The Beautiful Part 4

The above is a series of ill.u.s.trations of the fact that aesthetic pleasure depends as much on the activities of the beholder as on those of the artist. Unfamiliarity or over-familiarity explain a large part of the aesthetic non-responsiveness summed up in the saying _that there is no disputing of tastes._ And even within the circle of habitual responsiveness to some particular style, or master, there are, as we have just seen, days and hours when an individual beholder's perception and empathic imagination do not act in such manner as to afford the usual pleasure. But these occasional, even frequent, lapses must not diminish our belief either in the power of art or in the deeply organised and inevitable nature of aesthetic preference as a whole. What the knowledge of such fluctuations ought to bring home is that beauty of shape is most spontaneously and completely appreciated when the attention, instead of being called upon, as in galleries and concerts, for the mere purpose of aesthetic enjoyment, is on the contrary, directed to the artistic or "natural" beauty of shapes, in consequence of some other already existing interest. No one except an art-critic sees a new picture or statue without first asking "What does it represent?"; shape-perception and aesthetic empathy arising incidentally in the examination which this question leads to. The truth is that even the art-critic is oftenest brought into enforced contemplation of the artistic shape by some other question which arises from his particular bias: By whom? of what precise date? Even such technical questions as "where and when restored or repainted?" will elicit the necessary output of attention. It is possible and legitimate to be interested in a work of art for a dozen reasons besides aesthetic appreciation; each of these interests has its own sentimental, scientific, dramatic or even moneymaking emotion; and there is no loss for art, but rather a gain, if we fall back upon one of them when the specific aesthetic response is slow or not forthcoming. Art has other aims besides aesthetic satisfaction; and aesthetic satisfaction will not come any the quicker for turning our backs upon these non-aesthetic aims. The very worst att.i.tude towards art is that of the holiday-maker who comes into its presence with no ulterior interest or business, and nothing but the hope of an aesthetic emotion which is most often denied him. Indeed such seeking of aesthetic pleasure for its own sake would lead to even more of the blank despondency characteristic of so many gallery goers, were it not for another peculiarity of aesthetic responsiveness, which is responsible for very puzzling effects. This saving grace of the tourist, and (as we shall see) this pitfall of the art-expert, is what I propose to call the _Transferability of Aesthetic Emotion._

CHAPTER XIX

THE STORAGE AND TRANSFER OF EMOTION

IN dealing with familiarity as a multiplying factor of aesthetic appreciation, I have laid stress on its effect in facilitating the perception and the empathic interpretation of shapes. But repet.i.tion directly affects the emotion which may result from these processes; and when any emotion has become habitual, it tends to be stored in what we call memory, and to be called forth not merely by the processes in which it originated, but also independently of the whole of them, or in answer to some common or equivalent factor. We are so accustomed to this psychological fact that we do not usually seem to recognise its existence. It is the explanation of the power of words, which, apart from any images they awaken, are often irresistibly evocative of emotion. And among other emotions words can evoke the one due to the easy perception and to the life-corroborating empathic interpretation of shapes. The word _Beautiful,_ and its various quasi synonyms, are among the most emotionally suggestive in our vocabulary, carrying perhaps a vague but potent remembrance of our own bodily reaction to the emotion of admiration; nay even eliciting an incipient rehearsal of the half-parted lips and slightly thrown-back head, the drawn-in breath and wide-opened eyes, with which we are wont to meet opportunities of aesthetic satisfaction. Be this last as it may, it is certain that the emotion connected with the word _Beautiful_ can be evoked by that word alone, and without an accompanying act of visual or auditive perception. Indeed beautiful shapes would lose much of their importance in our life, if they did not leave behind them such emotional traces, capable of revival under emotionally appropriate, though outwardly very dissimilar, circ.u.mstances; and thereby enormously increasing some of our safest, perhaps because our most purely subjective, happiness.

Instead therefore of despising the raptures which the presence of a Venus of Milo or a Sixtine Madonna can inspire in people manifestly incapable of appreciating a masterpiece, and sometimes barely glancing at it, we critical persons ought to recognise in this funny, but consoling, phenomenon an additional proof of the power of Beauty, whose specific emotion can thus be evoked by a mere name and so transferred from some past experience of aesthetic admiration to a. present occasion which would otherwise be mere void and disappointment.

Putting aside these kind of cases, the transfer (usually accomplished by a word) of the aesthetic emotion, or at least of a willingness for aesthetic emotion, is probably one of the explanations of the spread of aesthetic interest from one art to another, as it is the explanation of some phases of aesthetic development in the individual. The present writer can vouch for the case of at least one real child in whom the possibility of aesthetic emotion, and subsequently of aesthetic appreciation, was extended from music and natural scenery to pictures and statues, by the application of the word _Beautiful_ to each of these different categories. And something a.n.a.logous probably helped on the primaeval recognition that the empathic pleasures. .h.i.therto attached to geometrical shapes might be got from realistic shapes, say of bisons and reindeer, which had hitherto been admired for their lifelikeness and skill, but not yet subjected to any aesthetic discrimination (_cf_. p. 96). Similarly, in our own times, the delight in natural scenery is being furthered by the development of landscape painting, rather than furthering it. Nay I venture to suggest that it was the habit of the aesthetic emotion such as mediaeval men received from the proportions, directions, and coordination of lines in their cathedrals of stone or brick which set their musicians to build up, like Browning's _Abt Vogler,_ the soul's first balanced and coordinated dwellings made of sounds.

Be this last as it may, it is desirable that the Reader should accept, and possibly verify for himself, the psychological fact of the _storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion._ Besides, the points already mentioned, it helps to explain several of the cruxes and paradoxes of aesthetics. First and foremost that dictum _De Gustibus non est disputandum_ which some philosophers and even aestheticians develop into an explicit denial of all intrinsic shape-preferences, and an a.s.sertion that _beautiful_ and _ugly_ are merely other names for _fashionable_ and _unfashionable, original_ and _unoriginal,_ or _suitable_ and _unsuitable._ As I have already pointed out, differences of taste are started by the perceptive and empathic habits, schematically various, of given times and places, and also by those, especially the empathic habits, connected with individual nervous condition: people accustomed to the round arch finding the Gothic one unstable and eccentric; and, on the other hand, a person taking keen pleasure in the sudden and lurching lines of Lotto finding those of t.i.tian tame and humdrum. But such intrinsically existing preferences and incompatibility are quite enormously increased by an emotional bias for or against a particular kind of art; by which I mean a bias not due to that art's peculiarities, but preventing our coming in real contact with them.

Aesthetic perception and especially aesthetic empathy, like other intellectual and emotional activities, are at the mercy of a hostile mental att.i.tude, just as bodily activity is at the mercy of rigidity of the limbs. I do not hesitate to say that we are perpetually refusing to look at certain kinds of art because, for one reason or another, we are emotionally prepossessed against them. On the other hand, once the favourable emotional condition is supplied to us, often by means of words, our perceptive and empathic activities follow with twice the ease they would if the business had begun with them. It is quite probable that a good deal of the enhancement of aesthetic appreciation by fashion or sympathy should be put to the account, not merely of gregarious imitativeness, but of the knowledge that a favourable or unfavourable feeling is "in the air." The emotion precedes the appreciation, and both are genuine.

A more personally humiliating aesthetic experience may be similarly explained. Unless we are very un.o.bservant or very self-deluded, we are all familiar with the sudden checking (often almost physically painful) of our aesthetic emotion by the hostile criticism of a neighbour or the superciliousness of an expert: "Dreadfully old-fashioned," "_Archi-connu,_""second-rate school work,"

"completely painted over," "utterly hashed in the performance" (of a piece of music), "mere prettiness"--etc. etc. How often has not a sentence like these turned the tide of honest incipient enjoyment; and transformed us, from enjoyers of some really enjoyable quality (even of such old-as-the-hills elements as clearness, symmetry, euphony or pleasant colour!) into shrivelled cavillers at everything save brand-new formulae and tip-top genius! Indeed, while teaching a few privileged persons to taste the special "quality" which Botticelli has and Botticelli's pupils have not, and thus occasionally intensifying aesthetic enjoyment by distinguishing whatever differentiates the finer artistic products from the commoner, modern art-criticism has probably wasted much honest but shamefaced capacity for appreciating the qualities common, because indispensable, to, all good art. It is therefore not without a certain retributive malignity that I end these examples of the storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion, and of the consequent bias to artistic appreciation, with that of the Nemesis d.o.g.g.i.ng the steps of the connoisseur. We have all heard of some purchase, or all-but-purchase, of a wonderful masterpiece on the authority of some famous expert; and of the masterpiece proving to be a mere school imitation, and occasionally even a certified modern forgery. The foregoing remarks on the storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion, joined with what we have learned about shape-perception and empathy, will enable the Reader to reduce this paradoxical enormity to a natural phenomenon discreditable only when not honestly owned up to. For a school imitation, or a forgery, must possess enough elements in common with a masterpiece, otherwise it could never suggest any connexion with it. Given a favourable emotional att.i.tude and the absence of obvious _extrinsic_ (technical or historical) reasons for scepticism, these elements of resemblance must awaken the vague idea, especially the empathic scheme, of the particular master's work, and his name--shall we say Leonardo's?--will rise to the lips. But _Leonardo_ is a name to conjure with, and in this case to destroy the conjurer himself: the word _Leonardo_ implies an emotion, distilled from a number of highly prized and purposely repeated experiences, kept to gather strength in respectful isolation, and further heightened by a thrill of initiate veneration whenever it is mentioned. This _Leonardo-emotion,_ once set on foot, checks all unworthy doubts, sweeps out of consciousness all thoughts of inferior work (_inferiority_ and _Leonardo_ being emotionally incompatible!), respectfully holds the candle while the elements common to the imitation and the masterpiece are gone over and over, and the differentiating elements exclusively belonging to Leonardo evoked in the expert's memory, until at last the objective work of art comes to be embedded in recollected masterpieces which impart to it their emotionally communicable virtue. And when the poor expert is finally overwhelmed with ridicule, the Philistine shrewdly decides that a sham Leonardo is just as good as a genuine one, that these are all matters of fashion, and that there is really no disputing of tastes!

CHAPTER XX

AESTHETIC IRRADIATION AND PURIFICATION

THE storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion explain yet another fact, with which indeed I began this little book: namely that the word _Beautiful_ has been extended from whatever is satisfactory in our contemplation of shapes, to a great number of cases where there can be no question of shapes at all, as in speaking of a "beautiful character" and a "fine moral att.i.tude"; or else, as in the case of a "beautiful bit of machinery," a "fine scientific demonstration" or a "splendid surgical operation" where the shapes involved are not at all such as to afford contemplative satisfaction. In such cases the word _Beautiful_ has been brought over with the emotion of satisfied contemplation. And could we examine microscopically the minds of those who are thus applying it, we might perhaps detect, round the fully-focussed thought of that admirable but nowise _shapely_ thing or person or proceeding, the shadowy traces of half-forgotten shapes, visible or audible, forming a halo of real aesthetic experience, and evoked by that word _Beautiful_ whose application they partially justify. Nor is this all. Recent psychology teaches that, odd as it at first appears, our more or less definite images, auditive as well as visual, and whether actually perceived or merely remembered, are in reality the intermittent part of the mind's contents, coming and going and weaving themselves on to a constant woof of our own activities and feelings. It is precisely such activities and feelings which are mainly in question when we apply the words _Beautiful_ and _Ugly._ Thus everything which has come in connexion with occasions for satisfactory shape-contemplation, will meet with somewhat of the same reception as that shape-contemplation originally elicited. And even the merest items of information which the painter conveys concerning the visible universe; the merest detail of human character conveyed by the poet; nay even the mere nervous intoxication furnished by the musician, will all be irradiated by the emotion due to the shapes they have been conveyed in, and will therefore be felt as beautiful.

Moreover, as the "beautiful character" and "splendid operation" have taught us, rare and desirable qualities are apt to be contemplated in a "platonic" way. And even objects of bodily desire, so long as that desire is not acute and pressing, may give rise to merely contemplative longings. All this, added to what has previously been said, sufficiently explains the many and heterogeneous items which are irradiated by the word _Beautiful_ and the emotion originally arising from the satisfied contemplation of mere shapes.

And that this contemplation of beautiful shapes should be at once so life-corroborating and so strangely impersonal, and that its special emotion should be so susceptible of radiation and transfer, is sufficient explanation of the elevating and purifying influence which, ever since Plato, philosophers have usually ascribed to the Beautiful.

Other moralists however have not failed to point out that art has, occasionally and even frequently, effects of the very opposite kind.

The ever-recurrent discussion of this seeming contradiction is, however, made an end of, once we recognise that art has many aims besides its distinguishing one of increasing our contemplation of the beautiful. Indeed some of art's many non-aesthetic aims may themselves be foreign to elevation and purification, or even, as for instance the lewd or brutal subjects of some painting and poetry, and the nervous intoxication of certain music, exert a debasing or enervating influence. But, as the whole of this book has tried to establish, the contemplation of beautiful shapes involves perceptive processes in themselves mentally invigorating and refining, and a play of empathic feelings which realise the greatest desiderata of spiritual life, viz. intensity, purposefulness and harmony; and such perceptive and empathic activities cannot fail to raise the present level of existence and to leave behind them a higher standard for future experience. This exclusively elevating effect of beautiful shape as such, is of course proportioned to the attention it receives and the exclusion of other, and possibly baser, interests connected with the work of art. On the other hand the purifying effects of beautiful shapes depend upon the attention oscillating to and fro between them and those other interests, e.g. _subject_ in the _representative_ arts, _fitness_ in the _applied_ ones, and _expression_ in music; all of which non-aesthetic interests benefit (enhanced if n.o.ble, redeemed if base) by irradiation of the n.o.bler feelings wherewith they are thus a.s.sociated. For we must not forget that where opposed groups of feeling are elicited, whichever happens to be more active and complex will neutralise its opponent.

Thus, while an even higher intensity and complexity of aesthetic feelings is obtained when the "subject" of a picture, the use of a building or a chattel, or the expression of a piece of music, is in itself n.o.ble; and a Degas ballet girl can never have the dignity of a Phidian G.o.ddess, nor a gambling _casino_ that of a cathedral, nor the music to Wilde's Salome that of Brahms' _German Requiem,_ yet whatever of beauty there may be in the shapes will divert the attention from the meanness or vileness of the non-aesthetic suggestion. We do not remember the mercenary and libertine allegory embodied in Correggio's _Danae,_ or else we reinterpret that sorry piece of mythology in terms of cosmic occurrences, of the Earth's wealth increased by the fecundating sky. Similarly it is a common observation that while _unmusical_ Bayreuth-goers often attribute demoralising effects to some of Wagner's music, the genuinely musical listeners are unaware, and usually incredulous, of any such evil possibilities.

This question of the purifying power of the Beautiful has brought us back to our starting-point. It ill.u.s.trates the distinction between _contemplating an aspect_ and _thinking about things,_ and this distinction's corollary that shape as such is yon-side of _real_ and _unreal,_ taking on the character of reality and unreality only inasmuch as it is thought of in connexion with a _thing._ As regards the possibility of being _good_ or _evil,_ it is evident from all the foregoing that _shape as shape,_ and without the suggestion of things, can be evil only in the sense of being ugly, ugliness diminishing its own drawbacks by being, _ipso facto,_ difficult to dwell upon, inasmuch as it goes against the grain of our perceptive and empathic activities. The contemplation of beautiful shape is, on the other hand, favoured by its pleasurableness, and such contemplation of beautiful shape lifts our perceptive and empathic activities, that is to say a large part of our intellectual and emotional life, on to a level which can only be spiritually, organically, and in so far, morally beneficial.

CHAPTER XXI

CONCLUSION (EVOLUTIONAL)

SOME of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final question concerning our subject. Not: What is the use of Art? since, as we have seen, Art has many and various uses both to the individual and to the community, each of which uses is independent of the attainment of Beauty.

The remaining question concerns the usefulness of the very demand for Beauty, of that _Aesthetic Imperative_ by which the other uses of art are more or less qualified or dominated. In what way, the Reader may ask, has sensitiveness to Beauty contributed to the survival of mankind, that it should not only have been preserved and established by evolutional selection, but invested with the tremendous power of the pleasure and pain alternative?

The late William James, as some readers may remember, placed musical pleasure between sentimental love and sea-sickness as phenomena unaccountable by any value for human survival, in fact masteries, if not paradoxes, of evolution.

The riddle, though not necessarily the mystery, does not consist in the survival of the aesthetic instinct of which the musical one is a mere sub-category, but in the origin and selectional establishment of its elementary const.i.tuents, say for instance s.p.a.ce-perception and empathy, both of which exist equally outside that instinct which is a mere compound of them and other primary tendencies. For given s.p.a.ce-perception and empathy and their capacity of being felt as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, the aesthetic imperative is not only intelligible but inevitable. Instead therefore of asking: Why is there a preference for what we call Beauty? we should have to ask: why has perception, feeling, logic, imagination, come to be just what it is?

Indeed why are our sense-organs, our bodily structure and chemical composition, what they are; and why do they exist at all in contradistinction to the ways of being of other living or other inanimate things? So long as these elementary facts continue shrouded in darkness or taken for granted, the genesis and evolutional reason of the particular compound which we call aesthetic preference must remain only one degree less mysterious than the genesis and evolutional reason of its psychological components.

Meanwhile all we can venture to say is that as satisfaction derived from shapes we call _beautiful,_ undoubtedly involves intense, complex, and reiterative mental activities, as it has an undeniable power for happiness and hence for spiritual refreshment, and as it moreover tends to inhibit most of the instincts whose superabundance can jeopardise individual and social existence, the capacity for such aesthetic satisfaction, once arisen, would be fostered in virtue of a ma.s.s of evolutional advantages which are as complex and difficult to a.n.a.lyse, but also as deep-seated and undeniable, as itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. _Lipps._ Raumaesthetik, Leipzig, 1897.

" Aesthetik, vol. I. part ii., Leipzig, 1906.

II. _Karl Groos._ Aesthetik, Giessen, 1892.

" Der Aesthetische Genuss, Giessen, 1902.

III. _Wundt._ Physiologische Psychologie (5th Edition, 1903), vol.

III. pg. 107 to 209. But the whole volume is full of indirect suggestion on aesthetics.

IV. _Munsterberg._ The Principles of Art Education, New York, 1905. (Statement of Lipps' theory in physiological terms.) V. _Kulpe._ Der gegenwartige Stand der experimentellen Aesthetik, 1907.

VI. _Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson._ Beauty and Ugliness, 1912 (contains abundant quotations from most of the above works and other sources).

VII. _Ribot._ Le Role latent des Images Motrices. Revue Philosophique, March 1912.

VIII. _Witasek._ Psychologie der Raumwahrnehmung des Auges (1910). These two last named are only indirectly connected with visual aesthetics.

For art-evolutional questions consult: IX. _Haddon._ Evolution in Art, 1895.

X. _Yrjo Hirn._ Origins of Art, Macmillan, 1900.

XI. _Levinstein._ Kinderzeichnungen, Leipzig, 1905.

XII. _Loewy._ Nature in early Greek Art (translation), Duckworth, 1907.

XIII. _Delia Seta._ Religione e Arte Figurata, Rome, 1912.

XIV. _Spearing._ The Childhood of Art, 1913.

XV. _Jane Harrison._ Ancient Art and Ritual, 1913.