The Psychology of Beauty Part 12

V

It will be demanded, however, what place there is then for a temporal factor, if the typical dramatic experience depends upon the great scene? It cannot be denied that the drama is a work of art developed in time, like music and poetry. It comes to a climax and a resolution; it evolves its harmonies like the symphony, in irrevocable order. We cannot afford to neglect, in such an aesthetic a.n.a.lysis, what is an undoubted element in dramatic effect, the so-called inevitable march of events. In answer to this objection we may hold that the temporal factor is a corollary of the primary demand for confrontation. It is necessary that the confrontation or conflict should be vividly imagined, with all possible a.s.sociative reinforcements--that it should be brought up to the turn of the screw, as it were.

For this, then, motivation is absolutely necessary. An att.i.tude is only clearly "realized" when it is made to seem inevitable.

It takes complete possession of our minds only when it inhibits all other possibilities. At any given scene, the power of a part to reproduce itself in us is measured by the convincing quality given it by motivation, and for this there must be a full body of a.s.sociations to draw on, to round out and complete understanding. The villain of the play is, for instance, less completely "suggested" to us, because our a.s.sociations are supposedly less rich for such characters; as a beggar hypnotized and made to feel himself a king has meagre mental equipment for the part. Now, this inner possession can come about only through the compelling force of a long course of preparation.

In providing such an acc.u.mulation of impulses, none was greater than the younger Dumas--and none had to be greater! To make his audience accept--that is, identify itself with--the action of the hero in "Denise," or the mother's decision in "Les Idees de Mms. Aubray," so subversive of general social feeling, and thereby to experience fully the great dramatic moment in each play, there had to go the effect of innumerable small impulses.

And to realize some situations is even beyond the scope of a play's development. It is an acute remark of Mr. G.K.

Chesterton's, that many plays nowadays turn on problems of marriage: which subject is one for slow years of adjustment, patience, adaptation, endeavor; while the drama requires quick decisions, boulevers.e.m.e.nts, etc., and would do wisely to confine itself to fields in which such boulevers.e.m.e.nts can be made credible. At any rate, motivation is desirable for the dramatic confrontation, and time--the working-out--is an essential condition of motivation. To make the dramatic conflict ever sharper and deeper, until it either melts into harmony, or ceases through the destruction of one element, is the whole duty of the development, and makes it necessary.

That development is temporal, is, dramatically, only a device for damming the flood that it may break at last with greater force.

This, too, is an answer to the objection that if confrontation is the dramatic essential, bare opposition, because the clearest confrontation, would be the greatest drama, and the "Suppliants"

of Euripedes be indeed an example of it. Bare opposition is never real confrontation in our sense, for that must be an arrest, a mutual antagonism of all impulses of soul and sense.

It must possess the whole man. It needs to take in "all thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights," to be complete, and the measure of its completeness is the measure of its aesthetic value.

In the same way, the demand for profound truth and significance in the drama is clearly to be reached from the purely dramatic need. Inner "possession," the condition for our dramatic tension, depends not alone on the c.u.mulation of suggestions-- suggestion in its, so to speak, quant.i.tative aspect. The att.i.tude of a character must be necessary in itself: that is, it must be true to the great and general laws of life. If it is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter into it. Thus we see that the one central requirement, the dramatic germ, leads to the most far-reaching demands for logic, sanity, and morality in the ideas of a play.

This should not be interpreted as exhausting the aesthetic value of logic and morality in the drama. The drama is a species of literature: and these qualities, apart from the fact that they are necessary to the full dramatic moment, have also an aesthetic effect proper to themselves. Thus the development ha the beauty which lies in a necessary progress; but this beauty is common to the epic, the novel, and the symphony, while the unity given by the confrontation and tension of simultaneous forces belongs to the drama alone.

It is therefore development as serving the dramatic end that I have deduced.

Yet we may well recall here the other aspect of the experience.

a.n.a.logous to the pleasure in rhythm and in music, in which the awaited beat or tone slips, as it were, into a place already prepared for it, with the satisfaction of harmonious nervous adjustment, is the pleasure in an inevitable and irrevocable progress. For it is not felt as inevitable unless the whole crystallization of the situation makes such, and only such, an action or thought necessary at a certain point in the structure, makes it to a certain extent antic.i.p.ated, and so recognized with acclaim on its appearance. We will an event in antic.i.p.ating and accepting it; and we realize it as it comes. Nothing more is to be found in the psychological a.n.a.lysis of the will itself--theoretically, the two states are nearly identical. Thus this continual antic.i.p.ation and "coming true" takes on the feeling-tone of all volition; and so in music, as I have shown at length, and in drama, and to a degree in all forms of literature, we have the illusion of the triumphant will. This is the secret of that creative joy felt by the spectator at a drama, which has been so often noted. It is this illusion of the triumphant will, too, which enters largely into our acceptance of the tragic end. Much has been said, in the "dispute over tragedy," of the so-called "Resignation" of the tragic hero, and of the audience in relation to his fate. But I believe that these writers are wrong in connecting this resignation primarily with a moral att.i.tude.

What is foreseen as perfectly inevitable, is sufficiently "accepted" in the psychological sense--that is, vividly imagined and awaited,--to contribute to this illusion of volition. Hence arise, for the catastrophe of drama, that exaltation and stern joy which are indissolubly connected with the experience of will in real life.

VI

We have spoken of the dramatic, and have desired to show that its peculiar aesthetic experience arises out of the tension or balance of emotion in the confrontation of opposing forces. If this is a fruitful theory, it should throw light on the distinction between the different forms of the drama, and on the princ.i.p.al issues of that "Dispute over Tragedy" which is always with us.

The possible results of a meeting of two forces are these.

Both forces, or one force, may be destroyed; or, short of destruction, the two may melt into harmony, or one may give way before the other. I think it may be said that these alternatives represent the distinctions of Tragedy and Comedy.

When two aims are absolutely irreconcilable, and when the forces tending to them are important,--that is, powerful,--there must be somewhere destruction, and we have tragedy. When they are reconcilable, if they are important, we have serious comedy; when not important, or not envisaged as important, we have light comedy. Thus Tragedy and Comedy are closely related,-- more closely than we are p.r.o.ne to think. In the words of the late Professor Everett, in "Poetry, Comedy, and Duty:" "The tragic is, like the comic, simply the incongruous. The great Tragedy of Nature, which is called the Struggle for Existence, results simply from a greater or less incongruousness between any form of life and its surroundings....The comic is found in an incongruous relation considered merely as to its FORM, while the tragic is found in an incongruous relation taken as to its reality." For this word incongruity I would subst.i.tute collision or conflict. When there is no way out, we have Tragedy; when there is a way out, we have Comedy. And when things are taken superficially enough, there always is a way out, for we can at least always agree to disagree. In any case, the end of the conflict is a period, repose, unity. This seems to be borne out by immediate introspection. The feelings with which we come from a great tragedy or a great comedy are indeed almost identical. The excitement, tension, sunk into repose, are common to both; the satisfaction with a good ending is strangely paralleled by our resignation to a bad one,-- significant of our real indifference to the fact, so long as the Aesthetic Unity is reached.

In George Meredith's wonderful little essay on the Comic Spirit, this view is rather remarkably confirmed. He has defined Comedy as the contrast of the middle way, the way of common sense, with our human vagaries, "Comme un point fixe fait remarquer l'emportement des autres." Comedy, he says, teaches the world to understand what ails it...."Comedy is the fountain of sound sense," and again, "the use of the true comedy is to awaken thoughtful laughter." "Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or moved with conceit, individually or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humorously malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit." The Comic Spirit is the just common sense, the subconscious wisdom of the ages. There IS a golden mean, the Comic Spirit shows it to us in the light of our flashing laughter at the deviation therefrom. And because there is, even the unreconciled--reconcilable--difference or conflict is not serious. That is why true Comedy seems to find its best field in a developed social life. The incongruities of human nature hurt is they are pressed too deep, because they are irreconcilable; they too quickly edge the tragic gulf.

But the incongruities of the conventional life do not hurt when pressed. To change our metaphor, adjustment to the middle way is here so easily credible and possible, that it is the very hunting-ground for the Comic Spirit.

The reputed masterpiece of Moliere shows us Alceste and Celimene in the end still at odds. But light-heartedness and sincerity are not to common sense incompatible, and thus we are rightly led up to the impa.s.se by paths of laughter. Wherever the middle way is divined, there is the possible entrance of the Spirit of Comedy. It is certainly a detriment to the purely Tragic effect of Pinero's greatest play, that the middle way, the possibility of reconciliation, is shadowed forth in the last word,--the cry of the stepdaughter of the Second Mrs.

Tanqueray, "If I had only been more merciful!" Dumas fils would never have allowed that. He would have written his play around that thought, and made it indeed a reconciling drama-- or he would have suppressed the cry. The end of Romeo and Juliet--date I confess it?--has always hovered for me close to that border which is not sublime. For the hapless lovers missed all for want of a little common sense. There was naught inevitable in their plight. I see the Comic Spirit leaning across to stay the hand of the impetuous Romeo. Why not take a moment's sober thought? she murmurs.

Tragedy ensues when there is no way out. It is not that ruin or death for those in whom these forces are embodied is of the essence of the situation; only that in the complete destruction of a force or purpose when it has been embodied in a strong desperate character, the death of that character is usually involved. There is no solution but to cut the knot. The tragic has been defined as "that quality of experience whereby, in and through some serious collision, followed by fatal catastrophe or inner ruin, something valuable in personality becomes manifest, either as sublime or admirable in the hero, or as triumph of an idea." But "Lear," "Macbeth," "Hamlet,"

"Oedipus King," "Oth.e.l.lo," exist to contravene this view. No, the tragic (in its first sense, in the sense derived from the dramatic form from which it is named) is in the collision itself; it is the profound and, to our vision, the irreconcilable antagonism of different elements in life. And in life we accept it because we must; we transcend it because, as moral beings, we may. The sublime in actual tragic experience is the reaction of the unconquerable Soul. In tragic literature another appears. We are helped in transcending the essential contradictions of life presented to us, because the conditions of literature in "preparing" an event create for us the illusion of volition, the acceptance of fate. And in the tragic drama, to all these elements of the complex experience, there is added the exaltation of the aesthetic "arrest," the tension of confrontations.

The question of the "highest" or "most tragic" form of tragedy seems to have been settled by general agreement. It has been held that the tragic of the justified opposing force is the more full of meaning and importance, for the reason that more interesting and complex feelings are called into play on each side than in the case of the unjustified opposing force. But the definition of the tragic drama we have won seems further to illuminate our undoubted preference for this type. We demand aesthetically all that will make the confrontation, the dramatic tension, more clearly felt; and we cannot realize fully a side which should be unjustified. In such a play as Maeterlinck's "Aglavaine and Selysette" there is no movement, and even the conflict is subterranean; yet, as all the characters are in their way n.o.ble, and in their way justified, we find it among the most poignant of his plays. Nay, more, in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life as we know it,--completely justified, or at least FELT as inevitable on both sides,--the more are we shaken by the distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to one's self and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies. Luther, as Freytag well shows, is a really tragic figure from the moment when we conceive of the inner connection of his intolerance with all that is good and great in his nature.

As the expression of such a conflict of impulses good in themselves, "Magda" is a great tragedy than the "Joy of Living;" "Ghosts" than "Hedda Gabler;" the story of "Francesca Da Rimini" (I do not mean D'Annunzio's play) than "La Citta Morta."

What, then, shall be said of the so-called tragic "Guilt," in which the hero rushes on impiously to his doom? It is clear that this question is closely related to the much-debated "Greatness" of the tragic hero. If there is guilt, there must be also greatness, to impress that side of the canvas on our vision. It is, indeed, almost a quant.i.tative problem.

Strength, energy, depth of pa.s.sion, breadth of vision, power and place, ravish our attention and our unconscious imitation.

What is lacking in extensity of a.s.sociative reproduction must be added in intensity. And, in fact, we find that it is the giants who bear the tragic "Schuld." Hamlet is not guilty; rather "one like ourselves," in Aristotle's phrase, and therefore he need not be great. I agree with Volkelt's view that even the traditional tremendous will of the tragic hero may be dispensed with. No doubt it is most often strength of will which brings out the original conflict. But that conflict once given, as it is given, for example, in "Hamlet,"

the main point is to increase the weight of each side, which can indeed be done by other elements of greatness. On the other hand, I disagree with Volkelt's reason for thus exempting will, which is, that the contrast feeling of "how great a fall was there" may be given by other qualities in the hero than that of will. As I have urged, it is not the catastrophe which is of the tragic essence, and therefore not for the sake of the catastrophe that we should marshal our elements. The climax of tragedy and of our feeling is in the deadlock of forces, and whatever is not absolutely essential thereto may be done without.

VII

The phenomenon of our aesthetic reaction on the so-called painful experiences of the drama has then been discussed at length and accounted for. There is an undoubted emotional experience of great intensity; and yet that emotion turns out to be not the emotion IN the drama, but rather the emotion FROM the drama,--a unique independent emotion of tension, otherwise a form of the characteristic aesthetic emotion with which we have been before engaged. The playwright who scornfully rejects the spectator supposed to be aesthetic, ideally contemplative and emotionally indifferent, is vindicated. There must be a vivid emotional effect, but it is the spectator's very own, and not a copy of the hero's emotion, because it is the product of the essential form of the drama itself, the confrontation of forces.

Secondly, that confrontation of forces has revealed itself as indeed essential. This is not the time-honored view of tragedy as collision, which has been arrived at simply by observing that great tragic dramas are mostly collisions, making the drama a picture thereof, but not explaining why it must be such. I have tried, on the contrary, to show that confrontation is a necessary product of the bare form of dramatic representation,--two people face to face. But if this bare form or scheme of confrontation is understood and interpreted as profoundly as possible, then all the other characteristics of the tragic drama are seen to flow from it; and thus for the first time to be really explained by being accounted for. The tragic drama not only is, but must be, collision, because confrontation, understood as richly as possible, must be collision. It must be "inevitable," and it must have movement, because only so is the confrontation reinforced.

In brief, others have said that the drama, or tragedy, is conflict, the perfect opposition of two forces. We should rather say that the drama is first of all picture, living representation of colloquy; as such, it is balance, confrontation; and confrontation to its ideal degree of intensity is conflict. No drama can dispense with picture; and so no drama is free from the obligation to add unto itself these other qualities also. The acting play is the play of confrontations.

VIII THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS

VIII THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS

I

THE Idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; to-day we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; and that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation. But while this view is a natural development, it is not of necessity una.s.sailable; and it is open to question whether the addition of an independent element of expression to the older definition of beauty can be justified by its consequences for art.

Such an inquiry, however, cannot stop with the relation of the deeper meanings of modern art to the conception of beauty. It must go further and find out what elements, the sensuous form or the ideas that are bound up with it, in a work of art, of the cla.s.sical as well as of the idealistic type, really const.i.tute its aesthetic value. What is it that makes the beauty of the "Venus of Milo"? Is it the pose and the modeling, or the idea of the eternal feminine that it expresses to us?

What is it that makes the beauty of St. Mark's or of Giotto's tower? the relation of the lines and ma.s.ses or the sacred significance of the edifices they go to form? What is it that makes the beauty of the Ninth Symphony? the perfection of the melodic sequence, or the Hymn of Joy, the message from the Infinite which they are meant to utter?

The ant.i.thesis between these two points of view is, of course, not the same as that other ant.i.thesis between "art for art's sake" and art in the light of its moral meanings and effects.

What we now call romantic or expressive art can certainly be made the more fruitful in moral suggestions; but this fact bears not at all on the question of what belongs fundamentally to the nature of beauty. We know, moreover, that on this matter the camps of the formalists and the romanticists are divided. The Greeks, the lovers of formal beauty, were so alive to the moral effects of art that their theories were in danger of being quite overwhelmed by this view. On the other hand, the lovers of ideas in art, the natural enemies, as one would have thought, of art for art's sake, have been most often impatient of any consideration of its moral elements or effects.

This second question, then, of art as pleasure or as moral influence can be once for all excluded from the discussion. So far as yet appears, the issue is between form and expression.

There is, perhaps, some point of common agreement from which to survey and distinguish more exactly these two diverging tendencies. Such a coign of vantage is offered by the nature of the aesthetic att.i.tude,--for since Kant there has been among aestheticians no essential difference of opinion on this point.

The aesthetic att.i.tude, all agree, is disinterested. We care for the image or appearance of the object, for the way its form affects us, and not for the actual existence of the object itself. If I delight aesthetically in a cl.u.s.ter of grapes, I do not want to eat them, but only to enjoy their image, and my feeling of pleasure, as aesthetic, would not be changed if before me were only a mirage, an hallucination, or a picture.

It is just the pleasure in perception that appeals to me,-- therein both schools agree,--and the only matter at issue is the question of what this disinterested pleasure of perception includes. Is that pleasure bound up with the mechanisms of perception itself, or does it come from the end of the process and the ease with which it is reached,--from the IDEA, in the contemplation of which we delight?

One school a.s.serts that the real pleasure in perception comes only from form. The given object is beautiful, through its original qualities of line, color, or sound, which strike the special senses in a way that is pleasing to them; and through its combinations of these qualities, which affect the whole human organism in a directly pleasurable way. What is outside of the given object of art--is meant, suggested, or recalled by it--belongs, it is said, to absolutely unaesthetic processes, as is shown by the fact that many things, which we are the first to acknowledge as ugly, are the exciting cause of great thoughts and delightful a.s.sociations. The opposed school maintains that the meanings of a work of art are all that it exists for. The presentation of an idea, by whatever sensuous means, so only that they be transparent, and the joy of the soul in contemplating this idea, must be the object and the end of art. The later idealists admit value to the form only in so far a it may express, convey, symbolize, or suggest the content, whether as pure idea, or as a shadowing forth of the Divine World-Meaning.

These theories are certainly intelligible; but the results of applying them with logical consistency are rather terrifying.

Andrew Lang says somewhere that the logical consequence of the formal theory of art in all its nakedness would make Tennyson the youth, Swinburne, and Edgar Poe the greatest poets of the world, and those delicious effusions of Edward Lear, "The Jumblies" and "On the Coast of Coromandel," masterpieces. Yet if we allow the idealists to pa.s.s sentence, what shall become of our treasures in "Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln," or "La Nuit de Decembre"? The results of such a judgment day would be even more appalling to the true lover of poetry.

Moreover, if the idea, the end of art, need not reside in the object itself, but may arise therefrom by subtle suggestion, the complications of poetry or painting are unnecessary. A geometric figure may remind us of the const.i.tution of the world of s.p.a.ce, a sundial, of the transitoriness of human existence, and with a "chorus-ending from Euripedes," the whole sweep of the cosmic meanings is upon us. In the words of Fra Lippo Lippi:--

"Why, for this, What need of art at all? A skull and bones, Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or what's best, A bell to chime the hours with, does as well."

II

In spite of this, however, a place for ideas must clearly be found in our definition of beauty; and yet it must be so limited and bound to the beautiful form that corollaries such as we have just drawn will be impossible. An interesting attempt to reconcile these two points of view--to establish an organic relation between form and idea--is found in "The Sense of Beauty" by Professor George Santayana. The central point of this writer's theory is his definition of beauty as the objectification of pleasure. Aesthetic experience, he says, is based partly on form, partly on expression, but the pleasure felt is always projected into the object, and is felt as a quality of it. All kinds of external a.s.sociations may connect themselves with the work of art, but so long as they remain external, and keep, so to speak, their values for themselves, they cannot be said to add beauty to the object. But when they are present only in their effect,-- a diffused feeling of pleasure,--that diffused feeling is attributed directly to the object, is felt as if it inheres therein, and so the object becomes more beautiful, for beauty is objectified pleasure. Professor Santayana designates form as beauty in the first term, and expression as beauty in the second term. Beauty in the first term can exist alone,--not so beauty in the second term. It must have a little beauty of the first term to graft itself upon. "A map, for instance, is not usually thought of as an aesthetic object, and yet, let the tints of it be a little subtle, let the lines be a little delicate, and the ma.s.ses of land and sea somewhat balanced, and we really have a beautiful thing, the charm of which consists almost entirely in its meaning.

Now here, it seems to me, is a weak point in Professor Santanaya's armor. If such wonderful elements of beauty can be projected into a fairly colorless object by virtue of its fringe of suggestiveness, why should not beauty of the second term be felt in objects without that little bit of intrinsic worth of form? Is not such indeed the fact? What else is the meaning of the story of "Beauty and the Beast"? The squat and hideous Indian idol, the scarabaeus, the bit of Aztec pottery, become attractive and desired for themselves by virtue of their halo of pleasure from dim a.s.sociations. And all these values are felt as completely OBJECTIFIED, and so fulfill the requirements for "beauty in the second term." That small amount of intrinsic beauty on which to graft the beauty of the second term is, therefore, not a necessary condition, so that we are left, on Professor Santayana's theory, with the strange paradox of so-called beautiful objects which are, nevertheless, confessedly ugly.

What, then, is the flaw in this definition? While we concede the objectification of pleasure in all these cases, we cannot, it would seem, admit a corresponding change from non-aesthetic to aesthetic feelings. The personal att.i.tude towards an object, based on sentiments objectified in it, and the aesthetic att.i.tude are two different things. The truth is, that all this objectified tone-feeling is directly dependent on the original real existence of the object that calls it up, and on our practical personal relation to it, and is thus, by universal agreement, definitely non-aesthetic. I enjoy the cast of the great Venus very nearly as much as the original,--but who cares for casts of the Aztec G.o.ds, or of the prehistoric carvings of the reindeer period? Who wants an imitation scarabaeus? To have the real thing, to see it, to touch it, to know that it has had real experiences that would fill me with wonder and with awe, "to love it for the danger it has pa.s.sed,"--to feel that I myself am through it actually linked with its mysterious history,--that is the value it has for me; not a pleasure of perception at all, but a very definite, practical interest in my own personality. If the pleasure lay only in disinterested perception, any representation of the object ought to have the same value.

What, then, the author of "The Sense of Beauty" calls "the beauty of the second term,"--the power to suggest feeling through the medium of a.s.sociated ideas,--we may deny to impart any aesthetic character whatever. Professor Santayana has, indeed, mediated between the formalists and the idealists; but his theory would lead us to attributions of beauty from which common sense revolts; and we have seen the secret of its deficiency to lie in the confusion of the personal with the aesthetic att.i.tude. If now we amend his definition, "Beauty is objectified pleasure," to "Beauty is objectified aesthetic pleasure," we are advanced no further.