The particular emotion produced in us by such things as are beautiful,
works of art or of nature, recollections and thoughts as well as
sights and sounds, the emotion of æsthetic pleasure, has been
recognised ever since the beginning of time as of a mysteriously
ennobling quality. All philosophers have told us that; and the
religious instinct of all mankind has practically proclaimed it, by
employing for the worship of the highest powers, nay, by employing for
the mere designation of the godhead, beautiful sights, and sounds, and
words by which beautiful sights and sounds are suggested. Nay, there
has always lurked in men's minds, and expressed itself in the
metaphors of men's speech, an intuition that the Beautiful is in some
manner one of the primordial and, so to speak, cosmic powers of the
world. The theories of various schools of mental science, and the
practice of various schools of art, the practice particularly of the
persons styled by themselves æsthetes and by others decadents, have
indeed attempted to reduce man's relations with the great world-power
Beauty to mere intellectual dilettantism or sensual superfineness. But
the general intuition has not been shaken, the intuition which
recognised in Beauty a superhuman, and, in that sense, a truly divine
power. And now it must become evident that the methods of modern
psychology, of the great new science of body and soul, are beginning
to explain the reasonableness of this intuition, or, at all events, to
show very plainly in what direction we must look for the explanation
of it. This much can already be asserted, and can be indicated even
to those least versed in recent psychological study, to wit, that the
power of Beauty, the essential power therefore of art, is due to the
relations of certain visible and audible forms with the chief mental
and vital functions of all human beings; relations established
throughout the whole process of human and, perhaps, even of animal,
evolution; relations seated in the depths of our activities, but
radiating upwards even like our vague, organic sense of comfort and
discomfort; and permeating, even like our obscure relations with
atmospheric conditions, into our highest and clearest consciousness,
colouring and altering the whole groundwork of our thoughts and
feelings.
Such is the primordial, and, in a sense, the cosmic power of the
Beautiful; a power whose very growth, whose constantly more complex
nature proclaims its necessary and beneficial action in human
evolution. It is the power of making human beings live, for the
moment, in a more organically vigorous and harmonious fashion, as
mountain air or sea-wind makes them live; but with the difference that
it is not merely the bodily, but very essentially the spiritual life,
the life of thought and emotion, which is thus raised to unusual
harmony and vigour. I may illustrate this matter by a very individual
instance, which will bring to the memory of each of my readers the
vivifying power of some beautiful sight or sound or beautiful
description. I was seated working by my window, depressed by the
London outlook of narrow grey sky, endless grey roofs, and rusty elm
tops, when I became conscious of a certain increase of vitality,
almost as if I had drunk a glass of wine, because a band somewhere
outside had begun to play. After various indifferent pieces, it began
a tune, by Handel or in Handel's style, of which I have never known
the name, calling it for myself the _Te Deum_ Tune. And then it seemed
as if my soul, and according to the sensations, in a certain degree my
body even, were caught up on those notes, and were striking out as if
swimming in a great breezy sea; or as if it had put forth wings and
risen into a great free space of air. And, noticing my feelings, I
seemed to be conscious that those notes were being played _on me_, my
fibres becoming the strings; so that as the notes moved and soared and
swelled and radiated like stars and suns, I also, being identified
with the sound, having become apparently the sound itself, must needs
move and soar with them.
We can all recollect a dozen instances when architecture, music,
painting, or some sudden sight of sea or mountain, have thus affected
us; and all poetry, particularly all great lyric poetry, Goethe's,
Shelley's, Wordsworth's, and, above all, Browning's, is full of the
record of such experience.
I have said that the difference between this æsthetic heightening of
our vitality (and this that I have been describing is, I pray you to
observe, the æsthetic phenomenon _par excellence_), and such other
heightening of vitality as we experience from going into fresh air and
sunshine or taking fortifying food, the difference between the
æsthetic and the mere physiological pleasurable excitement consists
herein, that in the case of beauty, it is not merely our physical but
our spiritual life which is suddenly rendered more vigorous. We do not
merely breathe better and digest better, though that is no small
gain, but we seem to understand better. Under the vitalising touch of
the Beautiful, our consciousness seems filled with the affirmation of
what life is, what is worth being, what among our many thoughts and
acts and feelings are real and organic and important, what among the
many possible moods is the real, eternal _ourself_.
Such are the great forces of Nature gathered up in what we call the
_æsthetic phenomenon_, and it is these forces of Nature which, stolen
from heaven by the man of genius or the nation of genius, and welded
together in music, or architecture, in the arts of visible design or
of written thoughts, give to the great work of art its power to
quicken the life of our soul.