THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY
_All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty._
§ 12. Our task will now be to pass in review the various elements
of our consciousness, and see what each contributes to the beauty
of the world. We shall find that they do so whenever they are
inextricably associated with the objectifying activity of the
understanding. Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that
web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it
lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which
we call beauty.
There is no function of our nature which cannot contribute
something to this effect, but one function differs very much from
another in the amount and directness of its contribution. The
pleasures of the eye and ear, of the imagination and memory, are
the most easily objectified and merged in ideas; but it would betray
inexcusable haste and slight appreciation of the principle involved,
if we called them the only materials of beauty. Our effort will
rather be to discover its other sources, which have been more
generally ignored, and point out their importance. For the five
senses and the three powers of the soul, which play so large a part
in traditional psychology, are by no means the only sources or
factors of consciousness; they are more or less external divisions of
its content, and not even exhaustive of that. The nature and
changes of our life have deeper roots, and are controlled by less
obvious processes.
The human body is a machine that holds together by virtue of
certain vital functions, on the cessation of which it is dissolved.
Some of these, like the circulation of the blood, the growth and
decay of the tissues, are at first sight unconscious. Yet any
important disturbance of these fundamental processes at once
produces great and painful changes in consciousness. Slight
alterations are not without their conscious echo: and the whole
temper and tone of our mind, the strength of our passions, the grip
and concatenation of our habits, our power of attention, and the
liveliness of our fancy and affections are due to the influence of
these vital forces. They do not, perhaps, constitute the whole basis
of any one idea or emotion: but they are the conditions of the
existence and character of all.
Particularly important are they for the _value_ of our experience.
They constitute health, without which no pleasure can be pure.
They determine our impulses in leisure, and furnish that surplus
energy which we spend in play, in art, and in speculation. The
attraction of these pursuits, and the very existence of an aesthetic
sphere, is due to the efficiency and perfection of our vital processes.
The pleasures which they involve are not exclusively bound to any
particular object, and therefore do not account for the relative
beauty of things. They are loose and unlocalized, having no special
organ, or one which is internal and hidden within the body. They
therefore remain undiscriminated in consciousness, and can serve
to add interest to any object, or to cast a general glamour over the
world, very favourable to its interest and beauty.
The aesthetic value of vital functions differs according to their
physiological concomitants: those that are favourable to ideation
are of course more apt to extend something of their intimate
warmth to the pleasures of contemplation, and thus to intensify the
sense of beauty and the interest of thought. Those, on the other
hand, that for physiological reasons tend to inhibit ideation, and to
drown the attention in dumb and unrepresentable feelings, are less
favourable to aesthetic activity. The double effect of drowsiness
and reverie will illustrate this difference. The heaviness of sleep
seems to fall first on the outer senses, and of course makes them
incapable of acute impressions; but if it goes no further, it leaves
the imagination all the freer, and by heightening the colours of the
fancy, often suggests and reveals beautiful images. There is a kind
of poetry and invention that comes only in such moments. In them
many lovely melodies must first have been heard, and centaurs and
angels originally imagined.
If, however, the lethargy is more complete, or if the cause of it is
such that the imagination is retarded while the senses remain
awake, -- as is the case with an over-fed or over-exercised body, --
we have a state of aesthetic insensibility. The exhilaration which
comes with pure and refreshing air has a marked influence on our
appreciations. To it is largely due the beauty of the morning, and
the entirely different charm it has from the evening. The opposite
state of all the functions here adds an opposite emotion to
externally similar scenes, making both infinitely but differently
beautiful.
It would be curious and probably surprising to discover how much
the pleasure of breathing has to do with our highest and most
transcendental ideals. It is not merely a metaphor that makes us
couple airiness with exquisiteness and breathlessness with awe; it
is the actual recurrence of a sensation in the throat and lungs that
gives those impressions an immediate power, prior to all reflection
upon their significance. It is, therefore, to this vital sensation of
deep or arrested respiration that the impressiveness of those objects
is immediately due.
_The influence of the passion of love._
§ 13. Half-way between vital and social functions, lies the sexual
instinct. If nature had solved the problem of reproduction without
the differentiation of sex, our emotional life would have been
radically different. So profound and, especially in woman, so
pervasive an influence does this function exert, that we should
betray an entirely unreal view of human nature if we did not
inquire into the relations of sex with our aesthetic susceptibility.
We must not expect, however, any great difference between man
and woman in the scope or objects of aesthetic interest: what is
important in emotional life is not which sex an animal has, but that
it has sex at all. For if we consider the difficult problem which
nature had to solve in sexual reproduction, and the nice adjustment
of instinct which it demands, we shall see that the reactions and
susceptibilities which must be implanted in the individual are for
the most part identical in both sexes, as the sexual organization is
itself fundamentally similar in both. Indeed, individuals of various
species and the whole animal kingdom have the same sexual
disposition, although, of course, the particular object destined to
call forth the complete sexual reaction, differs with every species,
and with each sex.
If we were dealing with the philosophy of love, and not with that
of beauty, our problem would be to find out by what machinery
this fundamental susceptibility, common to all animals of both
sexes, is gradually directed to more and more definite objects: first,
to one species and one sex, and ultimately to one individual. It is
not enough that sexual organs should be differentiated: the
connexion must be established between them and the outer senses,
so that the animal may recognize and pursue the proper object.
The case of lifelong fidelity to one mate -- perhaps even to an
unsatisfied and hopeless love -- is the maximum of differentiation,
which even overleaps the utility which gave it a foothold in nature,
and defeats its own object. For the differentiation of the instinct in
respect to sex, age, and species is obviously necessary to its
success as a device for reproduction. While this differentiation is
not complete, -- and it often is not, -- there is a great deal of
groping and waste; and the force and constancy of the instinct must
make up for its lack of precision. A great deal of vital energy is
thus absorbed by this ill-adjusted function. The most economical
arrangement which can be conceived, would be one by which only
the one female best fitted to bear offspring to a male should arouse
his desire, and only so many times as it was well she should grow
pregnant, thus leaving his energy and attention free at all other
times to exercise the other faculties of his nature.
If this ideal had been reached, the instinct, like all those perfectly
adjusted, would tend to become unconscious; and we should miss
those secondary effects with which we are exclusively concerned
in aesthetics. For it is precisely from the waste, from the radiation
of the sexual passion, that I beauty borrows warmth. As a harp,
made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to every wind, so
the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes
simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of
tenderness toward every object. The capacity to love gives our
contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to
manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic
sensibility -- without which it would be perceptive and
mathematical rather than aesthetic -- is due to our sexual
organization remotely stirred.
The attraction of sex could not become efficient unless the senses
were first attracted. The eye must be fascinated and the ear
charmed by the object which nature intends should be pursued.
Both sexes for this reason develope secondary sexual characteristics;
and the sexual emotions are simultaneously extended to various
secondary objects. The colour, the grace, the form, which
become the stimuli of sexual passion, and the guides of
sexual selection, acquire, before they can fulfil that office, a
certain intrinsic charm. This charm is not only present for reasons
which, in an admissible sense, we may call teleological, on account,
that is, of its past utility in reproduction, but its intensity and power
are due to the simultaneous stirring of profound sexual impulses.
Not, of course, that any specifically sexual ideas are connected
with these feelings: such ideas are absent in a modest and
inexperienced mind even in the obviously sexual passions of love
and jealousy.
These secondary objects of interest, which are some of the most
conspicuous elements of beauty, are to be called sexual for these
two reasons: because the contingencies of the sexual function hare
helped to establish them in our race, and because they owe their
fascination in a great measure to the participation of our sexual life
in the reaction which they cause.
If any one were desirous to produce a being with a great
susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better
designed for that object than sex. Individuals that need not unite
for the birth and rearing of each generation, might retain a savage
independence. For them it would not be necessary that any vision
should fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the prying
cruelty of the eye. But sex endows the individual with a dumb and
powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually
towards another; makes it one of the dearest employments of his
life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the
keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an
eternal melancholy.
What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest
meaning and beauty? The attention is fixed upon a well-defined
object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily
regarded as powers or qualities of that object. But these effects are
here powerful and profound. The soul is stirred to its depths. Its
hidden treasures are brought to the surface of consciousness. The
imagination and the heart awake for the first time. All these new
values crystallize about the objects then offered to the mind. If the
fancy is occupied by the image of a single person, whose qualities
have had the power of precipitating this revolution, all the values
gather about that one image. The object becomes perfect, and we
are said to be in love.[2] If the stimulus does not appear as a
definite image, the values evoked are dispersed over the world, and
we are said to have become lovers of nature, and to have
discovered the beauty and meaning of things.
To a certain extent this kind of interest will centre in the proper
object of sexual passion, and in the special characteristics of the
opposite sex; and we find accordingly that woman is the most
lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty would confess it,
the most interesting to woman. But the effects of so fundamental
and primitive a reaction are much more general. Sex is not the only
object of sexual passion. When love lacks its specific object, when
it does not yet understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some
other interest, we see the stifled fire bursting out in various
directions. One is religious devotion, another is zealous
philanthropy, a third is the fondling of pet animals, but not the least
fortunate is the love of nature, and of art; for nature also is often a
second mistress that consoles us for the loss of a first. Passion then
overflows and visibly floods those neighbouring regions which it
had always secretly watered. For the same nervous organization
which sex involves, with its necessarily wide branchings and
associations in the brain, must be partially stimulated by other
objects than its specific or ultimate one especially in man, who,
unlike some of the lower animals, has not his instincts clearly
distinct and intermittent, but always partially active, and never
active in isolation. We may say, then, that for man all nature is a
secondary object of sexual passion, and that to this fact the beauty
of nature is largely due.
_Social instincts and their aesthetic influence._
§ 14. The function of reproduction carries with it not only direct
modifications of the body and mind, but a whole set of social
institutions, for the existence of which social instincts and habits
are necessary in man. These social feelings, the parental, the
patriotic, or the merely gregarious, are not of much direct value for
aesthetics, although, as is seen in the case of fashions, they are
important in determining the duration and prevalence of a taste
once formed. Indirectly they are of vast importance and play a
great rôle in arts like poetry, where the effect depends on what is
signified more than on what is offered to sense. Any appeal to a
human interest rebounds in favour of a work of art in which it is
successfully made. That interest, unaesthetic in itself, helps to fix
the attention and to furnish subject-matter and momentum to arts
and modes of appreciation which are aesthetic. Thus comprehension
of the passion of love is necessary to the appreciation of
numberless songs, plays, and novels, and not a few works of
musical and plastic art.
The treatment of these matters must be postponed until we are
prepared to deal with expression -- the most complex element of
effect. It will suffice here to point out why social and gregarious
impulses, in the satisfaction of which happiness mainly resides, are
those in which beauty finds least support. This may help us to
understand better the relations between aesthetics and _hedonics,_
and the nature of that objectification in which we have placed the
difference between beauty and pleasure.
So long as happiness is conceived as a poet might conceive it,
namely, in its immediately sensuous and emotional factors, so long
as we live in the moment and make our happiness consist in the
simplest things, -- in breathing, seeing, hearing, loving, and
sleeping, -- our happiness has the same substance, the same
elements, as our aesthetic delight, for it is aesthetic delight that
makes our happiness. Yet poets and artists, with their immediate
and aesthetic joys, are not thought to be happy men; they
themselves are apt to be loud in their lamentations, and to regard
themselves as eminently and tragically unhappy. This arises from
the intensity and inconstancy of their emotions, from their
improvidence, and from the eccentricity of their social habits.
While among them the sensuous and vital functions have the upper
hand, the gregarious and social instincts are subordinated and often
deranged; and their unhappiness consists in the sense of their
unfitness to live in the world into which they are born.
But man is pre-eminently a political animal, and social needs are
almost as fundamental in him as vital functions, and often more
conscious. Friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence,
when added to family life, constitute surely the main elements of
happiness. Now these are only very partially composed of definite
images of objects. The desire for them, the consciousness of their
absence or possession, comes upon us only when we reflect, when
we are planning, considering the future, gathering the words of
others, rehearsing their scorn or admiration for ourselves,
conceiving possible situations in which our virtue, our fame or
power would become conspicuous, comparing our lot with that of
others, and going through other discursive processes of thought.
Apprehension, doubt, isolation, are things which come upon us
keenly when we reflect upon our lives; they cannot easily become
qualities of any object. If by chance they can, they acquire a great
aesthetic value. For instance, "home," which in its social sense is a
concept of happiness, when it becomes materialized in a cottage
and a garden becomes an aesthetic concept, becomes a beautiful
thing. The happiness is objectified, and the object beautified.
Social objects, however, are seldom thus aesthetic, because they
are not thus definitely imaginable. They are diffuse and abstract,
and verbal rather than sensuous in their materials. Therefore the
great emotions that go with them are not immediately transmutable
into beauty. If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because
happiness does not interest them. They cannot seriously pursue it,
because its components are not components of beauty, and being in
love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unaesthetic social
virtues in the operation of which happiness is found. On the other
hand those who pursue happiness conceived merely in the abstract
and conventional terms, as money, success, or respectability, often
miss that real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from
the senses and imagination. This element is what aesthetics
supplies to life; for beauty also can be a cause and a factor of
happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too
sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be
accounted happiness by the worldly mind.
_The lower senses._
§ 15. The senses of touch, taste, and smell, although capable no
doubt of a great development, have not served in man for the
purposes of intelligence so much as those of sight and hearing. It is
natural that as they remain normally in the background of
consciousness, and furnish the least part of our objectified ideas,
the pleasures connected with them should remain also detached,
and unused for the purpose of appreciation of nature. They have
been called the unaesthetic, as well as the lower, senses; but the
propriety of these epithets, which is undeniable, is due not to any
intrinsic sensuality or baseness of these senses, but to the function
which they happen to have in our experience. Smell and taste, like
hearing, have the great disadvantage of not being intrinsically
spatial: they are therefore not fitted to serve for the representation
of nature, which allows herself to be accurately conceived only in
spatial terms.[3] They have not reached, moreover, the same
organization as sounds, and therefore cannot furnish any play of
subjective sensation comparable to music in interest.
The objectification of musical forms is due to their fixity and
complexity: like words, they are thought of as existing in a social
medium, and can be beautiful without being spatial. But tastes
have never been so accurately or universally classified and
distinguished; the instrument of sensation does not allow such nice
and stable discriminations as does the ear. The art of combining
dishes and wines, although one which everybody practises with
more or less skill and attention, deals with a material far too
unrepresentable to be called beautiful. The art remains in the
sphere of the pleasant, and is consequently regarded as servile,
rather than fine.
Artists in life, if that expression may be used for those who have
beautified social and domestic existence, have appealed
continually to these lower senses. A fragrant garden, and savoury
meats, incense, and perfumes, soft stuffs, and delicious colours,
form our ideal of oriental luxuries, an ideal which appeals too
much to human nature ever to lose its charm. Yet our northern
poets have seldom attempted to arouse these images in their
sensuous intensity, without relieving them by some imaginative
touch. In Keats, for example, we find the following lines: --
And still she slept in azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd,
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
Even the most sensuous of English poets, in whom the love of
beauty is supreme, cannot keep long to the primal elements of
beauty; the higher flight is inevitable for him. And how much does
not the appeal to things in argosy transferred from Fez, reinforced
with the reference to Samarcand and especially to the authorized
beauties of the cedars of Lebanon, which even the Puritan may
sing without a blush, add to our wavering satisfaction and
reconcile our conscience to this unchristian indulgence of sense!
But the time may be near when such scruples will be less common,
and our poetry, with our other arts, will dwell nearer to the
fountain-head of all inspiration. For if nothing not once in sense is
to be found in the intellect, much less is such a thing to be found in
the imagination. If the cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful
shade, or the winds rustle through the maze of their branches, if
Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a
fit or poetic subject of allusion. And the word "Fez" would be
without imaginative value if no traveller had ever felt the
intoxication of the torrid sun, the languors of oriental luxury, or,
like the British soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of his
native land: --
Take me somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no ten commandments
And a man may raise a thirst.
Nor would Samarcand be anything but for the mystery of the
desert and the picturesqueness of caravans, nor would an argosy be
poetic if the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds and oars no
resistance, and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From these real
sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its power.
The sweep of the fancy is itself also agreeable; but the superiority
of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety
of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty
of those that can at any time be felt.
_Sound._
§ 16. Sound shares with the lower senses the disadvantage of
having no intrinsic spatial character; it, therefore, forms no part of
the properly abstracted external world, and the pleasures of the ear
cannot become, in the literal sense, qualities of _things._ But there
is in sounds such an exquisite and continuous gradation in pitch,
and such a measurable relation in length, that an object almost as
complex and describable as the visible one can be built out of
them. What gives spatial forms their value in description of
the environment is the ease with which discriminations and
comparisons can be made in spatial objects: they are measurable,
while unspatial sensations commonly are not. But sounds are also
measurable in their own category: they have comparable pitches
and durations, and definite and recognizable combinations of those
sensuous elements are as truly _objects_ as chairs and tables. Not
that a musical composition exists in any mystical way, as a portion
of the music of the spheres, which no one is hearing; but that, for a
critical philosophy, visible objects are also nothing but possibilities
of sensation. The real world is merely the shadow of that assurance
of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. This objectivity
can accrue to any mental figment that has enough cohesion,
content, and individuality to be describable and recognizable, and
these qualities belong no less to audible than to spatial ideas.
There is, accordingly, some justification in Schopenhauer's
speculative assertion that music repeats the entire world of sense,
and is a parallel method of expression of the underlying substance,
or will. The world of sound is certainly capable of infinite variety
and, were our sense developed, of infinite extensions; and it has as
much as the world of matter the power to interest us and to stir our
emotions. It was therefore potentially as full of meaning. But it has
proved the less serviceable and constant apparition; and, therefore,
music, which builds with its materials, while the purest and most
impressive of the arts, is the least human and instructive of them.
The pleasantness of sounds has a simple physical basis. All
sensations are pleasant only between certain limits of intensity; but
the ear can discriminate easily between noises, that in themselves
are uninteresting, if not annoying, and notes, which have an
unmistakable charm. A sound is a note if the pulsations of the air
by which it is produced recur at regular intervals. If there is no
regular recurrence of waves, it is a noise. The rapidity of these
regular beats determines the pitch of tones. That quality or
_timbre_ by which one sound is distinguished from another of the
same pitch and intensity is due to the different complications of
waves in the air; the ability to discriminate the various waves in the
vibrating air is, therefore, the condition of our finding music in it;
for every wave has its period, and what we call a noise is a
complication of notes too complex for our organs or our attention
to decipher.
We find here, at the very threshold of our subject, a clear instance
of a conflict of principles which appears everywhere in aesthetics,
and is the source and explanation of many conflicts of taste. Since
a note is heard when a set of regular vibrations can be
discriminated in the chaos of sound, it appears that the perception
and value of this artistic element depends on abstraction, on the
omission from the field of attention, of all the elements which do
not conform to a simple law. This may be called the principle of
purity. But if it were, the only principle at work, there would be no
music more beautiful than the tone of a tuning-fork. Such sounds,
although delightful perhaps to a child, are soon tedious. The
principle of purity must make some compromise with another
principle, which we may call that of interest. The object must have
enough variety and expression to hold our attention for a while,
and to stir our nature widely.
As we are more acutely sensitive to results or to processes, we find
the most agreeable effect nearer to one or to the other of these
extremes of a tedious beauty or of an unbeautiful expressiveness.
But these principles, as is clear, are not coordinate. The child who
enjoys his rattle or his trumpet has aesthetic enjoyment, of
however rude a kind; but the master of technique who should give
a performance wholly without sensuous charm would be a gymnast
and not a musician, and the author whose novels and poems should
be merely expressive, and interesting only by their meaning and
moral, would be a writer of history or philosophy, but not an artist.
The principle of purity is therefore essential to aesthetic effect, but
the principle of interest is subsidiary, and if appealed to alone
would fail to produce beauty.
The distinction, however, is not absolute: for the simple sensation
is itself interesting, and the complication, if it is appreciable by
sense and does not require discursive thought to grasp it, is itself
beautiful. There may be a work of art in which the sensuous
materials are not pleasing, as a discourse without euphony, if the
structure and expression give delight; and there may be an
interesting object without perceived structure, like musical notes,
or the blue sky. Perfection would, of course, lie in the union of
elements all intrinsically beautiful, in forms also intrinsically so;
but where this is impossible, different natures prefer to sacrifice
one or the other advantage.
_Colour._
§ 17. In the eye we have an organ so differentiated that it is
sensitive to a much more subtle influence than even that of air
waves. There seems to be, in the interstellar spaces, some
pervasive fluid, for the light of the remotest star is rapidly
conveyed to us, and we can hardly understand how this radiation of
light, which takes place beyond our atmosphere, could be realized
without some medium. This hypothetical medium we call the ether.
It is capable of very rapid vibrations, which are propagated in all
directions, like the waves of sound, only much more quickly.
Many common observations, such as the apparent interval between
lightning and thunder, make us aware of the quicker motion of
light. Now, since nature was filled with this responsive fluid,
which propagated to all distances vibrations originating at any
point, and moreover as these vibrations, when intercepted by a
solid body, were reflected wholly or in part, it obviously became
very advantageous to every animal to develope an organ sensitive
to these vibrations -- sensitive, that is, to light. For this would give
the mind instantaneous impressions dependent upon the presence
and nature of distant objects.
To this circumstance we must attribute the primacy of sight in our
perception, a primacy that makes light the natural symbol of
knowledge. When the time came for our intelligence to take the
great metaphysical leap, and conceive its content as permanent and
independent, or, in other words, to imagine _things,_ the idea of
these _things_ had to be constructed out of the materials already
present to the mind. But the fittest material for such construction
was that furnished by the eye, since it is the eye that brings us into
widest relations with our actual environment, and gives us the
quickest warning of approaching impressions. Sight has a
prophetic function. We are less interested in it for itself than for the
suggestion it brings of what may follow after. Sight is a method of
presenting psychically what is practically absent; and as the
essence of the _thing_ is its existence in our absence, the _thing_ is
spontaneously conceived in terms of sight.
Sight is, therefore, perception _par excellence,_ since we become
most easily aware of objects through visual agency and in visual
terms. Now, as the values of perception are those we call aesthetic,
and there could be no beauty if there was no conception of
independent objects, we may expect to find beauty derived mainly
from the pleasures of sight. And, in fact, form, which is almost a
synonym of beauty, is for us usually something visible: it is a
synthesis of the seen. But prior to the effect of form, which arises
in the constructive imagination, comes the effect of colour; this is
purely sensuous, and no better intrinsically than the effects of any
other sense: but being more involved in the perception of objects
than are the rest, it becomes more readily an element of beauty.
The values of colours differ appreciably and have analogy to the
differing values of other sensations. As sweet or pungent smells, as
high and low notes, or major and minor chords, differ from each
other by virtue of their different stimulation of the senses, so also
red differs from green, and green from violet. There is a nervous
process for each, and consequently a specific value. This emotional
quality has affinity to the emotional quality of other sensations; we
need not be surprised that the high rate of vibration which yields a
sharp note to the ear should involve somewhat the same feeling
that is produced by the high rate of vibration which, to the eye,
yields a violet colour. These affinities escape many minds; but it is
conceivable that the sense of them should be improved by accident
or training. There are certain effects of colour which give all men
pleasure, and others which jar, almost like a musical discord. A
more general development of this sensibility would make possible
a new abstract art, an art that should deal with colours as music
does with sound.
We have not studied these effects, however, with enough attention,
we have not allowed them to penetrate enough into the soul, to
think them very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, or of
kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial. But everything which has
a varied content has a potentiality of form and also of meaning.
The form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accustoms us to
discriminate and recognize its variations; and meaning will accrue
to it, when the various emotional values of these forms ally the
new object to all other experiences which involve similar emotions,
and thus give it a sympathetic environment in the mind. The
colours of the sunset have a brilliancy that attracts attention, and a
softness and illusiveness that enchant the eye; while the many
associations of the evening and of heaven gather about this kindred
charm and deepen it. Thus the most sensuous of beauties can be
full of sentimental suggestion. In stained glass, also, we have an
example of masses of colour made to exert their powerful direct
influence, to intensify an emotion eventually to be attached to very
ideal objects; what is in itself a gorgeous and unmeaning ornament,
by its absolute impressiveness becomes a vivid symbol of those
other ultimates which have a similar power over the soul.
_Materials surveyed._
§ 18. We have now gone over those organs of perception that give
us the materials out of which we construct objects, and mentioned
the most conspicuous pleasures which, as they arise from those
organs, are easily merged in the ideas furnished by the same. We
have also noticed that these ideas, conspicuous as they are in our
developed and operating consciousness, are not so much factors in
our thought, independent contributors to it, as they are
discriminations and excisions in its content, which, after they are
all made, leave still a background of vital feeling. For the outer
senses are but a portion of our sensorium, and the ideas of each, or
of all together, but a portion of our consciousness.
The pleasures which accompany ideation we have also found to be
unitary and vital; only just as for practical purposes it is necessary
to abstract and discriminate the contribution of one sense from that
of another, and thus to become aware of particular and definable
impressions, so it is natural that the diffused emotional tone of the
body should also be divided, and a certain modicum of pleasure or
pain should be attributed to each idea. Our pleasures are thus
described as the pleasures of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight,
and may become elements of beauty at the same time as the ideas
to, which they are attached become elements of objects. There is,
however, a remainder of emotion as there is a remainder of
sensation; and the importance of this remainder -- of the continuum
in which lie all particular pleasures and pains -- was insisted upon
in the beginning.
The beauty of the world, indeed, cannot be attributed wholly or
mainly to pleasures thus attached to abstracted sensations. It is
only the beauty of the materials of things which is drawn from the
pleasures of sensation. By far the most important effects are not
attributable to these materials, but to their arrangement and their
ideal relations. We have yet to study those processes of our mind
by which this arrangement and these relations are conceived; and
the pleasures which we can attach to these processes may then be
added to the pleasures attached to sense as further and more subtle
elements of beauty.
But before passing to the consideration of this more intricate
subject, we may note that however subordinate the beauty may be
which a garment, a building, or a poem derives from its sensuous
material, yet the presence of this sensuous material is indispensable.
Form cannot be the form of nothing. If, then, in finding or creating
beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and attend only to their
form, we miss an ever-present opportunity to heighten our effects.
For whatever delight the form may bring, the material might have
given delight already, and so much would have been gained
towards the value of the total result.
Sensuous beauty is not the greatest or most important element of
effect, but it is the most primitive and fundamental, and the most
universal. There is no effect of form which an effect of material
could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of
form, raises the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the
object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity which it
otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the
king's crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble
and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has
upon the senses, stimulates us here, where the form is also sublime,
and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need this stimulus if our
perceptions are to reach the highest pitch of strength and acuteness.
Nothing can be ravishing that is not beautiful pervasively.
And another point. The wider diffusion of sensuous beauty makes
it as it were the poor man's good. Fewer factors are needed to
produce it and less training to appreciate it. The senses are
indispensable instruments of labour, developed by the necessities
of life; but their perfect development produces a harmony between
the inward structure and instinct of the organ and the outward
opportunities for its use; and this harmony is the source of
continual pleasures. In the sphere of sense, therefore, a certain
cultivation is inevitable in man; often greater, indeed, among
rude peoples, perhaps among animals, than among those whose
attention takes a wider sweep and whose ideas are more abstract.
Without requiring, therefore, that a man should rise above his
station, or develope capacities which his opportunities will seldom
employ, we may yet endow his life with aesthetic interest, if we
allow him the enjoyment of sensuous beauty. This enriches him
without adding to his labour, and flatters him without alienating
him from his world.
Taste, when it is spontaneous, always begins with the senses.
Children and savages, as we are so often told, delight in bright and
variegated colours; the simplest people appreciate the neatness of
muslin curtains, shining varnish, and burnished pots. A rustic
garden is a shallow patchwork of the liveliest flowers, without that
reserve and repose which is given by spaces and masses. Noise and
vivacity is all that childish music contains, and primitive songs add
little more of form than what is required to compose a few
monotonous cadences. These limitations are not to be regretted;
they are a proof of sincerity. Such simplicity is not the absence of
taste, but the beginning of it.
A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions creates traditional
forms and expresses the simple pathos of its life, in unchanging but
significant themes, repeated by generation after generation. When
sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition is substituted bad taste
comes in. The essence of it is a substitution of non-aesthetic for
aesthetic values. To love glass beads because they are beautiful is
barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar; to love jewels only because
they are dear is vulgar, and to betray the motive by placing them
ineffectively is an offence against taste. The test is always the same:
Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real; it
may be different from that of others, but is equally justified and
grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is
spurious, and you are guilty, not of heresy, which in aesthetics is
orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self-excommunication
from its sphere.
Now, a great sign of this hypocrisy is insensibility to sensuous
beauty. When people show themselves indifferent to primary and
fundamental effects, when they are incapable of finding pictures
except in frames or beauties except in the great masters, we may
justly suspect that they are parrots, and that their verbal and
historical knowledge covers a natural lack of aesthetic sense.
Where, on the contrary, insensibility to higher forms of beauty
does not exclude a natural love of the lower, we have every reason
to be encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, which only
needs experience to refine it. If a man demands light, sound, and
splendour, he proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that
appearances as such interest him, and that he can pause in
perception to enjoy. We have but to vary his observation, to
enlarge his thought, to multiply his discriminations -- all of which
education can do -- and the same aesthetic habit will reveal to him
every shade of the fit and fair. Or if it should not, and the man,
although sensuously gifted, proved to be imaginatively dull, at
least he would not have failed to catch an intimate and wide-spread
element of effect. The beauty of material is thus the groundwork of
all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have
to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where
sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can
arouse delight.