science, like James
and Huxley, have made literature out of science because they could not
help putting into their writings something of their passionate interest
in the things they discovered and described.

The, necessity in art for the expression of value is, I think, the
principal difference between art and science, rather than, as Croce
[Footnote: _Estetica_, quarta edizione, p.27; English translation.
p.36.] supposes, the limitation of art to the expression of the
individual and of Science to the expression of the concept. For, on
the one hand, science may express the individual; and, on the other
hand, art may express the concept. The geographer, for example,
describes and makes maps of particular regions of the earth's surface;
the astronomer studies the individual sun and moon. Poets like Dante,
Lucretius, Shakespeare, and Goethe express the most universal concepts
of ethics or metaphysics. But what makes men poets rather than men of
science is precisely that they never limit themselves to the mere clear
statement of the concept, but always express its human significance
as well. A theory of human destiny is expressed in Prospero's lines--

  We are such stuff
  As dreams are made of, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep;

but with overtones of feeling at the core. Or consider the passion
with which Lucretius argues for a naturalistic conception of the
universe. And the reason why poets clothe their philosophical
expressions in concrete images is not because of any shame of the
concept, but just in order the more easily and vividly to attach and
communicate their emotion. Their general preference for the concrete
has the same motive; for there are only a few abstractions capable of
arousing and fixing emotion.

Even as an element of spontaneity is native to all expression, so
originally all expression is personal. This is easily observable in
the child. His first uses of words as well as of things are touched
with emotion. Every descriptive name conveys to him his emotional
reaction to the object; disinterested knowledge does not exist for
him; every tool, a knife or a fork, means to him not only something
to be used, but the whole background of feelings which its use involves.
Our first perceptions of things contain as much of feeling and attitude
as of color and shape and sound and odor. Pure science and mere industry
are abstractions from the original integrity of perception and
expression; mutilations of their wholeness forced upon the mind through
the stress of living. To be able to see things without feeling them,
or to describe them without being moved by their image, is a disciplined
and derivative accomplishment. Only as the result of training and of
haste do the forms and colors of objects, once the stimuli to a
wondering and lingering attention, become mere cues to their recognition
and employment, or mere incitements to a cold and disinterested analysis
and description. Knowledge may therefore enter into beauty when, keeping
its liberality, it participates in an emotional experience; and every
other type of expression may become aesthetic if, retaining its native
spontaneity, it can acquire anew its old power to move the heart. To
be an artist means to be, like the child, free and sensitive in
envisaging the world.

Under these conditions, nature as well as art may be beautiful. In
themselves, things are never beautiful. This is not apparent to common
sense because it fails to think and analyze. But beauty may belong to
our _perceptions_ of things. For perception is itself a kind of
expression, a process of mind through which meanings are embodied in
sensations. Given are only sensations, but out of the mind come ideas
through which they are interpreted as objects. When, for example, I
perceive my friend, it may seem as if the man himself were a given
object which I passively receive; but, as a matter of fact, all that
is given are certain visual sensations; that these are my friend, is
pure interpretation--I construct the object in embodying this thought
in the color and shape I see. The elaboration of sensation in perception
is usually so rapid that, apart from reflection, I do not realize the
mental activity involved. But if it turns out that it was some other
man that I saw, then I realize at once that my perception was a work
of mind, an expression of my own thought. Of course, not all perceptions
are beautiful. Only as felt to be mysterious or tender or majestic is
a landscape beautiful; and women only as possessed of the charm we
feel in their presence. That is, perceptions are beautiful only when
they embody feelings. The sea, clouds and hills, men and women, as
perceived, awaken reactions which, instead of being attributed to the
mind from which they proceed, are experienced as belonging to the
things evoking them, which therefore come to embody them. And this
process of emotional and objectifying perception has clearly no other
end than just perception itself. We do not gaze upon a landscape or
a pretty child for any other purpose than to get the perceptual,
emotional values that result. The aesthetic perception of nature is,
as Kant called it, disinterested; that is, autonomous and free. The
beauty of nature, therefore, is an illustration of our definition.

On the same terms, life as remembered or observed or lived, may have
the quality of beauty. In reverie we turn our attention back over
events in our own lives that have had for us a rare emotional
significance; these events then come to embody the wonder, the interest,
the charm that excited us to recollect them. Here the activity of
remembering is not a mere habit set going by some train of accidental
association; or merely practical, arising for the sake of solving some
present problem by applying the lesson of the past to it; or finally,
not unpleasantly insistent, like the images aroused by worry and sorrow,
but spontaneous and self-rewarding, hence beautiful. There are also
events in the lives of other people, and people themselves, whose lives
read like a story, which, by absorbing our pity or joy or awe, claim
from us a like fascinated regard. And there are actions we ourselves
perform, magnificent or humble, like sweeping a room, which, if we put
ourselves into them and enjoy them, have an equal charm. And they too
have the quality of beauty.

Despite the community between beautiful nature and art, the differences
are striking. Suppose, in order fix our ideas, we compare one of Monet's
pictures of a lily pond with the aesthetic appreciation of the real
pond. The pond is undoubtedly beautiful every time it is seen; with
its round outline, its sunlit, flower-covered surface, its background
of foliage, it is perhaps the source and expression of an unfailing
gladness and repose. Now the painting has very much the same value,
but with these essential differences. First, the painting is something
deliberately constructed and composed, the artist himself controlling
and composing the colors and shapes, and hence their values also; while
the natural beauty is an immediate reaction to given stimuli, each
observer giving meaning to his sensations without intention or effort.
Like the beauty of woman, it is almost a matter of instinct. In natural
beauty, there is, to be sure, an element of conscious intention, in
so far as we may purposely select our point of view and hold the object
in our attention; hence this contrast with art, although real and
important, is not absolute. Moreover, beauty in perception and memory
is the basis of art; the artist, while he composes, nevertheless partly
transcribes significant memories and observations. Yet, although
relative, the difference remains; art always consists of works of art,
natural beauty of more immediate experiences. And from this difference
follows another--the greater purity and perfection of art. The control
which the artist exerts over his material enables him to make it
expressive all through; every element conspires toward the artistic
end; there are no irrelevant or recalcitrant parts, such as exist in
every perception of nature. Last, the beauty of the painting, because
created in the beholder through a fixed and permaneat mechanism
constructed by the artist, is communicable and abiding, whereas the
immediate beauty of nature is incommunicable and transient. Since the
sthetic perception of nature has its starting point in variable aspects
that never recur, no other man could see or feel the lily pond as Monet
saw and felt it. And, although in memory we may possess a silent gallery
of beautiful images, into which we may enter privately as long as we
live, in the end the flux has its way and at death shatters this
treasure house irrevocably. Hence, only if the beauty of the lily pond
is transferred to a canvas, can it be preserved and shared.

The work of art is the tool of the aesthetic life. Just as organic
efficiency is tied to the nerve and muscle of the workman and cannot
be transferred to another, but the tool, on the other hand, is
exchangeable and transmissible (I cannot lend or bequeath my arm, but
I can my boat); and just as efficiency is vastly increased by the use
of tools (I can go further with my boat than I can swim); so, through
works of art, aesthetic capacity and experience are enhanced and become
common possessions, a part of the spiritual capital of the race.
Moreover, even as each invention becomes the starting point for new
ones that are better instruments for practical ends; so each work of
art becomes the basis for new experiments through which the aesthetic
expression of life attains to higher levels. Monet's own art, despite
its great originality, was dependent upon all the impressionists, and
they, even when they broke away from, were indebted to, the traditions
of French painting established by centuries. Through art, the aesthetic
life, which otherwise would be a private affair, receives a social
sanction and assistance.

That permanence and communication of expression are essential to a
complete conception of art can be discerned by looking within the
artistic impulse itself. However much the artist may affect indifference
to the public, he creates expecting to be understood. Mere self-
expression does not satisfy him; he needs in addition appreciation.
Deprived of sympathy, the artistic impulse withers and dies or supports
itself through the hope of eventually finding it. The heroism of the
poet consists in working on in loneliness; but his crown of glory is
won only when all men are singing his songs. And every genuine artist,
as opposed to the mere improviser or dilettante, wishes his work to
endure.[Footnote: See Anatole France: _Le Lys Rouge_. "Moi, dit
Choulette, je pense si peu a l'avenir terrestre que j'ai ecrit mes
plus beaux poemes sur les feuilles de papier a cigarettes. Elles se
sont facilement evanuies, ne laissant a mes vers qu'une espece
d'existence metaphysique." C'etait un air de negligence qu'il se
donnait. En fait, il n'avait jamais perdu une ligne de son ecriture.]
Having put his substance into it, he desires its preservation as he
does his own. His immortality through it is his boast.

  Exegi monumentum aere perennius
  Regalique situ pyramidum altius
       *       *       *       *       *
  Non omnis moriar.

Art is not mere inspiration, the transient expression of private moods,
but a work of communication, meant to endure.

There are certain distinguishing characteristics of aesthetic expression
all of which are in harmony with the description we have given of it.
In the first place, in art the sensuous medium of the expression
receives an attention and possesses a significance not to be found in
other types of expression. Although every one hears, no one attends
to the sound of the voice in ordinary conversation; one looks through
it, as through a glass, to the thought or emotion behind. In our routine
perceptions of nature, we are not interested in colors and shapes on
their own account, but only in order that we may recognize the objects
possessing them; in a scientific woodcut also, they are indifferent
to us, except in so far as they impart correct information about the
objects portrayed. Outside of art, sensation is a mere transparent
means to the end of communication and recognition. Compare the poem,
the piece of music, the artistic drawing or painting. There the words
or tones must be not only heard but listened to; the colors and lines
not only seen but held in the eye; of themselves, apart from anything
they may further mean, they have the power to awaken feeling and
pleasure. And this is no accident. For the aesthetic expression is meant
to possess worth in itself and is deliberately fashioned to hold us
to itself, and this purpose will be more certainly and effectively
accomplished if the medium of the expression has the power to move and
please. We enter the aesthetic expression through the sensuous medium;
hence the artist tries to charm us at the start and on the outside;
having found favor there, he wins us the more easily to the content
lying within.

If the medium, moreover, instead of being a transparent embodiment of
the artist's feelings, can express them in some direct fashion as well,
the power of the whole expression will gain. This is exactly what the
sound of the words of a poem or the colors and lines of a painting or
statue can do. As mere sound and as mere color and line, they convey
something of the feeling tone of the subject which, as symbols, they
are used to represent. For example, the soft flowing lines of Correggio,
quite apart from the objects they represent, express the voluptuous
happiness of his "Venus and Mars"; the slow rhythm of the repeated
word sounds and the quality of the vowels in the opening lines of
_Tithonus_ are expressive in themselves, apart from their meaning,
of the weariness in the thoughts of the hero, and so serve to re-express
and enforce the mood of those thoughts. When we come to study the
particular arts, we shall find this phenomenon of re-expression through
the medium everywhere.

A second characteristic distinguishing aesthetic expressions from other
expressions is their superior unity. In the latter, the unity lies in
the purpose to be attained or in the content of the thought expressed;
it is teleological or logical. The unity of a chair is its purpose,
which demands just such parts and in just such a mechanical arrangement;
the unity of a business conversation is governed by the bargain to be
closed, requiring such words and such only, and in the appropriate
logical and grammatical order. The unity of an argument is the thesis
to be proved; the unity of a diagram is the principle to be illustrated
or the information to be imparted. Compare the unity of a sonnet or
a painting. In a sonnet, there is a unity of thought and sentiment
creating a fitting grammatical unity in language, but in addition a
highly elaborate pattern in the words themselves that is neither
grammatical nor logical. In a painting, besides the dramatic unity of
the action portrayed, as in a battle scene; or of the spatial and
mechanical togetherness of things, as in a landscape; there is a harmony
of the colors, a composition of the lines and masses themselves, not
to be found in nature. And, although the general shape and arrangement
of the parts of a useful object is dominated by its purpose, if it is
also beautiful--a Louis Seize chair, for example--there is, besides,
a design that cannot be explained by use. In artistic expressions,
therefore, there exists a unity in the material, superposed upon the
unity required by the purpose or thought expressed. And this property
follows from the preceding. For, since the medium is valuable in itself,
the mind, which craves unity everywhere, craves it there also, and
lingers longer and more happily on finding it; and, since the medium
can be expressive, the unity of the fundamental mood of the thought
expressed will overflow into and pervade it. Hence there occurs an
autonomous development of unity in the material, raising the total
unity of the expression to a higher power.




CHAPTER III

THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF ART


Our definition of art can be complete only if it enables us to
understand the value of art. The reader may well ask what possible
value expression can have when it becomes an end in itself. "I can
understand," he may say, "the value of expression for the sake of
communication and influence, but what value can it have of itself?"
At this point, moreover, we are concerned with the intrinsic value
immediately realized in the experience of art, not with further values
that may result from it. Art, no less than practical expression, may
have effects on other experiences, which have to be considered in
measuring its total worth; but these we shall leave for investigation
in our last chapters, after we have reached our fullest comprehension
of art; we are interested now, in order to test and complete our
definition, in the resident value only. As a help toward reaching a
satisfactory view, let us examine critically some of the chief theories
in the field. First, the theory, often called "hedonistic," that the
value of art consists in the satisfactions of sense which the media
of aesthetic expression afford--the delight in color and sound and
rhythmical movement of line and form. The theory finds support in the
industrial arts, where beauty often seems to be only a luxurious charm
supervening upon utility; but also in painting and sculpture when
appreciated in their decorative capacity as "things of beauty." There
is a partial truth in this theory; for, as we have seen, the sensuous
media of all the arts tend to be developed in the direction of pleasure;
and no man who lacks feeling for purely sensuous values can enter into
the fullness of the aesthetic experience. But the theory fails in not
recognizing the expressive function of sensation in art. As Goethe
said, art was long formative, that is, expressive, before it was
beautiful, in the narrow sense of charming.[Footnote: "Die kunst is
lange bildend eh sie schon ist." _Von Deutscher Baukunst_, 1773.]
In order to be beautiful, it is not enough for a work of art to offer
us delightful colors and lines and sounds; it must also have a
meaning--it must speak to us, tell us something.

The second theory which I shall examine is the moralistic or Platonic.
According to this, art is an image of the good, and has value in so
far as through expression it enables us to experience edifying emotions
or to contemplate noble objects. The high beauty of the "Sistine
Madonna," for example, would be explained as identical with the worth
of the religious feelings which it causes in the mind of the beholder.
The advantage of art over life is supposed to consist in its power to
create in the imagination better and more inspiring objects than life
can offer, and to free and control the contemplation of them. This is
the narrower interpretation of the theory. When the notion of the good
is liberalized so as to include innocent happiness as well as the
strictly ethical and religious values, beauty is conceded to belong
to pictures of fair women and children, and to lyrics and romances,
provided there is nothing in them to shock the moral sense. Aesthetic
value is the reflection--the imaginative equivalent--of moral or
practical value.

The prime difficulty of this theory is its inadequacy as an
interpretation of the whole of actual art; for, in order to find support
among existing examples, it is compelled to make an arbitrary selection
of such as can be made to fit it. Actual art is quite as much an image
of evil as of good; there is nothing devilish which it has not
represented. And this part of art is often of the highest aesthetic
merit. Velasquez's pictures of dwarfs and degenerate princes are as
artistic as Raphael's Madonnas; Goethe's Mephistopheles is one of his
supreme artistic achievements; Shakespeare is as successful artistically
in his delineation of Lady Macbeth as of Desdemona. Now for us who
claim that the purpose of art must be divined from the actual practice
of artists, from the inside, and should not be an arbitrary
construction, from the outside, the existence of such examples is
sufficient to refute the theory in question. If the artist finds a
value in the representation of evil, value exists there and can be
discovered.

If, indeed, the sole effect of artistic expression were to bring to
the mind objects and emotions in the same fashion that ordinary life
does, then the value of art, the image of life, would be a function
of the value of the life imaged. And just as one seeks contact with
the good in real life and avoids the evil, so one would seek in art
imaginative contact with the good alone. But expression, and above all
artistic expression, does something more than present objects to the
imagination and arouse emotions. Art is not life over again, a mere
shadow of life; if it were, what would be its unique value? who would
not prefer the substance to the shadow? The expression of life is not
life itself; hence, even if the evil in life be always evil, the
expression of it may still be a good.

Another theory, often called the "intellectualistic" theory, claims
that the purpose of art is truth. "Beauty is truth; truth, beauty."
The immediate pleasure which we feel in the beautiful is the same as
the instant delight in the apprehension of truth. There is no difference
in purpose or value between science and art, but only a difference in
method--science presents truth in the form of the abstract judgment;
art, in the form of the concrete image or example.

The difficulty with this theory is the uncertainty as to what is meant
by truth; hence the many shapes it assumes. But before going deeply
into this question, let us consider some of the simple facts which
seem to tell for and against the theory. There can be no doubt that
many examples of the representative arts--painting, sculpture, novel,
and drama--are praised for their truth. We demand truth of coloring
or line in painting, of form in sculpture, of character and social
relation in the drama or novel. On the other hand, we admit aesthetic
value to fanciful painting and literature, and to expressions of beliefs
which no one accepts at the present time. We appreciate the beauty of
Dante's descriptions of the Inferno and of the conversations between
him and its inhabitants without believing them to be reports of fact.
No one values the _Blue Bird_ the less because it is not an account
of an actual occurrence. Even with regard to the realistic novel and
drama, no one thinks of holding them to the standards of historical
or scientific accuracy. And, although we may demand of a landscape
painting plausibility of color and line, we certainly do not require
that it be a representation of any identifiable scene.

If by truth, therefore, be meant a description or image of matters of
fact, then surely it is not the purpose of art to give us this truth.
The artist, to be sure, may give this, as when the landscapist paints
some locality dear to his client or the portraitist paints the client
himself; but he does not need to do this, and the aesthetic value of
his work is independent of it; for the picture possesses its beauty
even when we know nothing of its model. In the language of current
philosophy, truth in the sense of the correspondence of a portrayal
to an object external to the portrayal, is not "artistic truth."

The partisans of the intellectualistic theory would, of course, deny
that they ever meant truth with this meaning. "We mean by truth," they
would say, "an embodiment in sensuous or imaginative form of some
universal principle of nature and life. The image may be entirely
fictitious or fanciful, but so long as the principle is illustrated,
essential truth, and that is beauty, is attained." But if this were
so, every work of art would be the statement of a universal truth, as
indeed philosophical adherents of this theory have always
maintained--witness Hegel. Yet what is the universal truth asserted
in one of Monet's pictures of a lily pond? There is, of course, an
observance of the general laws of color and space, but does the beauty
of the picture consist in that? Does it not attach to the representation
of the concrete, individual pond? I do not mean that there may not be
beauty in the expression of universals; in fact, I have explicitly
maintained that there may, under certain conditions; I am simply
insisting that beauty may belong to expressions of the individual also,
and that you cannot reduce these to mere illustrations of universal
ideas. Because of its completeness and internal harmony, the philosopher
may find the simplest melody a revelation of the Absolute; but even
if it were, its beauty would still pertain to it primarily as a
revelation of the individual experience which it embodies. Again, by
reason of the freedom from the particular conditions out of which it
arises acquired by a work of art, its individual meaning easily becomes
typical, so that it often serves as a universal under which individuals
similar to those represented are subsumed--as when we speak of "a
Faust" or "a Hamlet"; nevertheless, the adequate expression of the
individual is at once the basis of its beauty and of its extended,
universalized significance. It is when works of art are profoundly
individual that we generalize their meaning. In art the individual
never sinks to the position of a mere specimen or example of a universal
law. The intellectualistic theory is partly true of symbolic art, but
not wholly, for even there, the individuality of the symbol counts.
And yet, as we shall see, there is another meaning of artistic truth,
which is legitimate.

Aesthetic value, therefore, is not alone sensuous value or ethical or
scientific or philosophical value. A work of art may contain one or
all of these values; but they do not constitute its unique value as
art. The foregoing attempts to define the value of art fail because
they renounce the idea of unique value, substituting goodness, sensuous
pleasure, or truth-values found outside of art. But the intrinsic value
of art must be unique, for it is the value of a unique activity--the
free expression of experience in a form delightful and permanent,
mediating communication. And this value we should be able to discover
by seeking the difference which supervenes upon experience through
expression of this kind.

Apart from expression, experience may be vivid and satisfactory as we
feel and think and dream and act; yet it is always in flux, coming and
going, shifting and unaware. But through expression it is arrested by
being attached to a permanent form, and there can be retained and
surveyed. Experience, which is otherwise fluent and chaotic, or when
orderly too busy with its ends to know itself, receives through
expression the fixed, clear outlines of a thing, and can be contemplated
like a thing. Every one has verified the clarifying effect of expression
upon ideas, how they thus acquire definiteness and coherence, so that
even the mind that thinks them can hold them in review. But this effect
upon feeling is no less sure. The unexpressed values of experience are
vague strivings embedded in chaotic sensations and images; these
expression sorts and organizes by attaching them to definite ordered
symbols. Even what is most intimate and fugitive becomes a stable
object. When put into patterned words, the subtlest and deepest passions
of a poet, which before were felt in a dim and tangled fashion, are
brought out into the light of consciousness. In music, the most elusive
moods, by being embodied in ordered sounds, remain no longer
subterranean, but are objectified and lifted into clearness. In the
novel or drama, the writer is able not only to enact his visions of
life in the imagination, but, by bodying them forth in external words
and acts, to possess them for reflection. In painting, all that is
seen and wondered at in nature is seen with more delicacy and
discrimination and felt with greater freedom; or the vague fancies
which a heated imagination paints upon the background of the mind come
out more vivid and better controlled, when put with care upon a canvas.

Even ordinary expression, of course, arrests and clarifies experience,
enabling us to commune with ourselves; but since its purpose is usually
beyond itself, this result is hasty and partial, limited to what is
needful for the practical end in view. In art alone is this value
complete. For there, life is intentionally held in the medium of
expression, put out into color and line and sound for the clear sight
and contemplation of men. The aim is just to create life upon which
we may turn back and reflect.

This effect of artistic expression upon experience has usually been
called "intuition." Because of its connotation of mysterious knowledge,
intuition is not a wholly satisfactory word, yet is probably as good
as any for the purpose of denoting what artists and philosophers of
art have had in mind and what we have been trying to describe. Other
terms might also serve--vision, sympathetic insight (sympathetic,
because it includes the value of experience; insight, because it
involves possessing experience as a whole and ordered, and as an object
for reflection). Intuition is opposed, on the one hand, to crude
unreflecting experience that never observes itself as a whole or attains
to clearness and self-possession; and, on the other hand, to science,
which gives the elements and relations of an experience, the classes
to which it belongs, but loses its uniqueness and its values. Science
elaborates concepts of things, gives us knowledge about things; art
presents us with the experience of things purified for contemplation.
Scientific truth is the fidelity of a description to the external
objects of experience; artistic truth is sympathetic vision--the
organization into clearness of experience itself.

Compare, for illustration, life as we live it from day to day with our
delineation of it as we recall it and tell it to an intimate companion;
and then compare that with the analysis and classification of it which
some psychologist or sociologist might make. Or compare the kind of
knowledge of human nature that we get from Shakespeare or Moliere with
the sort that we get from the sciences. In the one case, knowledge
attends a personal acquaintance with the experience, a bringing of it
home, a feeling for its values, a realization of the inner necessity
of its elements; in the other, it is a mere set of concepts. Or finally,
compare the knowledge of the human figure contained in an anatomist's
manual with a painting of it, where we not only see it, but in the
imagination touch it and move with it, in short live with it.

Intuition is the effect of artistic appreciation no less than of
artistic creation. If the artist's expression of his feelings and ideas
results in intuition, our appreciation of his work must have the same
value, for appreciation is expression transferred from the artist to
the spectator. By means of the colors, lines, words, tones that he
makes, the artist determines in us a process of expression similar to
his. Out of our own minds we put into the sense-symbols he has woven
ideas and feelings which provide the content and meaning he intends.
Hence all aesthetic appreciation is self-expression. This is evident
in the case of the more lyrical types of art. The lyric poem is
appreciated by us as an expression of our own inner life; music as an
expression of our own slumberous or subconscious moods. Yet even the
more objective types of art, like the novel or the drama, become forms
of self-expression, for we have to build up the worlds which they
contain in our own imagination and emotion. We have to live ourselves
out in them; we can understand them only in terms of our own life.

In the appreciation of the more objective types of art, the personality
expressed is not, of course, the actual personality; but rather the
self extended and expanded through the imagination. The things which
I seem to see and enjoy in the landscape picture I may have never
really seen; I may have never really moved through the open plain
there, as I seem to move, toward the mountain in the distance. The
acts described in the novel or portrayed on the stage I do not really
perform; the opinions uttered by the persons I do not hold. And yet,
in order to appreciate the picture, it must be _as if_ I really
saw the mountain and moved towards it; in order to appreciate the novel
or the play, I must make the acts and opinions mine. And this I can
do; for, as it is a commonplace to note, each one of us has within him
capacities of action and emotion and thought unrealized--the actual
self is only one of many that might have been--hundreds of possible
lives slumber in our souls. And no matter which of these lives we have
chosen for our own, or have had forced upon us by our fate, we always
retain a secret longing for all the others that have gone unfulfilled,
and an understanding born of longing. Some of these we imagine
distinctly--those that we consciously rejected or that a turn of chance
might have made ours; but most of them we ourselves have not the power
even to dream. Yet these too beckon us from behind, and the artist
provides us with their dream. Through art we secure an imaginative
realization of interests and latent tendencies to act and think and
feel which, because they are contradictory among themselves or at
variance with the conditions of our existence, cannot find free play
within our experience. That same sort of imaginative enlarged expression
of self that we get vicariously by participating in the life of our
friends we get also from art.[Footnote: Compare Santayana: _The Sense
of Beauty_, p. 186.]

Yet in appreciation, as in creation, expression results in intuition.
Appreciation is no mere imagining, transitory and lawless like a
daydream. The activity of the imagination is so organized in a permanent
and perspicuous form that we not only live it, but possess it as an
object. The activities engaged in building up the work of art in my
own mind are not the whole of me; judgment remains free to watch and
synthesize those that are being crystallized there. In looking at a
portrait, for example, the process of interpreting the life represented
is ancillary to a total judgment of character. In the novel or drama,
no matter with what abandon I put myself into the persons and
situations, the expression of them in outward words and acts, and the
organization which the artist has imposed upon them, makes of them
permanent objects for reflection, not mere modes of feeling and
imagining to endure. Self-expression that does not attain to
objectivity is incomplete as art. Even music and lyric poetry are
something more than mere feeling. In all genuine art, experience takes
on permanence and form--a synthesis, a total meaning, supervenes within
the flux of impressions and ideas and moods, not excluding, but
embracing and controlling them. That is intuition.

The insight into experience which art provides is the more valuable
because it is communicable; to possess it alone would be a good, but
to share it is better. All values become enhanced when we add to them
the joy of fellow feeling. The universality of aesthetic expression
carries with it the universality of aesthetic insight. Merely private
and unutterable inspirations are not art. Beauty does for life what
science does for intelligence; even as the one universalizes thought,
so the other universalizes values. In expressing himself, the artist
creates a form into which all similar experiences can be poured and
out of which they can all be shared. When, for example, we listen to
the hymns of the church or read the poems of Horace, the significance
of our experience is magnified because we find the feelings of millions
there; we are in unison with a vast company living and dead. No thing
of beauty is a private possession. All artists feed on one another and
into each experience of art has gone the mind-work of the ages.

But there are two types of universality, one by exclusion, the other
by inclusion. Communists like Tolstoy demand that art express only
those feelings that are already common, the religious and moral; they
would exclude all values that have not become those of the race. But
this is to diminish the importance of art; for it is art's privilege
to make feelings common by providing a medium through which they can
be communicated rather than merely to express them after they have
become common. Understanding is more valuable when it encompasses the
things that tend to separate and distinguish men than when it is limited
to the things that unite them. There is nothing so bizarre that art
may not express it, provided it be communicable.

The life of the imagination, which is the life of art, is, moreover,
the only life that we can have in common. Sharing life can never mean
anything else than possessing the life of one another sympathetically.
Actually to lead another's life would involve possessing his body,
occupying his position, doing his work, and so destroying him. But
through the sympathetic imagination we can penetrate his life and leave
him in possession. To do this thoroughly is possible, however, only
with the life of a very few people, with intimates and friends. With
the mass, we can share only ideal things like religion or patriotism,
but these also are matters of imagination. Now art enlarges the scope
of this common life by creating a new imaginary world to which we can
all belong, where action, enjoyment, and experience do not involve
competition or depend on possession and mastery.

Finally, the intuitions that art provides are relatively permanent.
Art not only extends life and enables us to share it, but also preserves
it. Existence has a leak in it, as Plato said; experience flows in and
then flows out forever. The individual passes from one act to another,
from one phase of life to another, childhood, then youth, then old
age. So the race; one generation follows another, and each type of
civilization displaces a predecessor. Against this flux, our belief
in progress comforts us; maturity is better than youth, we think, and
each generation happier and more spiritual than the last. Yet the
consolations of progress are partial. For even if we always do go on
to something better in the future, the past had its unique value, and
that is lost ineluctably. The present doubtless repeats much of the
form of the past--the essential aspects of human nature remain the
same; but the subtle, distinctive bloom of each stage of personal life,
and of each period of the world's history, is transient. We cannot
again become children, nor can we possess again the strenuous freedom
of the Renaissance or the unclouded integrity of personality of the
Greeks.

In the life of the individual, however, the flux is not absolute; for
through memory we preserve something of the unique value of our past.
Its vividness, its fullness, the sharp bite of its reality go; but a
subtilized essence remains. And the worth that we attach to our
personality depends largely upon it; for the instinct of self-
preservation penetrates the inner world; we strive not only to maintain
our physical existence in the present, but our psychic past as well.
In conserving the values of the past through memory we find a
satisfaction akin to that of protecting our lives from danger. Through
memory we feel childhood's joys and youth's sweet love and manhood's
triumphs still our own, secure against the perils of oblivion.

Now art does for the race what memory does for the individual. Only
through expression can the past be preserved for all men and all time.
When the individual perishes, his memories go with him; unless,
therefore, he puts them into a form where they can be taken up into
the consciousness of other men, they are lost forever. And just as the
individual seeks a vicarious self-preservation through identifying
himself with his children and his race, and finds compensation for his
own death in their continuance, so he rejoices when he knows that men
who come after will appreciate the values of his life. We of the present
feel ourselves enriched, in turn, as by a longer memory, in adding to
the active values of our own lives the remembered values of the past.
Their desire to know themselves immortal is met by our desire to unite
our lives with all our past. Art alone makes this possible. History
may tell us what men did, but only the poet or other artist can make
us relive the values of their experience. For through expression they
make their memories, or their interpretations of other men's memories,
ours. Art is the memory of the race, the conserver of its values.

The distinguishing characteristics of aesthetic expression observed by
us--the pleasurableness of the medium, the enhanced unity--serve
intuition as that has been described by us. One of the strongest
objections against the theory of art as intuition, as that theory has
been developed by Croce, for example, is that it provides no place for
charm. Yet without charm there is no complete beauty, and any
interpretation of the facts of the aesthetic experience which neglects
this element is surely inadequate. But charm although an indispensable,
is not an independent, factor in the experience of art; for it serves
intuition. It does so in two ways. The charm of the medium, by drawing
attention to itself, increases the objectivity of the experience
expressed. Even when the experiences felt into color and line and sound
are poignantly our own, to live pleasantly in any one of these
sensations is to live as an object to oneself, the life sharing the
externality of the medium--we put our life out there more readily when
it is pleasant there. And the charm of the medium serves intuition in
another way. When the activities of thought and feeling and imagination
released by the work of art are delightful, they become more delightful
still if the medium in which they function is itself delightful. To
imagine

  Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn

is a pleasure by itself, but more pleasurable, and therefore more
spontaneous, because of the melody of sound in which it is enveloped.
And when the activities expressed are not pleasant, the expression of
them in a delightful medium helps to induce us to make them our own
and accept them notwithstanding. The medium becomes a charming net to
hold us, and because of its allurements we give ourselves the more
freely to its spirit within. The following, for example, is not an
agreeable thought:

  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The way to dusty death.

Yet the expression of this thought is pleasant, among other reasons,
because of the rhythmic charm of language. We shall come back to this
fact in our chapter on "The Problem of Evil in Aesthetics." There is
no contradiction between the fair form of a work of art and its content,
however repellent. For if we value the sympathetic knowledge of life,
we shall be glad of any means impelling us to undertake what alone can
give this--a friendly dwelling with life itself. Thus the decorative
and the expressive functions of art are reconciled--pleasure and
intuition meet.

Just as from time to time pleasure in sensation has been one-sidedly
thought to be the purpose of art, so likewise the unity characteristic
of beautiful things. Indeed, beauty and order have become almost
synonymous in popular thought. And, to be sure, this unity, as we have
already remarked, has its own value; the mind delights in order just
for its own sake, and the artist, who is bent on making something
worthful on its own account, strives to develop it for that reason.
And yet unity is no more independent of expression and intuition than
sensation is; it too enters into their service. Many forms of unity
in works of art are themselves media of expression--the simplest and
most striking example is perhaps the rhythmical ordering of sounds in
poetry and music, the emotional value of which everybody appreciates.
In a later chapter, I shall try to show that the same is true of harmony
and balance. In another way, also, unity serves intuition. For the
existence of order in an experience is indispensable to that wholeness
of view, that mastery in the mind, which is half of intuition. The
merely various, the chaotic, the disorganized, cannot be grasped or
understood. In order that an experience may be understood, its items
must be strung together by some principle in terms of which they may
demand each other and constitute a whole. Organization _is_
understanding. Every work of art, every beautiful thing, is organized,
and, as we have observed, organized not merely in the thought or other
meaning expressed, but throughout, in the sensuous medium as well.

So far the value which we have discovered in artistic expression has
been that of delightful and orderly sympathetic vision. This is
supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic
expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how
poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it
disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen,
the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear
and orderly surface of the work of art; the emotions that weighed are
lifted out and up into color and line and sound, where the mind can
view and master them. Mere life gives place to the contemplation of
life; and contemplation imposes on life some of the calm that is its
own. The most violent and unruly passions may be the material of art,
but once they are put into artistic form they are mastered and refined.
"There is an art of passion, but no passionate art" (Schiller). Through
expression, the repression, the obstruction of feeling is broken down;
the mere effort to find and elaborate a fitting artistic form for the
material diverts the attention and provides other occupation for the
mind; an opportunity is given to reflect upon and understand the
experience, bringing it somehow into harmony with one's total
life,--through all these means procuring relief. It is impossible to
cite the famous passage from Goethe's "Poetry and Truth" too often:--

  And thus began that bent of mind from which I could not
  deviate my whole life through; namely, that of turning into
  an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled
  me, or otherwise occupied my attention, and of coming to
  some certain understanding with myself thereupon....
  All the works therefore that have been published by me are
  only fragments of one great confession.

[Footnote: English translation, edited by Parke Godwin, Vol. I, p.66.]

This effect of artistic expression belongs, of course, to other forms
of expression. Every confession, every confidential outpouring of
emotion, is an example. We have all verified the truth that to formulate
feeling is to be free with reference to it; not that we thereby get
rid of it, but that we are able to look it in the face, and find some
place for it in our world where we can live on good terms with it. The
greatest difficulty in bearing with any disappointment or sorrow comes
not from the thing itself--for after all we have other things to live
for--but from its effect upon the presuppositions, so to speak, of our
entire existence. The mind has an unconscious set of axioms or
postulates which it assumes in the process of living; now anything
that seems to contradict these, as a great calamity does, by destroying
the logic of life, makes existence seem meaningless and corrupts that
faith in life which is the spring of action. In order for the health
of the mind to be restored, the contradictory fact must be somehow
reconciled with the mind's presuppositions, and the rationality of
existence reaffirmed. But an indispensable preliminary to this is that
we should clearly envisage and reflect upon the fact, viewing it in
its larger relations, where it will lose its overwhelming significance.
Now that is what expression, by stabilizing and clarifying experience,
enables us to do.

A great many works of art besides Goethe's, not merely of lyric poetry,
but also of the novel and drama, among them some of the greatest, like
the _Divine Comedy_, so far as they spring intimately from the
life of the artist, are "fragments of a great confession," and have
had the sanitary value of a confession for their creators. It is not
always possible to trace the personal feelings and motives lying behind
the artist's fictions; for the suffering soul covers its pains with
subtle disguises; yet even when we do not know them, we can divine
them. We are certain, for example, that Watteau's gay pictured visions
were the projection--and confession--of his own disappointed dreams.
The great advantage of art over ordinary expression, in this respect,
is its universality. Art is the confessional of the race. The artist
provides a medium through which all men can confess themselves and
heal their souls. In making the artist's expression ours, we find an
equal relief. Who does not feel a revival of some old or present despair
of his own when he reads:--

  Un grand sommeil noir
  Tombe sur ma vie;
  Dormez toute espoir,
  Dormez toute envie!

  Je ne vois plus rien,
  Je perds la memoire
  Du mal et du bien....
  Oh, la triste histoire!

yet who does not at the same time experience its assuagement? And this
effect is not confined to lyrical art, for so far as, in novel and
drama, we put ourselves in the place of the dramatis persona, we can
pour our own emotional experiences into them and through them find
relief for ourselves. Just so, Aristotle recognized the cathartic or
healing influence of art, both in music and the drama--"through pity
and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." [Footnote:
_Poetics,_ 6, 2. _Politics,_ 5, 7.]

The delightsomeness of the work of art and its self-sufficient freedom,
standing in contrast with the drab or difficult realities of nature
and personal striving, serve also to make of beauty a consoler and
healer. In place of a confused medley of sense impressions, art offers
orderly and pleasant colors or sounds; instead of a real life of duties
hard to fulfill and ambitions painfully accomplished, art provides an
imagined life which, while imitating and thus preserving the interest
of real life, remains free from its hazards and burdens. I would not
base the value of art on the contrast between art and life; yet it is
unlikely, I think, if life were not so bound and disordered, that art
would seem so free and perfect; and it is often true that those who
suffer and struggle most love art best. The unity of the work of art,
in which each element suggests another within its world, keeping you
there and shutting you out momentarily from the real world to which
you must presently return, and the sensuous charm of the medium,
fascinating your eyes and ears, bring forgetfulness and a temporary
release.

To sum the results of the last two chapters. Art is expression, not
of mere things or ideas, but of concrete experience with its values,
and for its own sake. It is experience held in a delightful, highly
organized sensuous medium, and objectified there for communication and
reflection. Its value is in the sympathetic mastery and preservation
of life in the mind.




CHAPTER IV

THE ANALYSIS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: THE ELEMENTS OF THE EXPERIENCE


Thus far we have sought to define art, to form a concrete idea of the
experience of art, and to place it in its relations to other facts.
We shall now pass from synthetic definition to psychological analysis.
We want to pick out the elements of mind entering into the experience
of art and exhibit their characteristic relations. In the present
chapter we shall concern ourselves chiefly with the elements, leaving
the study of most of the problems of structure to the following chapter.

Every experience of art [Footnote: Throughout this discussion, I use
"experience of art," "aesthetic experience," and "beauty" with the same
meaning.] contains, in the first place, the sensations which are the
media of expression. In a painting, for example, there are colors; in
a piece of music, tones; in a poem, word-sounds. To this material,
secondly, are attached vague feelings. It is characteristic of aesthetic
expressions, as we have observed, that their media, quite apart from
anything that they may mean or represent, are expressive of moods--the
colors of a painting have a _stimmung,_ so have tones and words,
when rhythmically composed. The simplest aesthetic experiences, like
the beauty of single musical tones or colors, are of no greater
complexity; yet almost all works of art contain further elements; for
as a rule the sensations do not exist for their own sakes alone, but
possess a function, to represent things. The colors of a landscape
painting are not only interesting to us as beautiful colors, but as
symbols of a landscape; the words of a ballad charm and stimulate us
not only through their music, but because of actions or events which
they bring before the mind. This involves, psychologically speaking,
that certain ideas--of trees and clouds in the painting, of men and
their deeds in the poem--are associated to the sense elements and
constitute their meaning. Such ideas or meanings are the third class
of elements in the aesthetic experience. But these ideas, in their turn,
also arouse emotions, only not of the indefinite sort which belong to
the sense elements, but definite, like the emotions aroused by things
and events in real life. For example, Rembrandt's "Man with the Gold
Helmet" will not only move us in a vague way through the character and
rhythm of its lines and colors, but will, in addition, stimulate
sentiments of respect and veneration, similar to those that we should
feel if the old warrior were himself before us. In such definite
feelings we have, then, a fourth class of mental elements. A fifth
class will make our list complete. It consists of images from the
various sense departments--sight, hearing, taste, smell, temperature,
movement--which arise in connection with the ideas or meanings, making
them concrete and full. For example, some of the colors in a landscape
painting will not only give us the idea that there is sunlight there,
but will also arouse faint images of warmth, which will make the idea
more vivid; other colors, representing the clouds, will produce faint
sensations of softness; still others, representing flowers, may produce
faint odors.

Let us study sensation as an element in beauty, first. Sensation is
the door through which we enter into the experience of beauty; and,
again, it is the foundation upon which the whole structure rests.
Without feeling for the values of sensation, men may be sympathetic
and intelligent, but they cannot be lovers of the beautiful. They may,
for example, appreciate the profound or interesting ideas in poetry,
but unless they can connect them with the rhythm-values of the sounds
of the words, they have only an intellectual or emotional, not an
aesthetic experience.

Yet, despite the omnipresence and supreme worth of sensation in beauty,
not all kinds are equally fit for entrance into the experience. From
the time of Plato, who writes of "fair sights and sounds" only, vision
and hearing have been recognized as the preeminently aesthetic senses.
These senses provide the basis for all the arts--music and poetry are
arts of sound; painting, sculpture, and architecture are arts of vision.
And there are good reasons for their special fitness. Most cogent of
all is the fact that vision and hearing are the natural media of
expression; sounds, be they words or musical tones, convey thoughts
and feelings; so do visual sensations--the facial expression or gesture
seen communicates the inner life of the speaker; and even abstract
colors and space-forms, like red and the circle, have independent
feeling-tones. A taste or a temperature sensation may be pleasant or
unpleasant, but has no meaning, either by itself, as a color or a tone
has, or through association, as a word has. It has no connection with
the life of feeling or of thought. Its chief significance is
practical--sweet invites to eating, cold impels to the seeking of a
warm shelter, touch is a preliminary to grasping. All the so-called
lower senses are bound up with instincts and actions. Of course sights
and sounds have also a significance for instinct--the color and form
and voice of the individual of the opposite sex, for example. But,
before acting on the prompting of instinct, the lover may pause and
enjoy the appealing color and form; he may connect his feelings with
them and hold on to and delight in the resulting experience--an
emotional appreciation of the object may intervene between the stimulus
and the appropriate action, and even supplant it. In this way, vision
and hearing may free themselves from the merely practical and become
autonomous embodiments of feeling. The distance between the seen or
heard object and the body is important. The objects of touch and taste,
on the other hand, have to be brought into contact with the body; the
practical reaction then follows; there is no time during which it may
be suspended.

Important also, especially for the beauty of art, is our greater power
to control sensations of vision and hearing. Only colors and sounds
can be woven into complex and stable wholes. Tastes and odors, when
produced simultaneously or in succession, do not keep their distinctness
as colors and sounds do, but blur and interfere with each other. No
one, however ingenious, could construct a symphony of odors or a picture
of tastes. Nevertheless, the possibility of controlling colors and
sounds and of creating stable and public objects out of them, is only
a secondary reason for their aesthetic fitness. Even if one could
construct instruments for the orderly production of tastes and
odors--and simple instruments of this kind have been devised--one could
not make works of art out of them; for a succession of such sensations
would express nothing; they would still be utterly without meaning.
The fundamental reason for the superiority of sights and sounds is
their expressiveness, their connection with the life of feeling and
thought. They take root in the total self; whereas the other elements
remain, for the most part, on the surface.

Under favorable conditions, however, all sensations may enter into the
sthetic experience. Despite the close connection between the lower
senses and the impulses serving practical life, there is a certain
disinterestedness in all pleasant sensations. Fine wines and perfumes
offer tastes and odors which are sought and enjoyed apart from the
satisfaction of hunger; in dancing, movement sensations are enjoyed
for their own sake; in the bath, heat and cold. But, as we have seen,
it is not sufficient for a sensation to be free from practical ends
in order to become aesthetic; it must be connected with the larger
background of feeling; it must be expressive. Now, under certain
circumstances and in particular cases, this may occur, even in the
instance of the lower senses. The perfume of flowers, of roses and of
violets, has a strong emotional appeal; it is their "soul" as the poets
say. The odor of incense in a cathedral may be an important element
in devotion, fusing with the music and the architecture. Or recall the
odor of wet earth and reviving vegetation during a walk in the woods
on a spring morning. Even sensations of taste may become aesthetic.
An oft-cited example is the taste of wine on a Rhine steamer. Guyau,
the French poet-philosopher, mentions the taste of milk after a hard
climb in the Pyrenees. [Footnote: _Les Problemes de l'esthetique
contemporaine_, 8me edition, p. 63.] A drink of water from a clear
spring would serve equally well as an example familiar to all. The
warmth of a fire, of sunlight, of a cozy room, or the cold of a star-lit
winter night have an emotional significance almost, if not quite, equal
to that of the visual sensations from these objects. Touch seems to
be irretrievably bound up with grasping and using, but the touch of
a well-loved person may be a free and glowing experience, sharing with
sight in beauty. The movement sensations during a run in the open air
or in dancing are not only free from all practical purpose, but are
elements in the total animation. And other examples will come to the
mind of every reader. [Footnote: Compare Volkelt: _System der
Aesthetik_, Bd. I, Zweites Capitel, S. 92.]

As our illustrations show, the lower senses enter into the beauty of
nature only; they do not enter into the beauty of art. Their beauty
is therefore vague and accidental. It usually depends, moreover, upon
some support from vision, with the beauty of which it fuses. Apart
from the picturesque surroundings seen, the mountain milk and the Rhine
wine would lose much of their beauty; the warmth of sunlight or of
fire, without the brightness of these objects, the odor of flowers
without their form and color, would be of small aesthetic worth. Through
connection with vision the lower senses acquire something of its
permanence and independence. People differ greatly in their capacity
to render the lower senses aesthetic; it is essentially a matter of
refinement, of power to free them from their natural root in the
practical and instinctive, and lift them into the higher region of
sentiment. But every kind of sensation, however low, may become
beautiful; this is not to degrade beauty, but to ennoble sensation.

From a psychological standpoint, sensation is the datum of the aesthetic
experience, the first thing there, while its power to express depends
upon a further process which links it up with thoughts and feelings.
We must inquire, therefore, how this linkage takes place--how, for
example, it comes about that the colors of a painting are something
more than mere colors, being, in addition, embodiments of trees and
sky and foliage, and of liveliness and gayety and other feelings
appropriate to a spring landscape. Let us consider the linkage with
feeling first.

There are two characteristics of aesthetic feeling in its relation to
sensations and ideas which must be taken into account in any
explanation; its objectification in them and the universality of this
connection. Expression is embodiment. We find gayety in the colors of
the painting, joy in the musical tones, happiness in the pictured face,
tenderness in the sculptured pose. We hear the feeling in the sounds
and see it in the lines and colors. The happiness seems to belong to
the face, the joy to the tones, in the same simple and direct fashion
as the shape of the one or the pitch of the others. The feelings have
become true attributes. It is only by analysis that we pick them out,
separate them from the other elements of idea or sensation in the
whole, and then, for the purpose of scientific explanation, inquire
how they came to be connected. And this connection is not one that
depends upon the accidents of personal experience. It is not, for
example, like the emotional significance that the sound of the voice
of the loved one has for the lover, which even he may some day cease
to feel, and which other men do not feel at all. It is rather typified
by the emotional value of a melody, which, through psychological
processes common to all men, becomes a universal language of feeling.
The work of art is a communicable, not a private expression.

As we have observed, the elements of feeling in the aesthetic experience
are of two broad kinds--either vague, when directly linked with the
sensuous medium, or else definite, when this linkage is mediated by
ideas through which the medium is given content and meaning. The former
kind, which I shall consider first, comprises all cases of the emotional
expressiveness of the medium itself,--of tones and word-sounds and
their rhythms and patterns, of colors and lines and space-forms and
their designs. The detailed study of this expressiveness I shall leave
to the chapters on the arts; here I wish merely to indicate the kind
of psychological process involved.

In many cases the psychological principle of association operates. The
tender expressiveness of certain curved lines, like those of the Greek
amphora, for example, is due, partially at least, to association with
lines of the human body, with which normally this feeling is associated.
The associated object, together with its feeling tone, are sufficiently
common to the experience of all men to account for the universality
of the emotion, and the isolation of the stimulus--abstract line--from
its usual context of color and bulk accounts for the vagueness.
Sometimes, on the other hand, expressiveness seems to be due to a
direct psychological relation between the sense-stimulus and the
emotion. This is almost certainly the case with rhythms, and, as I
shall argue in the chapters on painting and music, is at least partially
true of colors and tones. The expressiveness is at once too immediate
and too universal to depend upon association with definite things and
events, or personal, emotional crises. A rhythm, for example, may be
exciting the first time it is heard; one does not have to wait to hear
it at a battle-charge; a melody may be sad even when one has never
heard it sung by chance at parting. Of course the fact that associations
are not remembered is no proof that they do not operate; but it is
difficult to conceive of any which could operate in these cases. For
this reason, I think, we must suppose that certain sense-stimuli and
combinations of stimuli not only produce in the sensory areas of the
brain the appropriate sensations, but that their effects are prolonged,
overflowing into the motor channels and there causing a total reaction
of the organism, the conscious aspect of which is a vague feeling. The
organic resonance is too slight and diffuse to produce a true emotion;
hence only a mood results.

In all the representative arts the vague expressiveness of the medium
is reinforced through emotions aroused by ideas which interpret
sensation as an element of a thing. The green in the painting is not
only green, but green of the sea; the red is not only red, but red of
the sky; the curved line is not a mere curve, it is the outline of a
wave. The totality of colors and lines is not a mere color and line
composition, but a marine landscape. The feeling tones of the elements
of this complex and of the complex itself are not only those of the
colors and lines as such, but of the interpretative ideas as well;
which in turn are the same as those of the corresponding real things.
The psychological process is here simple enough. The feeling tone of
the sea is carried by the idea of the sea, which now fuses with the
green color and wavy lines of the painting.

But in order fully to explain the phenomena of aesthetic expression,
it is not sufficient to show how the connection between feeling and
sensation and idea takes place; it is necessary, in addition, to explain
the nature of this connection. The feeling is not experienced by us
as what it is--our reaction to the sensations or represented
objects--but rather as an objective quality of them. The sounds are
sad, the curve tender, the sea placid and reposeful. Why is this?

The explanation is, I think, as follows. Despite their usual
subjectivity, feelings tend to be located in the objective world
whenever they are in conflict with or not directly rooted in the
personal life or character of the individual. In listening to music,
for example, feelings of despair and terror may be aroused in me who
am perhaps secure and happy; and even if the feelings are joyous, they
are not occasioned by any piece of personal good fortune--my situation
in life is the same now as before. Hence, finding no lodgment in the
ego, and having to exist somewhere, they seek a domicile in the sounds
evoking them. And, in general, works of art arouse but offer no personal
occasions for feeling, and therefore absorb it into themselves.

The process of objectification may, however, go further. It often
happens in the aesthetic experience that feelings are not objectified
alone, but carry with them the idea of the self--I come to feel
_myself_ as joyous or despairing in the sounds. The extent to which the
idea of the self thus follows the objectified feelings depends largely
upon the amount of their reverberation throughout the organism. When
this is small, and the feelings are vague and tenuous, as in color
appreciation, there is little or no definite projection of the idea
of the self; when, on the other hand, it is large and the emotions are
strong, as oftentimes in music, where breathing, circulation, hand and
foot are affected, then I myself seem to be there,--striving, pursuing,
struggling, in the sounds. I am where my body is. The projection of
the idea of the self is facilitated for the same reason when the body
is actually employed in the creation of the work of art, as in singing
and acting. It also occurs more readily when the life expressed in the
work of art is akin to the spectator's. Thus, an emotional and
suggestible woman, in watching a fine performance of "Magda," inevitably
puts herself in the place of the heroine if she has herself lived
through a similar experience. But when the life expressed is strikingly
foreign to our own, the projection of the idea of self is more
difficult; the duality between subject and object tends to remain.

These phenomena have excited special attention when, as in painting
and sculpture and the drama, a human being is represented. Suppose,
for example, I see a statue of a runner ready to start. I not only see
the form and color of the marble and recognize them as a man's; I also
feel emotions of excitement, tension, and expectation such as I should
myself feel were I too posed and waiting to run a race. And these
emotions I experience as the man's, and as his, not in a vague way,
but as definitely present in his sculptured form, even in particular
parts of it,--in the swelling chest and tightened limbs. Or consider
another case. Suppose I see Franz Hals' "Laughing Cavalier." I feel
jollity in the face, as the cavalier's. Yet in both cases I may feel
the emotions as also my own--as if I too were about to run or were
laughing. And the projection of the idea of the self will occur most
readily if I am myself a runner or a jolly person. In both instances,
moreover, the process will be mediated by impulses to movements that
are the normal accompaniments of the emotions in question. If I observe
myself carefully, I may find that my own chest is tending to swell and
my own limbs to tighten, in imitation of the runner's, or my own pupils
to dilate and the muscles of my face to wrinkle and to part, in
imitation of the Dutchman's. And these movement-impulses I objectify.
I not only see jollity in the face, but laughter as well; in the statue,
not only excitement, but running. And again--where my body is, there
am I; so I am jolly with the cavalier and excited with the runner. The
psychology of this process is simple enough. In my experience there
is a plain connection between the sight of a movement and sensations
attendant upon movement, and further, a connection between some of
these movements, namely, the expressive movements, and the emotions
which they express. In accordance with the law of association by
contiguity, whenever any one of several mental elements usually
connected together is present in the mind, the others tend to arise
also. So here. Seeing the semblance of tight muscles and a smiling
face, I feel the emotions which have these visual associates, experience
the correlated movement-sensations, project them all into the object
which initiated the process.

In recent years, a great deal has been made of these movement-sensations
in explaining aesthetic feeling. [Footnote: See the discussions in Lee
and Thompson: _Beauty and Ugliness_.] Yet in the case of all people who
are not strongly of the motor type, people in whose mental make-up
movement plays a minor part in comparison with vision and other
sensations, they play a secondary role, or even hardly any role at
all. Most spectators, indeed, instead of actually making slight
movements imitative of the movements seen or represented, and
experiencing the corresponding sensations, make no movements at all
and simply experience movement images; this substitution of image for
movement probably occurs in the minds of all except the most imitative.
Most people, even of the motor type, do not smile when they see the
"Laughing Cavalier" or start to run when they see the statue of the
runner; careful observation of themselves would disclose only faint
movement images which seem to play about their lips or limbs--mere
images of movement have supplanted movements. And many visualists would
not find any images at all. However, although the mistake has been
committed by some investigators of supposing that everybody experiences
movement because they themselves, being of the motor type, do, it
cannot be denied, I think, that such people attain to a vividness of
aesthetic living not reached by others. They appreciate beauty with
their bodies as well as with their souls. And in their case too, as
has been shown, aesthetic appreciation is more strongly histrionic--they
not only put themselves into the work of art, but the idea of themselves
as well.

Following the German school of einfuehlung, I have insisted throughout
this discussion on the importance of feeling in the aesthetic
experience; yet I do not think the voice of those people can be
neglected who claim that their experience with works of art is of
slight or no emotional intensity. There are people who would report
that they feel no jollity when they see the "Laughing Cavalier," or
anguish when they read the Ugolino Canto in the Inferno; yet such
people often have a highly developed aesthetic taste. How can this
difference be accounted for?

Starting with the emotional appreciation of art as primary, we can
account for it in this wise. It is a familiar phenomenon in the mental
life for a concept or idea of an emotional experience to take the place
of that experience. What man has not rejoiced when the simple and cold
judgment, "I suffered then," has come to supplant a recurring torment?
Or who that has lived constantly with a sick person has not observed
how, looking on the face of pain, inevitably the mere comment, "he is
in distress," comes to supplant the liveliest sympathetic thrill? There
are many reasons for this. The idea or judgment is a less taxing thing
than an emotion, and so is substituted for it in the mind, which
everywhere seeks economy of effort. The idea is also more efficient
from a practical point of view, because it leads directly to action
and does not divert and waste energy in diffused and useless movements.
The physician simply recognizes the states of mind of his patients,
he does not sympathize with them. Finally our own reactions to an
objectified emotion may interfere with the emotion. If, for example,
we see an angry man, our own fear of him may entirely supplant our
sympathetic feeling of his anger. In general, in our dealings with our
fellow men, we are too busy with our attitudes and plans with reference
to them, and too much concerned with economizing our emotional energy,
to get a sympathetic intuition of their inner life, and so are content
with an intellectual recognition of it. Now this habit of substituting
the more rapid and economical process of judgment for the longer and
more taxing one of sympathy, is carried over into the world of art.

Nevertheless, the world of art is a region especially fitted for
_einfuehlung._ For there the need for quick action, which in life
tends to syncopate emotion, does not exist. The characteristic attitude
of art is leisurely absorption in an object, giving time for all the
possibilities of feeling or other experience to develop. Moreover, in
art there is not the same saving need for the substitution of idea for
feeling as in real life. For in art, feeling is not so strong as in
life; even when the artist expresses his own personal experience, he
lightens its emotional burden through expression, and we, when we make
his experience ours, find a similar relief. The emotion is genuine,
only weakened in intensity. In other cases, where the artist constructs
a world of fictitious characters and events, our knowledge that they
are not real suffices to diminish the intensity of the emotions aroused.
For emotions have the practical function of inciting to action, and
when action is impossible, as in the purely ideal world of the artist,
they cannot keep their natural intensity. We cannot feel so strongly
over the mere idea of an event as over a real event. Were it otherwise,
who could stand the strain of _Hamlet_ or _Othello_?

Throughout this discussion of the elements of the experience of art,
I have used the terms emotion and feeling with an inclusive meaning,
to cover impulses as well as feelings in the narrower sense. For in
the aesthetic experience, there are impulses--impulses to move when
action is represented in picture and statue, impulses to act, as when,
in watching a play, we put ourselves in the place of the persons. But
such impulses are always checked through the realization that they
come from sources unrelated to our purposes, and fail to get the
reenforcement or consent of the total self necessary to action. In
reading or singing the "Marseillaise," to cite an example from poetry,
I experience all kinds of impulses--to shoulder a musket, to march,
to kill--but no one of them is carried out. Now an inhibited impulse
is scarcely distinguishable from an emotion. With few exceptions, the
impulses in art do not issue in resolves, decisions, determinations
to act; or, if they do, the determinations refer to acts to be executed
in the future, in an experience distinct and remote from the
sthetic--the "Marseillaise" has doubtless produced such resolutions
in the minds of Frenchmen; and there is much art that is productive
in that way, providing the "birth in beauty" of which Plato wrote.
[Footnote: In the _Symposium_.] In art, impulses result in immediate
action only when action is itself the medium of expression, as in the
dance, where impulses to movement pass over into motion. Of course such
actions still remain aesthetic since they serve no practical end and are
valued for themselves.

If the question were raised, which is more fundamental in the aesthetic
experience, idea or emotion? the answer would have to be, emotion. For
there exists at least one great art where no explicit ideas are present,
music, whereas art without emotion does not exist. Take away the
emotional content from expression and you get either a mere play of
sensations, like fireworks, or else pseudo-science, like the modern
naturalistic play. However, the supreme importance of the idea in art
cannot be denied. Every complex work of art, save music, is an
expression of ideas as well as of feelings, and even in music there
exists the tendency for feeling to seek definition in ideas--do we not
say a musical idea? And do we not find the masters of so abstract an
art as ornament employing their materials to represent symbolic
conceptions? I wish to call the attention of the reader to certain
very general considerations touching the nature and function of ideas
in the aesthetic experience, leaving the study of the concrete problems
to the more special chapters.

First, the relation of the idea to the sense medium of the expression.
Here, I think, we find something comparable to the process of
_einfuehlung_. For in art, ideas, like feelings, are objectified
in sensation. Only sensations are given; out of the mind come ideas
through which the former are interpreted and made into the semblance
of things. Consider, for example, Rembrandt's "Night-Watch." A festal
mood is there in the golds and reds, and gloom in the blacks; but there
also are the men and drums and arms. If we wished to push the analogy
with _einfuehlung_, we might coin a corresponding term--_einmeinung_,
"inmeaning." In all the representative arts, this is a process of equal
importance with infeeling; for the artist strives just as much to
realize his ideas of objects in the sense material of his art as to put
his moods there.

When, moreover, we consider that the expression of the more complex
and definite emotions is dependent upon the expression of ideas of
nature and human life, we see that the process is really a single one.
Feeling is a function of ideas; if, then, we demand sincerity in the
one, we must equally demand conviction in the other. The poet could
not convey to us his pleasure at the sight of nature or his awe of
death unless he could somehow bring us into their presence. The painter
could not express the moods of sunlight or of shadow until he had
invented a technique for their representation. Clear and confident
seeing is a condition of feeling. Hence every advance in the imitation
of nature is an advance in the power of expression. The demand for
fidelity of representation, for "truth to nature," so insistently made
by the common man in his criticism of art, is justified even from the
point of view of expressionism.

Yet this fidelity of representation does not involve exact reproduction
of nature. The limitations of the media of the arts definitely exclude
this. No painter can reproduce on a canvas the infinite detail of any
object or exactly imitate its colors and lines. In the single matter
of brightness, for example, his medium is hopelessly inadequate; even
the light of the moon is beyond his power, not to speak of the light
of the sun; he has to substitute a relative for an absolute scale of
values. The sculptor cannot reproduce the color or hair of the human
body. However, this failure exactly to imitate nature does not prevent
the artist from suggesting to us ideas of the objects in which he is
interested. If the outline of the marble be that of a man, we get the
idea of a man; if the color and shape be that of a tree, we get the
idea of a tree. Our acceptance of these ideas is, of course, only
partial; for we are equally susceptible to the negative suggestions
of the whiteness of the marble and the smallness of the outline of the
tree. Every work of art represents a sort of compromise between reality
and unreality, belief and disbelief.

Nevertheless, despite this compromise, the purpose of art is
uncompromisingly attained. For art does not seek to give us nature
over again, but to express its feeling tones, and these are conveyed
when we get an idea of the corresponding object, even if that idea is
inadequate from a strictly scientific point of view. We do not react
emotionally to the infinite detail of any object, but only to its
presence as a whole and to certain salient features. The artist succeeds
when he constructs a humanized image of the object--one which arouses
and becomes a center for feeling. This image, when made of a few
elements, may be far more telling than a much more accurate copy; for
there is no diffusion of interest to irrelevant aspects. How effective
a medium for expression are the few and simple lines of Beardsley's
draftsmanship! The amount of detail necessary to convey an emotionally
effective idea is relative to the technique of the different arts and
varies also with the suggestibility and discrimination of the observer.
Here no a priori principles can be laid down for what only the
experimental practice of the artist can determine.

Moreover, the negative suggestions of a work of art, although they are
effective in preventing entire belief in the reality of the idea
expressed, do not hinder the communication and appreciation of the
attached feelings. Just so long as the belief attitude is not wholly
extinguished, this is the case; and the skillful artist takes care of
that. Of course, an attitude of self-surrender, of willingness to
accept suggestions, has to be present and we cooperate with the artist
in creating it. Aesthetic belief implies sufficient abandon that we
may react emotionally to a suggestion, but not enough that we may react
practically. We let the idea tell upon our feelings; we do not let it
incite us to action. The aesthetic plausibility of an idea depends
largely upon its initial plausibility with the artist. There is nothing
more contagious than belief. To utter things with an accent of
conviction is half the battle in getting oneself believed. If the
artist pretends to believe something and expresses himself with an air
of assurance, we accept it, no matter how preposterous it may be from
the practical or scientific point of view. Think of Rabelais!

A work of art is a logical system. It presupposes certain assumptions,
postulates, conventions, which we must accept if we are to live in its
world. Now, in order that we may accept them, the artist must first
have vividly accepted them himself. Only if they have become a very
part of him, can they become at all valid for us. The failure of
classicistic art in a non-classical age, of "Pre-Raphaelitism" after
Raphael, is a failure in this--the artist has never lived even
imaginatively in the world he depicts. His belief is an artifice and
a sham, and he cannot impose upon us with his pretense. But once we
have accepted the artist's postulates, then we are prepared to follow
him in his conclusions. In the Homeric world, we shall not balk at the
intercourse between gods and men; in mediaeval painting and drama, we
shall accept miracle; in _Alice in Wonderland_, we shall accept
any dream-like enchantment. But we demand that the conclusions shall
follow from the premises, that the whole be consistent. We cannot
tolerate miracle in a realistic novel or drama, or glaring inaccuracy
of fact in a historical novel, because they are in contradiction to
the laws of reality tacitly assumed. The final demand which we make
of any work, of art is that it live. What can be made to live for us
may be beautiful to us. But nothing can draw our life into itself which
has not drawn the artist's, or which is untrue to its own inner logic.

One of the most life-creating elements of a work of art is imagery.
Everywhere in art the tendency exists for ideas to be filled out,
rendered concrete and vivid, through images. In looking at a painting
of a summer landscape, for example, we not only recognize the colors
as meaning sunlight, but actually experience them as warm; in looking
at a statue we not only recognize its surface as that of the body of
a woman, but we feel its softness and smoothness; which involves that
the ideas of sunlight and a human body, employed in interpreting the
sensations received from these works of art, are developed back into
the original mass of images from which they were derived. However,
although ideas are formed from images, they are not images,--as our
ordinary employment of them in recognizing objects attests. We may and
usually do, for example, recognize a mirror as smooth without
experiencing it as smooth--the image equivalent of the idea remains
latent. Our ordinary experience with objects is too hasty and too
intent on practical ends for images to develop. On the other hand, the
leisurely attitude characteristic of the aesthetic experience is
favorable to the recall of images; hence, just as in the aesthetic
perception of objects we put our feelings into them, so equally we
import into them the relevant images. The aesthetic reaction tends to
be total. Our demand for feeling in art also requires the image; for
feelings are more vividly attached to images than to abstract ideas.
It is a fact familiar in the experience of everybody that the strength
of the emotional tone of an object is a function of the clearness of
the image which we form of it on recall. We can preserve the feeling
tone of a past event or an absent object only if we can keep a vivid
image of it; as our image of it becomes vague, our interest in it
dissipates. Everywhere in our experience the image mediates between
feeling and idea. So in art. Images have no more an independent and
self-sufficient status in art than sensations have; like the latter
they are a means for the expression of feeling. In the painting of
sunlight, for example, the images of warmth carry joyousness and a
sense of ease; in the statue, the tactile images convey the emotional
response to the represented object. In literature the expressiveness
of images is perhaps even more impressive. Consider how longing is
aroused by the tactile, gustatory, and thermal images in the oft-quoted
lines of Keats:--

  O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
  Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth.

Examples might be multiplied indefinitely.

In literature alone of the arts, images from all departments of sense
can be aroused. Visual images play a greater role there than in painting
and sculpture, for the reason that, in the latter, visual sensations
take their place--we do not image what we can see. In sculpture, the
greater part of the imagery is of touch and motion--in the imagination,
we feel the surfaces and move with the represented motions; the
whiteness or blackness of the materials prevents the arousal of the
image of the color of the body. In painting, besides the temperature
images already mentioned, there are touch images--in still-life, for
example, when silks and furs are represented; images of odors, in
flower pieces; of motion, in pictures which depict motion, as in the
racing horses of Degas; of taste, in pictures of wine and fruit. Of
course the kind and amount of imagery depend upon the imaginal type
to which the spectator belongs and the wealth of the imaginal furnishing
of his mind. In any art, moreover, the chief and requisite thing is
expression through the sense medium, which should never be obscured
by expression through associated images. It is not the primary business
of a flower painter to arouse images of perfume, but to compose colors
and lines; nor the function of the musician to arouse the visual images
which accompany the musical experience of many people, but to compose
sounds. In sculpture, on the other hand, images of touch and movement
play an almost necessary part, for they are constituent elements in
the representation of form and motion; yet it is not indispensable to
the appreciation of sculpture that images of the sweet odor of the
human body be awakened. The image is seldom the basis of aesthetic
appreciation; it is more often its completion. But we shall go into
these matters more in detail in our special chapters.

In the representative arts, particularly painting and sculpture, the
associated images are fused with the visual sensations which constitute
the medium. I see the softness and sweet-odorousness of the painted
rose petal, just as I see the real rose soft and sweet; I see the
surface of the statue firm and shapely, just as I see the human body
so. This is because the ideas of the things represented in painting
and sculpture seem to be actually present in the visual sensations
which they interpret; the flower and the man seem to be there before
me. In these arts, aesthetic perception is a fusion of image with
sensation in much the way that normal perception is. In literature and
music, on the other hand, the connection between the sense medium of
the art and the associated images is less close; and for the reason
that the sounds are no part of the things which they bring before the
mind. In looking at a picture of a rose, I see the red as an element
of the rose represented; whereas, in reading about a rose, I only seem
to hear a voice describing it. In the latter case, therefore, the
olfactory and visual images have a certain remoteness and independence
of the word-sounds; I do not actually see and smell them in the sounds.
However, in the case of familiar words with a strong emotional
significance, the fusion of image with sound may be almost complete.
Who, for example, does not see a sweet and red image of a rose into
the word-sounds when he reads:--

  Oh, my love's like a red, red rose
  That's newly sprung in June.

Or, when Dante describes the _selva oscura_, who does not see the
darkness in the word _oscura_? In all such cases a strong feeling
tone binds together the word-sound with the image. This fusion is most
striking in poetry because of the highly emotional material with which
it works.

The ideas and images associated with a work of art depend very largely
on the education, experience, and idiosyncrasy of the spectator. The
scholar, for example, will put tenfold more meaning into his reading
of the _Divine Comedy_ than the untrained person. Or compare Pater's
interpretation of the "Mona Lisa" with Muther's. Can we say that certain
ideas and images belong properly to the work of art, while others do
not? With regard to this, we can, I think, set up two criteria. First,
the intention of the artist--whatever the artist meant his work to
express: that it expresses. Yet, since this can never be certainly and
completely discovered, there must always remain a large region of
undetermined interpretation. Now for judging the relevancy of this
penumbra of meaning and association the following test applies--does it
bring us back to the sensuous medium of the work of art or lead us away?
Anything is legitimate which we actually put into the form of the work
of art and keep there, while whatever merely hangs loose around it is
illegitimate. For example, if while listening to music we give ourselves
up to personal memories and fancies, we are almost sure to neglect the
sounds and their structure; we cannot objectify the former in the
latter; with the result that the composition is largely lost to us.
Naturally, no hard and fast lines can be drawn, especially in the case
of works of vague import like music; yet we can use this criterion as a
principle for regulating and inhibiting our associations. It demands of
us a wide-awake and receptive appreciation. The genuine meanings and
associations of a work of art are those which are the irresistible and
necessary results of the sense stimuli working upon an attentive
percipient; the rest are not only arbitrary, but injurious.

To this, some people would doubtless object on the ground that art was
made for man and not man for art. The work of art, they would claim,
should interpret the personal experience of the spectator; hence
whatever he puts into it belongs there of right. There are, however,
two considerations limiting the validity of this assertion. First, the
work of art is primarily an expression of the artist's personality
and, second, its purpose is to provide a common medium of expression
for the experience of all men. If interpretation remains a purely
individual affair, both its relation to the artist and the possibility
of a common aesthetic experience through it are destroyed. For this
reason we should, I believe, deliberately seek to make our appreciations
historically sound and definite. And in the social and historical
appreciation resulting, we shall find our own lives--not so different
from the artist's and our fellows'--abundantly and sufficiently
expressed.




CHAPTER V

THE ANALYSIS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: THE STRUCTURE OF THE
EXPERIENCE


In our discussion of first principles, we set down a high degree of
unity as one of the distinguishing characteristics of works of art.
In this we followed close upon ancient tradition; for the markedly
structural character of beauty was noticed by the earliest observers.
Plato, the first philosopher of art, identified beauty with simplicity,
harmony, and proportion, and Aristotle held the same view. They were
so impressed with aesthetic unity that they compared it with the other
most highly unified type of thing they knew, the organism; and ever
afterwards it has been called "organic unity." With the backing of
such authority, unity in variety was long thought to be the same as
beauty; and, although this view is obviously one-sided, no one has
since succeeded in persuading men that an object can be beautiful
without unity.

Since art is expression, its unity is, unavoidably, an image of the
unity of the things in nature and mind which it expresses. A lyric
poem reflects the unity of mood that binds together the thoughts and
images of the poet; the drama and novel, the unity of plan and purpose
in the acts of men and the fateful sequence of causes and effects in
their lives. The statue reflects the organic unity of the body; the
painting, the spatial unity of visible things. In beautiful artifacts,
the basal unity is the purpose or end embodied in the material
structure.

But the unity of works of art is not wholly derivative; for it occurs
in the free arts like music, where nothing is imitated, and even in
the representative arts, as we have observed, it is closer than in the
things which are imaged. Aesthetic unity is therefore unique and, if
we would understand it, we must seek its reason in the peculiar nature
and purpose of art. Since, moreover, art is a complex fact, the
explanation of its unity is not simple; the unity itself is very
intricate and depends upon many cooperating factors.

In the case of the imitative arts, taking the given unity of the objects
represented as a basis, the superior unity of the image is partly due
to the singleness of the artist's interest. For art, as we know, is
never the expression of mere things, but of things so far as they have
value. Out of the infinite fullness of nature and of life, the artist
selects those elements that have a unique significance for him.

  Music, when soft voices die,
  Vibrates in the memory;
  Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
  Live within the sense they quicken;
  Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
  Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
  And so thy thoughts when thou art gone,
  Love itself shall slumber on.

Observe how, out of the countless things which he knows, the poet has
chosen those which he feels akin to his faith in the immortality of
love. The painter would not, if he could, reproduce all the elements
of a face, but only those that are expressive of the interpretation
of character he wishes to convey. The novelist and the dramatist proceed
in a like selective fashion in the treatment of their material. In the
lives of men there are a thousand actions and events--casual spoken
words, recurrent processes such as eating and dressing, hours of
idleness and futility which, because repetitious, habitual, or
inconsequential, throw no light upon that alone in which we are
interested,--character and fortune. To describe a single example of
these facts suffices. In the novel and drama, therefore, the
personalities and life histories of men have a simplicity and singleness
of direction not found in reality. The artist seeks everywhere the
traits that individualize and characterize, and neglects all others.

Moreover, since the aim of art is to afford pleasure in the intuition
of life, the artist will try to reveal the hidden unities that so
delight the mind to discover. He will aim to penetrate beneath the
surface of experience observed by common perception, to its more obscure
logic underneath. In this way he will go beyond what the mere mechanism
of imitation requires. The poet, for example, manifests latent emotional
harmonies among the most widely sundered things. The subtle novelist
shows how single elements of character, apparently isolated acts or
trivial incidents, are fateful of consequences. He discloses the minute
reactions of one personality upon another. Or he enters into the soul
of man himself, into his private and individual selfhood, and uncovers
the hidden connections between thought and feeling and impulse. Finally,
he may take the wider sweep of society and tradition into view and
track out their part in the molding of man and his fate. In the search
for unity, the artist is on common ground with the man of science; but
with this difference: the artist is concerned with laws operating in
concrete, individual things in which he is interested; while the
scientist formulates them in the abstract. For the artist, unity is
valuable as characterizing a significant individual; for the scientist,
it is valuable in itself, and the individual only as an example of it.

This same purpose of affording pleasure in sympathetic vision leads
the artist not only to present the unity of life, but so to organize
its material that it will be clear to the mind which perceives it. Too
great a multitude of elements, elements that are not assorted into
groups and tied by relations or principles, cannot be grasped. Hence
the artist infuses into the world which he creates a new and wholly
subjective simplicity and unity, to which there is no parallel in
nature. The composition of elements in a picture does not correspond
to any actual arrangement of elements in a landscape, but to the demands
of visual perspicuity. The division of a novel into chapters, of the
chapters into paragraphs, of the paragraphs into sentences, although
it may answer in some measure to the objective divisions of the
life-story related, corresponds much more closely to the subjective
need for ready apprehension. The artist meets this need halfway in the
organization of the material which he presents. Full beauty depends
upon an adaptation of the object to the senses, attention, and synthetic
functions of the mind. The long, rambling novel of the eighteenth
century is a more faithful image of the fullness and diversity of life,
but it answers ill to the limited sweep of the mind, its proneness to
fatigue, and its craving for wholeness of view.

But even all the reasons so far invoked--the necessity for significance,
the interest in unity, the demand for perspicuity--do not, I think,
suffice to explain the structure of works of art. For structure has,
oftentimes, a direct emotional appeal, which has not yet been taken
into account, and which is a leading motive for its presence. Consider,
for example, symmetry. A symmetrical disposition of parts is indeed
favorable to perspicuity; for it is easier to find on either side what
we have already found on the other, the sight of one side preparing
us for the sight of the other; and such an arrangement is flattering
to our craving for unity, for we rejoice seeing the same pattern
expressed in the two parts; yet the experience of symmetry is richer
still: it includes an agreeable feeling of balance, steadfastness,
stability. This is most evident in the case of visual objects, like
a Greek vase, where there is a plain division between right and left
similar halves; but it is also felt in music when there is a balance
of themes in the earlier and later parts of a composition, and in
literature in the well-balanced sentence, paragraph, or poem. To cite
the very simplest example, if I read, "on the one hand ... on the other
hand," I have a feeling of balanced tensions precisely analogous to
what I experience when I look at a vase. Structure is not a purely
intellectual or perceptive affair; it is also motor and organic, and
that means emotional. It is felt with the body as well as understood
by the mind. I have used the case of symmetry to bring out this truth,
but I might have used other types of unification, each of which has
its unique feeling tone, as I shall show presently, after I have
analyzed them.

Keeping in mind the motives which explain the structure of works of
art, I wish now to distinguish and describe the chief types. There
are, I think, three of these, of which each one may include important
special forms--unity in variety, dominance, and equilibrium.

Unity in variety was the earliest of the types to be observed and is
the most fundamental. It is the organic unity so often referred to in
criticism. It involves, in the first place, wholeness or individuality.
Every work of art is a definite single thing, distinct and separate
from other things, and not divisible into parts which are themselves
complete works of art. No part can be taken away without damage to the
whole, and when taken out of the whole, the part loses much of its own
value. The whole needs all of its parts and they need it; "there they
live and move and have their being." The unity is a unity of the variety
and the variety is a differentiation of the unity.[Footnote: Cf. Lipps:
_Aesthetik_, Bd. I, Drittes Kapitel.] The variety is of equal
importance with the unity, for unity can assert itself and work only
through the control of a multiplicity of elements. The analogy between
the unity of the work of art and the unity of the organism is still
the most accurate and illuminating. For, like the work of art, the
body is a self-sufficient and distinctive whole, whose unified life
depends upon the functioning of many members, which, for their part,
are dead when cut away from it.

The conception of unity in variety as organic represents an ideal or
norm for art, which is only imperfectly realized in many works. There
are few novels which would be seriously damaged by the omission of
whole chapters, and many a rambling essay in good standing would permit
pruning without injury, unless indeed we are made to feel that the
apparently dispensable material really contributes something of fullness
and exuberance, and so is not superfluous, after all. The unity in
some forms of art is tighter than in others; in a play closer than in
a novel; in a sonnet more compact than in an epic. In extreme examples,
like _The Thousand and One Nights,_ the _Decameron,_ the _Canterbury
Tales,_ the unity is almost wholly nominal, and the work is really a
collection, not a whole. With all admissions, it remains true, however,
that offenses against the principle of unity in variety diminish the
aesthetic value of a work. These offenses are of two kinds--the
inclusion of the genuinely irrelevant, and multiple unity, like double
composition in a picture, or ambiguity of style in a building. There may
be two or more parallel lines of action in a play or a novel, two or
more themes in music, but they must be interwoven and interdependent.
Otherwise there occurs the phenomenon aptly called by Lipps "aesthetic
rivalry"--each part claims to be the whole and to exclude its neighbor;
yet being unable to do this, suffers injury through divided attention.

Unity in variety may exist in any one or more of three modes--the
harmony or union of cooperating elements; the balance of contrasting
or conflicting elements; the development or evolution of a process
towards an end or climax. The first two are predominantly static or
spatial; the last, dynamic and temporal. I know of no better way of
indicating the characteristic quality of each than by citing examples.

Aesthetic harmony exists whenever some identical quality or form or
purpose is embodied in various elements of a whole--sameness in
difference. The repetition of the same space-form in architecture,
like the round arch and window in the Roman style; the recurrence of
the same motive in music; the use of a single hue to color the different
objects in a painting, as in a nocturne of Whistler: these are simple
illustrations of harmony. An almost equally simple case is gradation
or lawful change of quality in space and time--the increase or decrease
of loudness in music of saturation or brightness of hue in painting,
the gentle change of direction of a curved line. In these cases there
is, of course, a dynamic or dramatic effect, if you take the elements
in sequence; but when taken simultaneously and together, they are a
harmony, not a development. Simplest of all is the harmony between
like parts of regular figures, such as squares and circles; or between
colors which are neighboring in hue. Harmonious also are characters
in a story or play which are united by feelings of love, friendship,
or loyalty. Thus there is harmony between Hamlet and Horatio, or between
the Cid and his followers.

Aesthetic balance is the unity between elements which, while they
oppose or conflict with one another, nevertheless need or supplement
each other. Hostile things, enemies at war, business men that compete,
persons that hate each other, have as great a need of their opponents,
in order that there may be a certain type of life, as friends have,
in order that there may be love between them; and in relation to each
other they create a whole in the one case as in the other. There is
as genuine a unity between contrasting colors and musical themes as
there is between colors closely allied in hue or themes simply
transposed in key. Contrasting elements are always the extremes of
some series, and are unified, despite the contrast, because they
supplement each other. Things merely different, no matter how different,
cannot contrast, for there must be some underlying whole, to which
both belong, in which they are unified. In order that this unity may
be felt, it is often necessary to avoid absolute extremes, or at least
to mediate between them. Among colors, for example, hues somewhat
closer than the complementary are preferred to the latter, or, if the
extremes are employed, each one leads up to the other through
intermediate hues. The unity of contrasting colors is a balance because,
as extremes, they take an equal hold on the attention. The well-known
accentuation of contrasting elements does not interfere with the
balance, because it is mutual. A balanced unity is also created by
contrasts of character, as in Goethe's _Tasso_, or by a conflict
between social classes or parties, as in Hauptmann's _Die Weber_.
Balanced, finally, is the unity between the elements of a painting,
right and left, which draw the attention in opposite directions. The
third type of unity appears in any process or sequence in which all
the elements, one after another, contribute towards the bringing about
of some end or result. It is the unity characteristic of all
teleologically related facts. The sequence cannot be a mere succession
or even a simple causal series, but must also be purposive, because,
in order to be aesthetic, the goal which is reached must have value.
Causality is an important aspect of this type of unity, as in the
drama, but only because a teleological series of actions depends upon
a chain of causally related means and ends. The type is of two
varieties: in the one, the movement is smooth, each element being
harmoniously related to the last; in the other, it is difficult and
dramatic, proceeding through the resolution of oppositions among its
elements. The movement usually has three stages: an initial phase of
introduction and preparation; a second phase of opposition and
complication; then a final one, the climax or catastrophe, when the
goal is reached; there may also be a fourth,--the working out of the
consequences of this last. Illustrations of this mode of unity are:
the course of a story or a play from the introduction of the characters
and the complication of the plot to the denouement or solving of the
problem; the development of a character in a novel from a state of
simplicity or innocence through storm and stress into maturity or ruin;
the evolution of a sentiment in a sonnet towards its final statement
in the last line or two; the melody, in its departure from the keynote,
its going forth and return; the career of a line.

As I have indicated before, each type of unity has its specific
emotional quality. The very word harmony which we use to denote the
first mode is itself connotative of a way of being affected, of being
moved emotionally. The mood of this mode is quiet, oneness, peace. We
feel as if we were closely and compactly put together. If now, within
the aesthetic whole, we emphasize the variety, we begin to lose the
mood of peace; tensions arise, until, in the case of contrast and
opposition, there is a feeling of conflict and division in the self;
yet without loss of unity, because, if the whole is aesthetic, each of
the opposing elements demands the other; hence there is balance between
them, and this also we not only know to be there, but feel there. The
characteristic mood of the evolutionary type of unity is equally
unique--either a sense of easy motion, when the process is unobstructed,
or excitement and breathlessness, when there is opposition.

The different types of unity are by no means exclusive of each other
and are usually found together in any complex work of art. Symmetry
usually involves a combination of harmony and balance. The symmetrical
halves of a Greek vase, for example, are harmonious in so far as their
size and shape are the same, yet balanced as being disposed in opposite
directions, right and left. Rhythm is temporal symmetry, and so also
represents a combination of harmony and balance. Static rhythm is only
apparent; for in every seeming case, the rhythm really pervades the
succession of acts of attention to the elements rather than the elements
themselves; a colonnade, for example, is rhythmical only when the
attention moves from one column to another. There is harmony in rhythm,
for there is always some law--metrical scheme in poetry, time in music,
similarity of column and equality of interval between them in a
colonnade--pervading the elements. But there is also balance; for as
the elements enter the mind one after the other, there is rivalry
between the element now occupying the focus of the attention and the
one that is about to present an equal claim to this position. Because
of its intrinsic value, we tend to hold on to each element as we hear
or see it, but are forced to relinquish it for the sake of the one
that follows; only for a moment can we keep both in the conscious span;
the recurrence and overcoming of the resulting tension, as we follow
the succession through, creates the pulsation so characteristic of
rhythm. The opposition of the elements as in turn they crowd each other
out does not, however, interfere with the harmony, for they have an
existence all together in memory, where the law binding them can be
felt,--a law which each element as it comes into consciousness is
recognized as fulfilling. Since we usually look forward to the end of
the rhythmical movement as a goal, rhythm often exists in combination
with evolution, and is therefore the most inclusive of all artistic
structural forms. In a poem, for example, the metrical rhythm is a
framework overlying the development of the thought. Dramatic unity is
found combined with balance even in the static arts, as, for example,
in the combination of blue and gold, where the balance is not quite
equal, because of a slight movement from the blue to the more brilliant
and striking gold. I have already shown how harmony, opposition, and
evolution may be combined in a melody. In the drama, also, all three
are present. There is a balance of opposing and conflicting wills or
forces; this is unstable; whence movement follows, leading on to the
catastrophe, where the problem is solved; and throughout there is a
single mood or atmosphere in which all participate, creating an
enveloping harmony despite the tension and action. And other
illustrations of combinations of types will come to the mind of every
reader.

Each form of unity has its difficulties and dangers, which must be
avoided if perfection is to be attained. In harmony there may be too
much identity and too little difference or variety, with the result
that the whole becomes tedious and uninteresting. This is the fault
of rigid symmetry and of all other simple geometrical types of
composition, which, for this reason, have lost their old popularity
in the decorative and pictorial arts. In balance, on the other hand,
the danger is that there may be too great a variety, too strong an
opposition; the elements tend to fly apart, threatening the integrity
of the whole. For it is not sufficient that wholeness exist in a work
of art; it must also be felt. For example, in Pre-Raphaelite paintings
and in most of the Secession work of our own day, the color contrasts
are too strong; there is no impression of visual unity. In the dramatic
type of unity there are two chief dangers--that the evolution be
tortuous, so that we lose our way in its bypaths and mazes; or, on the
other hand, that the end be reached too simply and quickly; in the one
case, we lose heart for the journey because of the obstacles; in the
other, we lose interest and are bored for want of incidents.

We come now to the second great principle of aesthetic structure--
Dominance.[Footnote: Cf. Lipps: _Aesthetik_, Bd. I, S. 53, Viertes
Kapitel] In an aesthetic whole the elements are seldom all on a level;
some are superior, others subordinate. The unity is mediated through
one or more accented elements, through which the whole comes to emphatic
expression. The attention is not evenly distributed among the parts,
but proceeds from certain ones which are focal and commanding to others
which are of lesser interest. And the dominant elements are not only
superior in significance; they are, in addition, representative of the
whole; in them, its value is concentrated; they are the key by means
of which its structure can be understood. They are like good rulers
in a constitutional state, who are at once preeminent members of the
community and signal embodiments of the common will. Anything which
distinguishes and makes representative of the whole serves to make
dominant. In a well-constructed play there are one or more characters
which are central to the action, in whom the spirit and problem of the
piece are embodied, as Hamlet in _Hamlet_ and Brand in _Brand_; in every
plot there is the catastrophe or turning point, for which every
preceding incident is a preparation, and of which every following one is
a consequent; in a melody there is the keynote; in the larger
composition there are the one or more themes whose working out is the
piece; in a picture there are certain elements which especially attract
the attention, about which the others are composed. In the more complex
rhythms, in meters, for example, the elements are grouped around the
accented ones. In an aesthetic whole there are certain qualities and
positions which, because of their claim upon the attention, tend to make
dominant any elements which possess them. In space-forms the center and
the edges are naturally places of preeminence. The eye falls first upon
the center and then is drawn away to the boundaries. In old pictures,
the Madonna or Christ is placed in the center and the angels near the
perimeter; in fancy work it is the center and the border which women
embroider. In time, the beginning, middle, and end are the natural
places of importance; the beginning, because there the attention is
fresh and expectant; towards the middle, because there we tend to rest,
looking backward to the commencement and forward to the end; the end
itself, because being last in the mind, its hold upon the memory is
firmest. In any process the beginning is important as the start, the
plan, the preparation; the middle as the climax and turning point; the
end as the consummation. Of course by the middle is not meant a
mathematical point of division into equal parts, but a psychological
point, which is usually nearer the end, because the impetus of action
and purpose carry forward and beyond. Thus in a plot the beginning
stands out as setting the problem and introducing the characters and
situation; then the movement of the action, gathering force increasingly
as it proceeds, breaks at some point well beyond the middle; in the last
part the problem is solved and the consequences of the action are
revealed. Large size is another quality which distinguishes and tends to
make dominant, as in the tower and the mountain. In one of Memling's
paintings, "St. Ursula and the Maidens," which, when I saw it, was in
Bruges, the lady is represented twice as tall as the full grown girls
whom she envelops in her protecting cloak; yet, despite the
unnaturalness, we do not experience any incongruity; for it is rational
to our feeling. Intensity of any sort is another property which creates
dominance--loudness of sound in music; concentration of light in
painting, as in Rembrandt; stress in rhythm; depth and scope of purpose
and feeling, as in the great characters of fiction. The effectiveness of
intensity may be greatly increased through contrast--the pianissimo
after the fortissimo; the pathos of the fifth act of _Hamlet_ set off by
the comedy of the first scene. Sometimes all the natural qualifications
of eminence are united in a single work: in old paintings, for example,
the Christ Child, spiritually the most significant element of the whole,
will be of supernatural size, will occupy the center of the picture,
will have the light concentrated upon him, and will be dressed in
brightly gleaming garments.

As I have already indicated, there may be more than one dominant
element; for instance, two or more principal characters in a novel or
play--Lord and Lady Macbeth, Sancho and Don Quixote, Othello and
Desdemona, Brand and his wife. In this case, there must be either
subordination among them, a hierarchical arrangement; or else
reciprocity or balance, as in the illustrations cited, where it is
difficult to tell which is the more important of the two; otherwise
they would pull the whole apart. The advantage of several dominant
elements lies in the greater animation, and when the work is large,
in the superior organization, which they confer. In order that there
may be perspicuity, it is necessary, when there are many elements,
that they be separated into minor groups around high points which
individualize and represent them, and so take their place in the mind,
mediating between them and unity when a final synthesis of the whole
is to be made.

The third great principle of aesthetic structure is equilibrium or
impartiality. This is a principle counteracting dominance. It demands,
despite the subordination among the elements, that none be neglected.
Each, no matter how minor its part in the whole, must have some unique
value of its own, must be an end as well as a means. Dominance is the
aristocratic principle in art, the rule of the best; this is the
democratic principle, the demand for freedom and significance for all.
Just as, in a well-ordered state, the happiness of no individual or
class of individuals is sacrificed to that of other individuals or
classes; so in art, each part must be elaborated and perfected, not
merely for the sake of its contribution to the whole, but for its own
sake. There should be no mere figure-heads or machinery. Loving care
of detail, of the incidental, characterizes the best art.

Of course this principle, like the others, is an ideal or norm, which
is only imperfectly realized in many works of art. Many a poet finds
it necessary to fill in his lines and many a painter and musician does
the like with his pictures or compositions. There is much mere
scaffolding and many lay-figures in drama and novel. But the work of
the masters is different. There each line or stroke or musical phrase,
each character or incident, is unique or meaningful. The greatest
example of this is perhaps the _Divine Comedy_, where each of the
hundred cantos and each line of each canto is perfect in workmanship
and packed with significance. There is, of course, a limit to this
elaboration of the parts, set by the demands for unity and wholeness.
The individuality of the elements must not be so great that we rest
in them severally, caring little or nothing for their relations to one
another and to the whole. The contribution of this principle is
richness. Unity in variety gives wholeness; dominance, order;
equilibrium, wealth, interest, vitality.

The structure of works of art is even more complicated than would
appear from the description given thus far. For there is not only the
unity of the elements among themselves, but between the two aspects
of each element and of the whole--the form and content. This--the unity
between the sense medium and whatever of thought and feeling is embodied
in it--is the fundamental unity in all expression. It is the unity
between a word and its meaning, a musical tone and its mood, a color
and shape and what they represent. Since, however, it is indispensable
to all expression, it is not peculiar to art. And to a large extent,
even in the creative work of the artist, this unity is given, not made;
the very materials of the artist consisting of elementary
expressions--words, tones, colors, space-forms--in which the unity of
form and content has already been achieved, either by an innate
psycho-physical process, as is the case with tones and simple rhythms,
or by association and habit, as is the case with the words of any
natural language, or the object-meanings which we attach to colors
and shapes. The poet does not work with sounds, but with words which
already have their definite meanings; his creation consists of the
larger whole into which he weaves them. Of course, even in the case
of ordinary verbal expression, the thought often comes first before
its clothing in words, when there is a certain process of choice and
fitting; and in painting there is always the possibility of varying
conventional forms; yet even so, in large measure, the elements of the
arts are themselves expressions, in which a unity of form and content
already exists.

In art, however, there are subtler aspects to the relation between
form and content, and these have a unique aesthetic significance. For
there, as we know, the elements of the medium, colors and lines and
sounds, and the patterns of these, their harmonies and structures and
rhythms, are expressive, in a vague way, of feeling; hence, when the
artist employs them as embodiments of his ideas, he has to select them,
not only as carriers of meaning, but as communications of mood. Now,
in order that his selection be appropriate, it is clearly necessary
that the feeling tone of the form be identical with that of the content
which he puts into it. The medium as such must reexpress and so enforce
the values of the content. This is the "harmony," as distinguished
from the mere unity, of form and content, the existence of which in
art is one of its distinguishing properties. I have already called
attention to this in our second chapter. It involves, as we observed,
that in painting, for example, the feeling tone of the colors and lines
should be identical with that of the objects to be represented; in
poetry, that the emotional quality of meter and rhythm should be attuned
to the incidents and sentiments expressed. Otherwise the effect is
ugly or comical.

When we come to the work of art, this harmony is already achieved. But
for the artist it is something delicately to be worked out. Yet, just
as in ordinary expression form and content often emerge in unison, the
thought itself being a word and the word a thought; so in artistic
creation, the mother mood out of which the creative act springs, finds
immediate and forthright embodiment in a congenial form. Such a
spontaneous and perfect balance of matter and form is, however, seldom
achieved without long and painful experimentation and practice, both
by the artist himself in his own private work, and by his predecessors,
whose results he appropriates. Large traditional and oftentimes rigid
forms, such as the common metrical and musical schemes and architectural
orders, into which the personal matter of expression may aptly fall,
are thus elaborated in every art. As against every looser and novel
form, they have the advantages first, of being more readily and steadily
held in the memory, where they may gather new and poignant associations;
second, of coming to us already freighted with similar associations
out of the past; and last, of compelling the artist, in order that he
may fit his inspiration into them, to purify it of all irrelevant
substance. Impatient artists rebel against forms, but wise ones either
accommodate their genius to them, until they become in the end a second
and equally spontaneous nature, or else create new forms, as definite
as the old.




CHAPTER VI

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN AESTHETICS, AND ITS SOLUTION THROUGH THE TRAGIC,
PATHETIC, AND COMIC


When, in our third chapter, we defined the purpose of art, we indicated
that it was broad enough to include the expression of evil, but we did
not show in detail how this was possible. That is our present theme.

Art is sympathetic representation; the effort not only to reveal an
object to us, but to unite us with it. The artist finds no difficulty
in accomplishing this purpose with reference to one class of
objects--those which, apart from portrayal, we call beautiful. To these
we are drawn immediately because they serve directly the ends of life.
Nature sees to it that we dwell with pleasure on the sight of healthy
children, well-grown women, and bountiful landscapes. And to the
representations of such objects we are attracted by the same instincts
that attract us to the things themselves. No special power of art is
required that we take delight in them; the task of the artist is half
accomplished before he begins. Yet the scope of art is wider than this,
for it represents evil as well as good. Death as well as life, sickness
and deformity as well as health, suffering as well as joy, sin equally
with goodness, come within its purview. And these also it not only
reveals to us but makes good to know, so good in fact that they are
perhaps the preferred objects of artistic representation. But instead
of being able to rely on instincts that would draw us to these objects,
art has to overcome those that would lead us away from them. It has
to conquer our natural horror at death, pain at suffering, and revulsion
against wickedness. How does it? That is the problem of evil in
sthetics.

There are many means by which this problem is solved. In the first
place, the mere fact that art is representation and not reality does
much toward overcoming any feelings of moral or physical repugnance
we might have toward the objects represented. These feelings exist for
the sake of action; hence, when action is impossible--and we cannot
act on the unreal--although they may still persist, they become less
strong. Toward the merely imaginary, the practical and moral attitudes,
which towards the real would lead to condemnation and withdrawal, lose
their relevance and tend to disappear. That is one of the advantages
of art over the more immediate perception of life. It is difficult to
take a purely aesthetic attitude towards all of life, to seek only to
get into sympathetic contact with it for the sake of an inner
realization of what it is; much of it touches us too closely on the
side of our practical and moral interests. A certain man, for example,
does not belong to our set, or his ways are so bohemian that it would
imperil our social position or the safety of our souls to get acquainted
with him; so we reject him and cast him into the outer darkness of our
disapproval--or he rejects us. Such a person, we feel, is to be avoided
or haply, if we be saints, to be saved from himself; but not to be
accepted and understood. And even if we succeed in freeing ourselves
from the moral point of view, we are still preoccupied with the
practical, if the man happens to interest us commercially; we have not
the time nor the desire to see his nature as a whole. Not so in art.
As a character in a novel, a man cannot be employed; nor can it be a
hazard to keep company with him; and his soul is surely beyond our
saving; the only thing left for us to do is to sympathize with and try
to understand him, to enter into communion with his spirit. By freeing
life from the practical and moral, art gives the imagination full sway.
This, to be sure, is only a negative force working in the direction
of beauty, yet is important none the less because it enables the more
positive influences to function easily.

One of these is what I would call "sympathetic curiosity," which may
encompass all images of life. Things which, if met with in life, would
certainly repel, when presented in image, simply excite our curiosity
to know. Of course some are impelled by the same interest to get into
contact with all experience--_Homo sum: humani nihil alienum a me
puto_--yet with the great majority the impulses to withdraw are too
strong. But all have a desire for further knowledge when a mere idea
of human life, however repellent, is presented; for the instinct of
gregariousness, which creates a special interest in our kind, works
with full force in the mind to strengthen curiosity. There is no part
of human experience which it does not embrace. We can well forego
knowledge of stars and trees, but we cannot remain ignorant of anything
human. As the moth to the flame, we are led, even against our will,
into all of life, even the most unpleasant. The charm possessed by the
novel and unplumbed, by such stories as _Jude the Obscure_, or by the
weird imaginings of a Baudelaire, comes from this source. It is no mere
scientific curiosity, because it includes that "consciousness of kind,"
which makes us feel akin to all we know.

Sympathetic curiosity, however, seldom works alone, for other interests,
less worthy and therefore often unavowed, usually cooperate to overcome
our repugnances towards the unpleasant. Many of our repugnances are
not simple and original like those felt towards death, darkness, and
deformity, but highly complex products of education, which may be
dissolved by a strong appeal to the more primitive instincts which
they seek to repress. An artist may, for example, through a vivid
portrayal, so excite the animal lust and cruelty which lurk hidden in
all of us as to make the most morally reprehensible objects acceptable.
Nature has taken many a revenge on civilization through art. Although
no one should demand that these appeals be entirely excluded, yet when
they operate alone, without the sublimation of insight, they are
flagrantly unaesthetic in their influence, because they deprive the
work of art of its freedom.

Another means which the artist may employ in order to win us is the
appeal of sense. However repellent be the objects which he represents,
if he can clothe them in a sensuous material which will charm us, he
will have exerted a powerful countervailing force. We have already had
occasion to observe this in our first chapter. Through the call of
sense we are invited to enter and are made welcome at the very threshold
of the work of art. Engaging lines, winsome colors and tones, and
compelling rhythms can overcome almost any repugnance that we might
otherwise feel for the subject-matter. Their primary appeals are
superior to all the reservations of civilization. No wonder that the
stern moralists who would keep beauty for the clean and holy have been
afraid of art! Yet the delight of sense, because its emotional effect
is diffused, does not interfere with the contemplative serenity of
art, as unbridled passion does; it even quiets passion by diverting
the attention to itself; hence may always be employed by the artist.
A good example of the aesthetic fascination of sensation is Von Stuck's
"Salome" in the Art Institute of Chicago. For all normal feeling,
Salome dancing with the head of John the Baptist is a revolting object;
yet how beautiful the artist has made his picture through the simple
loveliness of gold and red!

It would be a mistake, however, to infer the indifference of the
subject-matter in art. The creation of a work of art is based on a
primary aesthetic experience of nature or human life, and not everything
is capable of producing such an experience in all men. The subject
must be one towards which the artist or spectator is able to take the
sthetic attitude of emotional, yet free, perception. Some people are
unable to lay aside their moral prepossessions towards certain phases
of life or even towards representation of them; the idea affects them
as would the reality. For such people even the genius of a Beardsley
is too feeble to create an experience of beauty out of the material
with which he works. Or again, some people cannot objectify their
sensual egotistic impulses and feelings; for them the reading of a
Boccaccio, for example, is only a substitute for such feelings, not
a means of insight into them. It requires a robust intellectual
attitude, a predominance of mind over feeling and instinct, aesthetically
to appreciate some works of art. But for those who can receive it, the
representation of any phase of life may afford an aesthetic experience,
may create a thing good to know, if only it be mastered by the mind
and embodied in a charming form.

The charm of sense together with the satisfaction of insight are
sufficient to explain the conquest of evil by art. Yet further means
have been employed--the special appeals of the tragic, pathetic, and
comic.

What any one may mean by tragic is largely a matter of personal
definition or tradition; yet there is, I think, a common essence upon
which all would agree. First, tragedy always involves the manful
struggle of a personality in the pursuit of some end, at the cost of
suffering, perhaps of death and failure. The opposition may come from
nature, as in _The Grammarian's Funeral_; from fate, as in the
_Oedipus_; from social and political interests, as in _Antigone_; that
is of little moment; it is important solely that the battle be accepted
and waged unflinchingly to the issue. In this ultimate sense, most of
human life is tragic; because it involves a continual warfare with
circumstances, which the majority of people carry on with a silent
heroism. Originally, only the glorious and spectacular conflicts of
great personalities were deemed worthy of representation in art; but
with the growth of sympathy the range of tragic portrayal has gradually
been extended over almost the whole of human life. The peasant in his
struggle for subsistence against a niggardly soil, or the patient woman
who loses the bloom of her youth in the unremitting effort to maintain
her children, are tragic figures.

Second, it is part of the essence of tragedy that the conflict should
be recognized as necessary and its issue as inevitable. In one form
or another, whether as Greek or Christian or naturalistic, fatality
has remained an abiding element in the idea of tragedy. The purpose
or passion or sentiment which impels the hero to undertake and maintain
the struggle must be a part of his nature so integral that nothing
else is possible for him. "_Ich kann nicht anders_" is the cry
of every tragic personality. And the opposition which he meets from
other persons, from social forces or natural circumstances, must seem
to be equally fateful--must be represented as issuing from a counter
determination or law no less inescapable than the hero's will. Even
when the catastrophe depends upon some so-called accident, it must be
made to appear necessary that our human purposes should sometimes be
caught and strangled in the web of natural fact which envelops them.

The reasons for our acceptance of tragedy are not difficult to find
and have been noted, with more or less clearness, by all students. We
accept it much as the hero accepts his own struggle--he believes in
the values which he is fighting for and we sympathetically make his
will ours. Moreover, we discover a special value in his courage which,
we feel, compensates for the evil of his suffering, defeat, or death.
So long as we set any value on life, it is impossible for us not to
esteem courage; for courage is at once the defense against attack of
all our possessions and the source, in personal initiative and
aggressive action, of newer and larger life. And any shrinking that
we may feel against the sternness of the struggle is quenched both by
the hero's example and by our recognition of its necessity. Since we
are not participants of it, our protest would be futile, and even if
we played a part in it, we should be as foolish as we should be weak,
not to recognize that the will which opposes us is as inflexible as
our own--"such is life"--that is our ultimate comment. An appreciation
of tragedy involves, therefore, a sure discernment of the essential
disharmony of existence, yet at the same time, a feeling for the moral
values which it may create; neither the optimist nor the utilitarian
can enter into its world.

There are, however, works of art in which sheer evil, without any
compensating development of character, is portrayed; where indeed the
struggle may even cause decay of character. In Zola's _The Dram
Shop_, for example, the story is the tale of the moral decline,
through unfortunate circumstances and vicious surroundings, of the
sweet, pliant Gervaise. Instead of developing a resistance to
circumstances which would have made them yield a value even in defeat,
she lets herself go and is spoiled beneath them. She has no friend to
help or guardian angel to save. We do not blame her, for, with her
soft nature, she could not do otherwise than crumble under the hard
press of fate; neither can we admire her, for she lacks the adamantine
stuff of which heroes are made. This is pathos, not tragedy. And just
as most of human life involves tragedy in so far as it develops a
strength to meet the dangers which threaten it, so likewise it involves
pathos, in so far as it seldom resists at every point, but gives way,
blighted without hope. Many a man or woman issues from life's conflicts
weaker, not stronger; broken, not defiant; petulant, not sweetened;
and at the hour of death there are few heroes. Yet there may be beauty
in the story of this human weakness and weariness. Whence comes it?
How can the representation of this sheer evil become a good? The
principle involved is a simple one. Announced first, as far as I know,
by Mendelssohn, it has recently been much more scientifically and
penetratingly analyzed by Lipps, although wrongly applied by him to
the tragic rather than the pathetic.[Footnote: Cf. Lipps: _Der Streit
ber die Tragodie_, and _Aesthetik_, Bd. I, S. 599.]

It is a familiar and generally recognized experience, as Lipps has
observed, that any threat or harm done to a value evokes in us a
heightened appreciation of its worth. Parting is a sweet sorrow because
only then do we fully realize the worth of what we are losing; the
beauty of youth that dies is more beautiful because in death its
radiance shines the brighter in our memory. A good in contemplation
comes to take the place of a lost good in reality. Just as we hold on
the more tightly to things that are slipping away from us in a vain
effort to keep them, so to save ourselves from utter sorrow, we build
up in the imagination a fair image of what we have lost, free of the
dust of the world. This makes the peculiar charm of the delicate and
fragile, of weak things and little things, of the transient and
perishable; they awaken in us the tender, protective impulse while
they last, and when they are gone they suffer at our hands an
idealization which the strong and enduring can never receive. Our pity
for them mediates an increased love of them; we mock at fate which
deprives us of them by keeping them secure and fairer in our memory.

As in life, so in art. Beneath and around the pictured destruction and
ruin there opens up to us a more poignant vision of the loveliness of
what was or might have been. At the end of _The Dram Shop_, when
Gervaise sinks into ruin, we inevitably revert to the beginning and
see again, only more intensely, the gentle girl that she was, or else,
going forward, we imagine what she might have been, if only she had
been given a chance. The form of a possible good rises up from under
the actual evil. The story of oppression becomes the praise of freedom;
the picture of death, a vision of life. I know of no finer example of
this in all literature than Sophocles' _Ajax_. Ajax has offended
Athena, so he, the hero of the Grecian host, is seized with the mad
desire to do battle with cattle and sheep. In lucid intervals he laments
to his wife the shameful fate which has befallen him. How glorious his
former prowess appears lost in so ridiculous a counterfeit! And his
despair creates its magic.

In almost all so-called tragedies, true tragedy and pathos are
intermingled; for we feel both pity and admiration, and the pity
intensifies the admiration. The danger that threatens or the disaster
that overwhelms the values which the hero embodies make us realize
their worth the more. Throughout the _Antigone_ we admire the
heroine's tragic courage of devotion; but it is at the point when,
just before her death, she laments her youth and beauty that shall go
fruitless--

  Alechron, anymenaion, oute ton gamon
  mepos lachousan oute paideion tpophaes

that we feel the fullness of strength that was needed for the sacrifice.
One might perhaps think this lament a blemish of weakness in a picture
of fortitude; but the impression is just the opposite, I believe; for
force is measured by what it overcomes.

There are so many different theories of tragedy that it would be
impossible, were it worth while, to embark on a criticism of all of
them. There are certain ones, however, which, because of their wide
acceptance, demand some attention at our hands. First, it is often
assumed that a tragedy should represent the good as ultimately
triumphing, despite suffering and failure. But how can the good triumph
when the hero fails and dies? Only, it is answered, if the hero
represents a cause which may win despite or even because of his
individual doom; and it is with this cause, not with him, that we
chiefly sympathize. This was Hegel's view, who demanded that the tragic
hero represent some universal interest which, when purged of the
one-sidedness and uncompromising insistence of the hero's championing,
may nevertheless endure and triumph in its genuine worth. In the
_Antigone_, Hegel's favorite example, the cause of family loyalty
finds recognition through the punishment of Creon for the girl's death;
while at the same time the principle of the sovereignty of the state
is upheld through her sacrifice. There are many tragedies which conform,
at least partially, to this scheme; but not all, hence it cannot be
a universal norm. In _Romeo and Juliet_, for example, although
the death of the young people serves to bring about a reconciliation
of their families, the real principle for which they suffered--the
right of private choice in matters of love--is in no way furthered by
the outcome of the play. And, although it is always possible to
universalize the good which is sought by any will, it is not possible
to deflect upon a principle the full intensity of our sympathy, away
from the individual, concrete passion and action. Whenever a great
personality is represented, it is his personal suffering and fortitude
that win at once our pity and our admiration. For private sorrows, for
the ruin of character, for the death of those whom we are made to love,
there can be no complete atonement in the universal; because it is
with the individual that we are chiefly concerned. No; the
reconciliation lies where we have placed it--in tragedy, in the personal
heroism of the strong character; in pathos, in the vision, not in the
triumph, of the good.

The ordinary Protestant theological theory of tragedy is even more
inadequate than the Hegelian. For, by assuming that there is no genuine
loss in the world, that every evil is compensated for in the future
lives of the heroes, it takes away the sting from their sacrifice and
so deprives them of their crown of glory. It makes every adventure a
calculation of prudence and every despair a farce. It is remote from
the reality of experience where men stake all on a chance and, instead
of receiving the good by an act of grace, wring it by blood and tears
from evil.

On much the same level of thinking is the moralistic theory which
requires that the misfortunes of the hero should be the penalty for
some fault or weakness. This view, which has the authority of Aristotle,
is also based on the doctrine of the justice of the world-order. It
was pretty consistently carried out in the classical Greek drama;
although there suffering is not exacted as an external retribution,
but as the inevitable consequence of the turbulent passions of the
characters; for even the punishment for offenses against the gods is
of the nature of a personal revenge which they take. Later, of course,
when the gods retreated into the background of human life, retributive
justice was conceived more abstractly. Now, it must be admitted, I
think, that this idea, so deeply rooted in the popular mind, has exerted
a profound influence on the drama; yet it cannot be applied universally
without sophistry. To be sure, in _Romeo and Juliet_, the young
people were disobedient and headstrong; in _Lear_, the old father
was foolishly trustful of his wicked daughters; these frailties brought
about their ruin. But did they deserve so hard a fate as theirs? Did
not Lear suffer as much for his folly as his daughters for their
wickedness? This is always true in life, and Shakespeare holds the
mirror up to nature--but is it consistent with the theory of retributive
justice? One can usually trace back to some element of his nature,
physical or moral, the misfortunes that befall an individual; even
those which we call accidents, as Galton claimed, are often due to
some inherent defect of attention which makes us fail to respond
protectively at the right moment. If we take the self to include the
entire organism, then it remains true that we cooperate as a partial
cause in all that happens to us. Ophelia's weak and unresisting brain
must share with the stresses which surrounded her the responsibility
for her madness. In this sense, and in this sense only, do we deserve
our fate, be it good or ill. Yet, when interpreted in this broadest
meaning, retributive justice loses all ethical significance. And the
cosmic disharmony appears all the more glaring. It ceases to be
chargeable to an external fate or God, to the environment or convention,
which might perhaps be mastered and remolded; and is seen pervading
the nature of reality itself, no accidental circumstance, but essential
evil, ineradicable. The greatest tragic poets see it thus. And then
blame turns to understanding and resentment into pity.

Retributive justice, as the motive force of tragedy, has for us lost
its meaning. We no longer feel the necessity of justifying the ways
of God to man, because we have ceased to believe that there exists any
single, responsible power. The good is not a preordained and
automatically accomplished fact, but an achievement of finite effort,
appearing here and there in the world when individuals, instead of
contending against each other, cooperate for their mutual advantage.

In addition to the comic, there is much artistic representation of
evil which can be classed neither as pathetic nor as tragic. Neither
moral admiration nor idealization are aroused by the characters
portrayed. They may be great criminals like Lady Macbeth or Iago, or
the undistinguished and disorderly people of modern realistic
literature, yet in either case we find them good to know. And we do
so, not merely because we enjoy, as disinterested onlookers, the
spectacle of human existence, but because the artist makes us enter
into it and realize its values. For even that which from the moral
point of view we pronounce evil is, so long as it maintains itself,
a good thing from its own point of view. Every will, however blind and
careless, seeks a good and finds it, if only in hope and the effort
to attain. Through the intimacy of his descriptions and often against
our resistance, the artist may compel us to adopt the attitude of the
life which he is portraying, constraining us to feel the inner necessity
of its choices, the compulsion of its delights. It is difficult to
abandon ourselves thus to sympathy with what is wrong in life itself,
because we have in mind the consequences and relations which make it
wrong; yet we all do so at times, whenever we let ourselves go, charmed
by its momentary offering. But in the world of art this is easier,
because there the values, being merely represented, can have no sinister
effects. When great personalities are portrayed, this abandon is
readiest; for the strength or poignancy of their natures carries us
away as by a whirlwind. Witness Lady Macbeth when she summons the
powers of hell to unsex her for her murderous task, or Vanni Fucci in
the _Inferno_,[Footnote: _Inferno_, Canto 25, 1-3.] who mocks
at God. For the instant, we become as they and feel their ecstasy of
pride and power as our own. Yet the great artist can awaken this
sympathy even for characters that are small and weak. In Gogol's _Dead
Souls_, for example, there are no heroes. The most interesting
characters are the country gentlemen who return to their estates
planning to write books which will regenerate Russia. But the old
habits of life in the remote district are too strong. So, instead of
writing, they fall back into the routine of their ancestors and merely
smoke and dream. Here are failure and mediocrity; yet so intimate is
the artist's story that we not only understand it all, but feel how
good it is--to dream our lives away. I do not doubt that in this story
there are elements of pathos and comedy; yet, in general, the
delineation is too objective for either; we neither laugh nor cry, but
are simply borne on, unresisting, ourselves become a part of the silent
tide of Russian life.

The problem of evil in aesthetics may finally be solved by the use of
the comic. For in comedy we take pleasure in an object which, in the
broadest sense, is evil. In order for an object to be comical there
must be a standard or norm, an accepted system, within which the object
pretends but fails to fit, and with reference to which, therefore, it
is evil. There must be some points of contact between the object and
the standard in order that there may be pretense, but not enough points
for fulfillment. If we never had any definite expectations with
reference to things, never made any demands upon them; if instead of
judging them by our preconceived ideas, we took them just as they came
and changed our ideas to meet them,--there would be nothing comical.
Or, if everything fitted into our expectations and was as we planned
it, then again there would be nothing comical. In a world without
ideas, the comic could not exist. The comic depends upon our
apperceiving an object in terms of some idea and finding it incongruous.
The most elementary illustrations demonstrate this. The unusual is the
original comic; to the child all strange things are comical--the
Chinaman with his pigtail, the negro with his black skin, the new
fashion in dress, the clown with his paint and his antics. As we get
used to things, and that means as we come to form ideas of them into
which they will fit, adjusting the mind to them, rather than seeking
to adjust them to the mind, they cease to be comical. So fashions in
dress or manners which were comical once, become matters of course and
we laugh no longer. Enduringly comic are only those objects that
persistently create expectations and as persistently violate them.
Such objects are few indeed; but they exist, and constitute the
perennial, yet never wearying, stock in trade of comedy. But the comic
spirit does not have to depend upon them exclusively, for, as life
changes, it constantly raises new expectations and offers new objects
which at once provoke and fail to meet them. Everything, therefore,
is potentially comical and, in the course of human history, few things
can escape a laugh; some curious mind is sure, sooner or later, to
bring them under a new idea against which they will be shown up to be
absurd. The sanctities of religion, love, and political allegiance
have not been exempt.

Why, if the comical object is always opposed to our demands, should
we take pleasure in it? How can we be reconciled to things that are
admittedly incongruous with our standards? Why are we not rather
displeased and angry with them? Investigators have usually looked for
a single source of pleasure in the comic, but of those which have been
suggested at least two, I think, contribute something. First, by
adopting the point of view of the standard as our own, identifying
ourselves with it, and through the contrast of ourselves with the
object, we may take pleasure in the resulting exaltation of ourselves.
The pleasure in the comic is often closely akin to that which we feel
in distinction of any kind. We feel ourselves superior to the object
at which we laugh. There is pride in much of laughter and not
infrequently cruelty, a delight in the absurdities of other men because
they exalt ourselves as the representatives of the rational and normal.
There is often a touch of malice even in the laughter of the child.
Nevertheless, the pleasure in the comic is still contemplative, and
so far aesthetic, because it is a pleasure in perception, not in action.
No matter how evil be the comic object, we do not seek to destroy or
remodel it; action is sublimated into laughter.

But the pleasure in the comic may arise through our taking the opposite
point of view--that of the funny thing itself. Instead of upholding
the point of view of the standard, we may identify ourselves with the
object. If the comic spirit is oftentimes the champion of the normal
and conventional, it is as often the mischief-maker and rebel. Whenever
the maintaining of a standard involves strain through the inhibition
of instinctive tendencies, to relax and give way to impulse causes a
pleasure which centers itself upon the object that breaks the tension.
The intrusive animal that interrupts the solemn occasion, the child
that wittingly or not scoffs at our petty formalities through his naive
behavior, win our gratitude, not our scorn. They provide an opportunity
for the welcome release of nature from convention. And the greater the
strain of the tension, the greater the pleasure and the more
insignificant the object or event that will bring relief and cause
laughter. The perennial comic pleasure in the risque is derived from
this source. There is an element of comic pleasure in the perpetration
of any mischievous or unconventional act. Those things which men take
most seriously, Schopenhauer has said, namely, love and religion, and
we might add, morality, are the most abundant sources of the comic,
because they involve the most strain and therefore offer the easiest
chances for a playful release. Even utter and absolute nonsense is
comical because it undoes all Kant's categories of mind.

Hence, contrary to the theory of Bergson, the spontaneous as well as
the mechanical and rigid may be comical. Sometimes the same object may
be comical from both the points of view which we have specified; this
is always true, as we shall see, in the most highly developed comedy.
For example, we may laugh at the child's prank because it is so absurd
from the point of view of our grown-up expectations as to reasonable
conduct, and at the same time, taking the part of the child, rejoice
at the momentary relief from them which it offers us. Our scorn is
mixed with sympathy. And oftentimes the child himself will hold both
points of view at once, laughing at his own absurdity and exulting
nevertheless in his own freedom. This is the essence of slyness. It
follows, moreover, that a thing which was comical for one of the reasons
assigned may become comical for the other, by a simple change in the
point of view regarding it. For the behavior which first pleased us
because it was unconventional tends itself to become a new convention,
with reference to which the old convention then becomes the object of
a laughter which is scornful. The tables are turned: the rebel laughs
at the king.

The foregoing explanation of why we find the comical pleasant also
explains why so many of our other pleasures are intermixed with the
comical--why so often we not only smile when we are pleased, but laugh.
For, in the case of all except the most elementary enjoyments, our
pleasures are connected with the satisfaction of definite expectations
regarding the actions or events of our daily lives. But, owing to the
dulling effect of habit, the pleasure attendant upon these satisfactions
gradually becomes smaller and smaller or even negligible; until, as
a result, only the novel and surprising events which surpass our
expectations give us large pleasure; but these are comical. With the
child, whose expectations are rigid and few in number because of his
lack of discrimination and small experience, almost all pleasures,
like almost all events, are of the nature of surprises. The child
almost always laughs when he is pleased. The slang phrase "to be highly
tickled" expresses with precision this close connection between laughter
and pleasure. Moreover, as the complexity of life increases, its strains
and repressions are multiplied, with the result that any giving way
to an impulse contains a slight element of the mischievous or
ridiculous; whence, for this reason too, the pleasant is also the
comical. In fact, most of the pleasures of highly complex and reflective
persons are tinged with laughter.

We expect art to accomplish three great results--reconciliation,
revelation, and sympathy. So far we have shown how comic art may
accomplish the first; we have yet to prove how it may accomplish the
rest. In his book _Le Rire_, Bergson has expressed the view that
comedy is explicitly falsifying and unsympathetic. As to the former
charge, we can, I think, convince ourselves of the opposite if we
examine certain of the more obvious methods of comedy, particularly
those which might seem at first sight to lend support to his contention.
One of the most common of these is exaggeration. The simplest example
is caricature, where certain features of an object are purposely
exaggerated. The effect is, of course, comical, because we expect the
normal and duly-proportioned. What a manifest falsification, one might
assert! Yet just the opposite is the actual result. For every good
caricaturist selects for exaggeration prominent and characteristic
traits, through which by the very emphasis that is placed upon them,
the nature of the individual is better understood. Another favorite
method is abstraction. Certain traits are presented as if they were
the whole man. We get the typical comic figures of the novel and drama;
the physician who is only a physician; the lawyer who injects the legal
point of view into every circumstance of life; the lover or the miser
who is just love or greed; the people who, as in Dickens, meet every
situation with the same phrase or attitude, This, too, looks like a
plain falsification of human nature, because, however strong be the
professional bias or however overmastering the ruling passion, real
people are always more complex and many-sided, having other modifying
and counteracting elements of character which prevent their speech and
actions from being completely monotonous and mechanical. Nevertheless,
we can again acquit the comic writer of falsification, because we
understand the method which he is employing, the trick of his trade.
He deceives no one. On the contrary, he enables us to perceive the
logic of certain elementary springs of character. Following the method
of the experimentalist, he selects certain aspect

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