I love not man the less but nature more

From these our interviews, in which I steal,

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the universe, and feel

What I can ne'er express.

This ability to rest in nature unadorned and to find entertainment in

her aspects, is, of course, a great gain. Aesthetic education consists

in training ourselves to see the maximum of beauty. To see it in the

physical world, which must continually be about us, is a great

progress toward that marriage of the imagination with the reality

which is the goal of contemplation.

While we gain this mastery of the formless, however, we should

not lose the more necessary capacity of seeing form in those things

which happen to have it. In respect to most of those things which

are determinate as well as natural, we are usually in that state of

aesthetic unconsciousness which the peasant is in in respect to the

landscape. We treat human life and its environment with the same

utilitarian eye with which he regards the field and mountain. That

is beautiful which is expressive of convenience and wealth; the rest

is indifferent. If we mean by love of nature aesthetic delight in the

world in which we casually live (and what can be more _natural_

than man and all his arts?), we may say that the absolute love of

_nature_ hardly exists among us. What we love is the stimulation

of our own personal emotions and dreams; and landscape appeals

to us, as music does to those who have no sense for musical form.

There would seem to be no truth in the saying that the ancients

loved nature less than we. They loved landscape less -- less, at

least, in proportion to their love of the definite things it contained.

The vague and changing effects of the atmosphere, the masses of

mountains, the infinite and living complexity of forests, did not

fascinate them. They had not that preponderant taste for the

indeterminate that makes the landscape a favourite subject of

contemplation. But love of nature, and comprehension of her, they

had in a most eminent degree; in fact, they actually made explicit

that objectification of our own soul in her, which for the romantic

poet remains a mere vague and shifting suggestion. What are the

celestial gods, the nymphs, the fauns, the dryads, but the definite

apperceptions of that haunting spirit which we think we see in the

sky, the mountains, and the woods? We may think that our vague

intuition grasps the truth of what their childish imagination turned

into a fable. But our belief, if it is one, is just as fabulous, just as

much a projection of human nature into material things; and if we

renounce all positive conception of quasi-mental principles in

nature, and reduce our moralizing of her to a poetic expression of

our own sensations, then can we say that our verbal and illusive

images are comparable as representations of the life of nature to

the precision, variety, humour, and beauty of the Greek mythology?

_Extensions to objects usually not regarded authentically._

§ 34. It may not be superfluous to mention here certain analogous

fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to

objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy,

natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All

theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The

material is experience; and although each part of experience is, of

course, perfectly definite in itself, and just that experience which it

is, yet the recollection and relating together of the successive

experiences is a function of the theoretical faculty. The systematic

relations of things in time and space, and their dependence upon

one another, are the work of our imagination. Theory can therefore

never have the kind of truth which belongs to experience; as

Hobbes has it, no discourse whatsoever can end in absolute

knowledge of fact.

It is conceivable that two different theories should be equally true

in respect to the same facts. All that is required is that they should

be equally complete schemes for the relation and prediction of the

realities they deal with. The choice between them would be an

arbitrary one, determined by personal bias, for the object being

indeterminate, its elements can be apperceived as forming all kinds

of unities. A theory is a form of apperception, and in applying it to

the facts, although our first concern is naturally the adequacy of

our instrument of comprehension, we are also influenced, more

than we think, by the ease and pleasure with which we think in its

terms, that is, by its beauty.

The case of two alternative theories of nature, both exhaustive and

adequate, may seem somewhat imaginary. The human mind is,

indeed, not rich and indeterminate enough to drive, as the saying is,

many horses abreast; it wishes to have one general scheme of

conception only, under which it strives to bring everything. Yet the

philosophers, who are the scouts of common sense, have come in

sight of this possibility of a variety of methods of dealing with the

same facts. As at the basis of evolution generally there are many

variations, only some of which remain fixed, so at the origin of

conception there are many schemes; these are simultaneously

developed, and at most stages of thought divide the intelligence

among themselves. So much is thought of on one principle -- say

mechanically -- and so much on another -- say teleologically. In

those minds only that have a speculative turn, that is, in whom the

desire for unity of comprehension outruns practical exigencies,

does the conflict become intolerable. In them one or another of

these theories tends to swallow all experience, but is commonly

incapable of doing so.

The final victory of a single philosophy is not yet won, because

none as yet has proved adequate to all experience. If ever unity

should be attained, our unanimity would not indicate that, as the

popular fancy conceives it, the truth had been discovered; it would

only indicate that the human mind had found a definitive way of

classifying its experience. Very likely, if man still retained his

inveterate habit of hypostatizing his ideas, that definitive scheme

would be regarded as a representation of the objective relations of

things; but no proof that it was so would ever be found, nor even

any hint that there were external objects, not to speak of relations

between them. As the objects are hypostatized percepts, so the

relations are hypostatized processes of the human understanding.

To have reached a final philosophy would be only to have

formulated the typical and satisfying form of human apperception;

the view would remain a theory, an instrument of comprehension

and survey fitted to the human eye; it would be for ever utterly

heterogeneous from fact, utterly unrepresentative of any of those

experiences which it would artificially connect and weave into a

pattern. Mythology and theology are the most striking illustrations

of this human method of incorporating much diffuse experience

into graphic and picturesque ideas; but steady reflection will hardly

allow us to see anything else in the theories of science and

philosophy. These, too, are creatures of our intelligence, and have

their only being in the movement of our thought, as they have their

only justification in their fitness to our experience.

Long before we can attain, however, the ideal unification of

experience under one theory, the various fields of thought demand

provisional surveys; we are obliged to reflect on life in a variety of

detached and unrelated acts, since neither can the whole material

of life be ever given while we still live, nor can that which is given

be impartially retained in the human memory. When omniscience

was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness

of human thought may console us for its imperfection.

History, for instance, which passes for the account of facts, is in

reality a collection of apperceptions of an indeterminate material;

for even the material of history is not fact, but consists of

memories and words subject to ever-varying interpretation. No

historian can be without bias, because the bias defines the history.

The memory in the first place is selective; official and other

records are selective, and often intentionally partial. Monuments

and ruins remain by chance. And when the historian has set

himself to study these few relics of the past, the work of his own

intelligence begins. He must have some guiding interest. A history

is not an indiscriminate register of every known event; a file of

newspapers is not an inspiration of Clio. A history is a view of the

fortunes of some institution or person; it traces the development of

some interest. This interest furnishes the standard by which the

facts are selected, and their importance gauged. Then, after the

facts are thus chosen, marshalled, and emphasized, comes the

indication of causes and relations; and in this part of his work the

historian plunges avowedly into speculation, and becomes a

philosophical poet. Everything will then depend on his genius, on

his principles, on his passions, -- in a word, on his apperceptive

forms. And the value of history is similar to that of poetry, and

varies with the beauty, power, and adequacy of the form in which

the indeterminate material of human life is presented.

_Further dangers of indeterminateness._

§ 35. The fondness of a race or epoch for any kind of effect is a

natural expression of temperament and circumstances, and cannot

be blamed or easily corrected. At the same time we may stop to

consider some of the disadvantages of a taste for the indeterminate.

We shall be registering a truth and at the same time, perhaps,

giving some encouragement to that rebellion which we may

inwardly feel against this too prevalent manner. The indeterminate

is by its nature ambiguous; it is therefore obscure and uncertain in

its effect, and if used, as in many arts it often is, to convey a

meaning, must fail to do so unequivocally. Where a meaning is not

to be conveyed, as in landscape, architecture, or music, the

illusiveness of the form is not so objectionable: although in all

these objects the tendency to observe forms and to demand them is

a sign of increasing appreciation. The ignorant fail to see the forms

of music, architecture, and landscape, and therefore are insensible

to relative rank and technical values in these spheres; they regard

the objects only as so many stimuli to emotion, as soothing or

enlivening influences. But the sensuous and associative values of

these things -- especially of music -- are so great, that even without

an appreciation of form considerable beauty may be found in them.

In literature, however, where the sensuous value of the words is

comparatively small, indeterminateness of form is fatal to beauty,

and, if extreme, even to expressiveness. For meaning is conveyed

by the _form_ and order of words, not by the words themselves,

and no precision of meaning can be reached without precision of

style. Therefore no respectable writer is voluntarily obscure in the

structure of his phrases -- that is an abuse reserved for the clowns

of literary fashion. But a book is a larger sentence, and if it is

formless it fails to mean anything, for the same reason that an

unformed collection of words means nothing. The chapters and

verses may have said something, as loose words may have a

known sense and a tone; but the book will have brought no

message.

In fact, the absence of form in composition has two stages: that in

which, as in the works of Emerson, significant fragments are

collected, and no system, no total thought, constructed out of them;

and secondly, that in which, as in the writings of the Symbolists of

our time, all the significance is kept back in the individual words,

or even in the syllables that compose them. This mosaic of

word-values has, indeed, a possibility of effect, for the absence of form

does not destroy materials, but, as we have observed, rather allows

the attention to remain fixed upon them; and for this reason

absence of sense is a means of accentuating beauty of sound and

verbal suggestion. But this example shows how the tendency to

neglect structure in literature is a tendency to surrender the use of

language as an instrument of thought The descent is easy from

ambiguity to meaninglessness.

The indeterminate in form is also indeterminate in value. It needs

completion by the mind of the observer and as this completion

differs, the value of the result must vary. An indeterminate object

is therefore beautiful to him who can make it so, and ugly to him

who cannot. It appeals to a few and to them diversely. In fact, the

observer's own mind is the storehouse from which the beautiful

form has to be drawn. If the form is not there, it cannot be applied

to the half-finished object; it is like asking a man without skill to

complete another man's composition. The indeterminate object

therefore requires an active and well-equipped mind, and is

otherwise without value.

It is furthermore unprofitable even to the mind which takes it up; it

stimulates that mind to action, but it presents it with no new object.

We can respond only with those forms of apperception which we

already are accustomed to. A formless object cannot _inform_ the

mind, cannot mould it to a new habit. That happens only when the

data, by their clear determination, compel the eye and imagination

to follow new paths and see new relations. Then we are introduced

to a new beauty, and enriched to that extent. But the indeterminate,

like music to the sentimental, is a vague stimulus. It calls forth at

random such ideas and memories as may lie to hand, stirring the

mind, but leaving it undisciplined and unacquainted with any new

object. This stirring, like that of the pool of Bethesda, may indeed

have its virtue. A creative mind, already rich in experience and

observation, may, under the influence of such a stimulus, dart into

a new thought, and give birth to that with which it is already

pregnant; but the fertilizing seed came from elsewhere, from study

and admiration of those definite forms which nature contains, or

which art, in imitation of nature, has conceived and brought to

perfection.

_Illusion of infinite perfection._

§ 36. The great advantage, then, of indeterminate organization is

that it cultivates that spontaneity, intelligence, and imagination

without which many important objects would remain unintelligible,

and because unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of landscape,

the forms of religion and science, the types of human nature itself,

are due to this apperceptive gift. Without it we should have a chaos;

but its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the fluid

material a great variety of forms. An object which stimulates us to

this activity, therefore, seems often to be more sublime and

beautiful than one which presents to us a single unchanging form,

however perfect. There seems to be a life and infinity in

the incomplete, which the determinate excludes by its own

completeness and petrifaction. And yet the effort in this very

activity is to reach determination; we can only see beauty in so far

as we introduce form. The instability of the form can be no

advantage to a work of art; the determinate keeps constantly what

the indeterminate reaches only in those moments in which the

observer's imagination is especially propitious. If we feel a certain

disappointment in the monotonous limits of a definite form and its

eternal, unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more

the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude

us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of

this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably

involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a

constant object? May we not prefer the unchangeable to the

irrecoverable?

We may; and the preference is one which we should all more

clearly feel, were it not for an illusion, proper to the romantic

temperament, which lends a mysterious charm to things which are

indefinite and indefinable. It is the suggestion of infinite perfection.

In reality, perfection is a synonym of finitude. Neither in nature

nor in the fancy can anything be perfect except by realizing a

definite type, which excludes all variation, and contrasts sharply

with every other possibility of being. There is no perfection apart

from a form of apperception or type; and there are as many kinds

of perfection as there are types or forms of apperception latent in

the mind.

Now these various perfections are mutually exclusive. Only in a

kind of aesthetic orgy -- in the madness of an intoxicated

imagination -- can we confuse them. As the Roman emperor

wished that the Roman people had but a single neck, to murder

them at one blow, so we may sometimes wish that all beauties had

but one form, that we might behold them together. But in the

nature of things beauties are incompatible. The spring cannot

coexist with the autumn, nor day with night; what is beautiful in a

child is hideous in a man, and _vice versa;_ every age,

every country, each sex, has a peculiar beauty, finite and

incommunicable; the better it is attained the more completely it

excludes every other. The same is evidently true of schools of art,

of styles and languages, and of every effect whatsoever. It exists

by its finitude and is great in proportion to its determination.

But there is a loose and somewhat helpless state of mind in which

while we are incapable of realizing any particular thought or vision

in its perfect clearness and absolute beauty, we nevertheless feel its

haunting presence in the background of consciousness. And one

reason why the idea cannot emerge from that obscurity is that it is

not alone in the brain; a thousand other ideals, a thousand other

plastic tendencies of thought, simmer there in confusion; and if any

definite image is presented in response to that vague agitation of

our soul, we feel its inadequacy to our need in spite of, or perhaps

on account of, its own particular perfection. We then say that the

classic does not satisfy us, and that the "Grecian cloys us with his

perfectness." We are not capable of that concentrated and serious

attention to one thing at a time which would enable us to sink into

its being, and enjoy the intrinsic harmonies of its form, and the

bliss of its immanent particular heaven; we flounder in the vague,

but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts and

semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood

is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to

think, speak, or imagine.

The sum of our incoherences has, however, an imposing volume

and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves

laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems

to us to come nearest to the ideal is not what embodies any one

possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many,

and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive

thrill. Each thing, without being a beauty in itself, by stimulating

our indeterminate emotion, seems to be a hint and expression of

infinite beauty. That infinite perfection which cannot be realized,

because it is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on

account of this suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded

as higher, more significant, and more beautiful than any

determinate one.

The illusion, however, is obvious. The infinite perfection

suggested is an absurdity. What exists is a vague emotion, the

objects of which, if they could emerge from the chaos of a

confused imagination, would turn out to be a multitude of

differently beautiful determinate things. This emotion of infinite

perfection is the _materia prima -- rudis indigestaque moles --_ out

of which attention, inspiration, and art can bring forth an infinity of

particular perfections. Every aesthetic success, whether in

contemplation or production, is the birth of one of these

possibilities with which the sense of infinite perfection is pregnant.

A work of art or an act of observation which remains indeterminate

is, therefore, a failure, however much it may stir our emotion. It is

a failure for two reasons. In the first place this emotion is seldom

wholly pleasant; it is disquieting and perplexing; it brings a desire

rather than a satisfaction. And in the second place, the emotion, not

being embodied, fails to constitute the beauty of anything; and

what we have is merely a sentiment, a consciousness that values

are or might be there, but a failure to extricate those values, or to

make them explicit and recognizable in an appropriate object.

These gropings after beauty have their worth as signs of aesthetic

vitality and intimations of future possible accomplishment; but in

themselves they are abortive, and mark the impotence of the

imagination. Sentimentalism in the observer and romanticism in

the artist are examples of this aesthetic incapacity. Whenever

beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the

eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection.

The kind of perfection may indeed be new; and if the discovery of

new perfections is to be called romanticism, then romanticism is

the beginning of all aesthetic life. But if by romanticism we mean

indulgence in confused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid

force, then there is evidently need of education, of attentive labour,

to disentangle the beauties so vaguely felt, and give each its

adequate embodiment. The breadth of our inspiration need not be

lost in this process of clarification, for there is no limit to the

number and variety of forms which the world may be made to wear;

only, if it is to be appreciated as beautiful and not merely felt as

unutterable, it must be seen as a kingdom of forms. Thus the works

of Shakespeare give us a great variety, with a frequent marvellous

precision of characterization, and the forms of his art are definite

although its scope is great.

But by a curious anomaly, we are often expected to see the greatest

expressiveness in what remains indeterminate, and in reality

expresses nothing. As we have already observed, the sense of

profundity and significance is a very detachable emotion; it can

accompany a confused jumble of promptings quite as easily as it

can a thorough comprehension of reality. The illusion of infinite

perfection is peculiarly apt to produce this sensation. That illusion

arises by the simultaneous awakening of many incipient thoughts

and dim ideas; it stirs the depths of the mind as a wind stirs the

thickets of a forest; and the unusual consciousness of the life and

longing of the soul, brought by that gust of feeling, makes us

recognize in the object a singular power, a mysterious meaning.

But the feeling of significance signifies little. All we have in this

case is a potentiality of imagination; and only when this

potentiality begins to be realized in definite ideas, does a real

meaning, or any object which that meaning can mean, arise in the

mind. The highest aesthetic good is not that vague potentiality, nor

that contradictory, infinite perfection so strongly desired; it is the

greatest number and variety of finite perfections. To learn to see in

nature and to enshrine in the arts the typical forms of things; to

study and recognize their variations; to domesticate the

imagination in the world, so that everywhere beauty can be seen,

and a hint found for artistic creation, -- that is the goal of

contemplation. Progress lies in the direction of discrimination and

precision, not in that of formless emotion and reverie.

_Organized nature the source of apperceptive forms; example of

sculpture._

§ 37. The form of the material world is in one sense always

perfectly definite, since the particles that compose it are at each

moment in a given relative position; but a world that had no other

form than that of such a constellation of atoms would remain

chaotic to our perception, because we should not be able to survey

it as a whole, or to keep our attention suspended evenly over its

innumerable parts. According to evolutionary theory, mechanical

necessity has, however, brought about a distribution and

aggregation of elements such as, for our purposes, constitutes

individual things. Certain systems of atoms move together as units;

and these organisms reproduce themselves and recur so often in

our environment, that our senses become accustomed to view their

parts together. Their form becomes a natural and recognizable one.

An order and sequence is established in our imagination by virtue

of the order and sequence in which the corresponding impressions

have come to our senses. We can remember, reproduce, and in

reproducing vary, by kaleidoscopic tricks of the fancy, the forms in

which our perceptions have come.

The mechanical organization of external nature is thus the source

of apperceptive forms in the mind. Did not sensation, by a constant

repetition of certain sequences, and a recurring exactitude of

mathematical relations, keep our fancy clear and fresh, we should

fall into an imaginative lethargy. Idealization would degenerate

into indistinctness, and, by the dulling of our memory, we should

dream a world daily more poor and vague.

This process is periodically observable in the history of the arts.

The way in which the human figure, for instance, is depicted, is an

indication of the way in which it is apperceived. The arts give back

only so much of nature as the human eye has been able to master.

The most primitive stage of drawing and sculpture presents man

with his arms and legs, his ten fingers and ten toes, branching out

into mid-air; the apperception of the body has been evidently

practical and successive, and the artist sets down what he knows

rather than any of the particular perceptions that conveyed that

knowledge. Those perceptions are merged and lost in the haste to

reach the practically useful concept of the object. By a naïve

expression of the same principle, we find in some Assyrian

drawings the eye seen from the front introduced into a face seen in

profile, each element being represented in that form in which it

was most easily observed and remembered. The development of

Greek sculpture furnishes a good example of the gradual

penetration of nature into the mind, of the slowly enriched

apperception of the object. The quasi-Egyptian stiffness melts

away, first from the bodies of the minor figures, afterwards of

those of the gods, and finally the face is varied, and the hieratic

smile almost disappears.[10]

But this progress has a near limit; once the most beautiful and

inclusive apperception reached, once the best form caught at its

best moment, the artist seems to have nothing more to do. To

reproduce the imperfections of individuals seems wrong, when

beauty, after all, is the thing desired. And the ideal, as caught by

the master's inspiration, is more beautiful than anything his pupils

can find for themselves in nature. From its summit, the art

therefore declines in one of two directions. It either becomes

academic, forsakes the study of nature, and degenerates into empty

convention, or else it becomes ignoble, forsakes beauty, and sinks

into a tasteless and unimaginative technique. The latter was the

course of sculpture in ancient times, the former, with moments of

reawakening, has been its dreadful fate among the moderns.

This reawakening has come whenever there has been a return to

nature, for a new form of apperception and a new ideal. Of this

return there is continual need in all the arts; without it our

apperceptions grow thin and worn, and subject to the sway of

tradition and fashion. We continue to judge about beauty, but we

give up looking for it. The remedy is to go back to the reality, to

study it patiently, to allow new aspects of it to work upon the mind,

sink into it, and beget there an imaginative offspring after their

own kind. Then a new art can appear, which, having the same

origin in admiration for nature which the old art had, may hope to

attain the same excellence in a new direction.

In fact, one of the dangers to which a modern artist is exposed is

the seduction of his predecessors. The gropings of our muse, the

distracted experiments of our architecture, often arise from the

attraction of some historical school; we cannot work out our own

style because we are hampered by the beauties of so many others.

The result is an eclecticism, which, in spite of its great historical

and psychological interest, is without aesthetic unity or permanent

power to please. Thus the study of many schools of art may

become an obstacle to proficiency in any.

_Utility the principle of organization in nature._

§ 38. Utility (or, as it is now called, adaptation, and natural

selection) organizes the material world into definite species and

individuals. Only certain aggregations of matter are in equilibrium

with the prevailing forces of the environment. Gravity, for instance,

is in itself a chaotic force; it pulls all particles indiscriminately

together without reference to the wholes into which the human eye

may have grouped them. But the result is not chaos, because matter

arranged in some ways is welded together by the very tendency

which disintegrates it when arranged in other forms. These forms,

selected by their congruity with gravity, are therefore fixed in

nature, and become types. Thus the weight of the stones keeps the

pyramid standing: here a certain shape has become a guarantee of

permanence in the presence of a force in itself mechanical and

undiscriminating. It is the utility of the pyramidal form -- its fitness

to stand -- that has made it a type in building. The Egyptians

merely repeated a process that they might have observed going on

of itself in nature, who builds a pyramid in every hill, not indeed

because she wishes to, or because pyramids are in any way an

object of her action, but because she has no force which can easily

dislodge matter that finds itself in that shape.

Such an accidental stability of structure is, in this moving world, a

sufficient principle of permanence and individuality. The same

mechanical principles, in more complex applications, insure the

persistence of animal forms and prevent any permanent deviation

from them. What is called the principle of self-preservation, and

the final causes and substantial forms of the Aristotelian

philosophy, are descriptions of the result of this operation. The

tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is

simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are

not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their

equilibrium; while the incidence of a too great disturbance causes

that disruption we call death, or that variation of type, which, on

account of its incapacity to establish itself permanently, we call

abnormal.

Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable species; and the

aesthetic eye, studying her forms, tends, as we have already shown,

to bring the type within even narrower limits than do the external

exigencies of life.

_The relation of utility to beauty._

§ 39. This natural harmony between utility and beauty, when its

origin is not understood, is of course the subject of much perplexed

and perplexing theory. Sometimes we are told that utility is itself

the essence of beauty, that is, that our consciousness of the

practical advantages of certain forms is the ground of our aesthetic

admiration of them. The horse's legs are said to be beautiful

because they are fit to run, the eye because it is made to see, the

house because it is convenient to live in. An amusing application --

which might pass for a _reductio ad absurdum,_ -- of this dense

theory is put by Xenophon into the mouth of Socrates. Comparing

himself with a youth present at the same banquet, who was about

to receive the prize of beauty, Socrates declares himself more

beautiful and more worthy of the crown. For utility makes beauty,

and eyes bulging out from the head like his are the most

advantageous for seeing; nostrils wide and open to the air, like his,

most appropriate for smell; and a mouth large and voluminous, like

his, best fitted for both eating and kissing.[11]

Now since these things are, in fact, hideous, the theory that shows

they _ought to be_ beautiful, is vain and ridiculous. But that

theory contains this truth: that had the utility of Socratic features

been so great that men of all other type must have perished,

Socrates would have been beautiful. He would have represented

the human type. The eye would have been then accustomed to that

form, the imagination would have taken it as the basis of its

refinements, and accentuated its naturally effective points. The

beautiful does not depend on the useful; it is constituted by the

imagination in ignorance and contempt of practical advantage; but

it is not independent of the necessary, for the necessary must also

be the habitual and consequently the basis of the type, and of all its

imaginative variations.

There are, moreover, at a late and derivative stage in our aesthetic

judgment, certain cases in which the knowledge of fitness and

utility enters into our sense of beauty. But it does so very indirectly,

rather by convincing us that we should tolerate what practical

conditions have imposed on an artist, by arousing admiration of his

ingenuity, or by suggesting the interesting things themselves with

which the object is known to be connected. Thus a cottage-chimney,

stout and tall, with the smoke floating from it, pleases because

we fancy it to mean a hearth, a rustic meal, and a comfortable

family. But that is all extraneous association. The most

ordinary way in which utility affects us is negatively; if we

know a thing to be useless and fictitious, the uncomfortable

haunting sense of waste and trickery prevents all enjoyment, and

therefore banishes beauty. But this is also an adventitious

complication. The intrinsic value of a form is in no way affected by it.

Opposed to this utilitarian theory stands the metaphysical one that

would make the beauty or intrinsic rightness of things the source of

their efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken literally, as it

is generally meant, this idea must, from our point of view, appear

preposterous. Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment

and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or preside over her.

She everywhere appears to move by mechanical law. The types of

things exist by what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance,

and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves to our

environment and not our environment to our faculties. Such is the

naturalistic point of view which we have adopted.

To say, however, that beauty is in some sense the ground of

practical fitness, need not seem to us wholly unmeaning. The fault

of the Platonists who say things of this sort is seldom that of

emptiness. They have an intuition; they have sometimes a strong

sense of the facts of consciousness. But they turn their discoveries

into so many revelations, and the veil of the infinite and absolute

soon covers their little light of specific truth. Sometimes, after

patient digging, the student comes upon the treasure of some

simple fact, some common experience, beneath all their mystery

and unction. And so it may be in this case. If we make allowances

for the tendency to express experience in allegory and myth, we

shall see that the idea of beauty and rationality presiding over

nature and guiding her, as it were, for their own greater glory, is a

projection and a writing large of a psychological principle.

The mind that perceives nature is the same that understands and

enjoys her; indeed, these three functions are really elements of one

process. There is therefore in the mere perceptibility of a thing a

certain prophecy of its beauty; if it were not on the road to beauty,

if it had no approach to fitness to our faculties of perception, the

object would remain eternally unperceived. The sense, therefore,

that the whole world is made to be food for the soul; that beauty is

not only its own, but all things' excuse for being; that universal

aspiration towards perfection is the key and secret of the world, --

that sense is the poetical reverberation of a psychological fact -- of

the fact that our mind is an organism tending to unity, to

unconsciousness of what is refractory to its action, and to

assimilation and sympathetic transformation of what is kept within

its sphere. The idea that nature could be governed by an aspiration

towards beauty is, therefore, to be rejected as a confusion, but at

the same time we must confess that this confusion is founded on a

consciousness of the subjective relation between the perceptibility,

rationality, and beauty of things.

_Utility the principle of organization in the arts._

§ 40. This subjective relation is, however, exceedingly loose. Most

things that are perceivable are not perceived so distinctly as to be

intelligible, nor so delightfully as to be beautiful. If our eye had

infinite penetration, or our imagination infinite elasticity, this

would not be the case; to see would then be to understand and to

enjoy. As it is, the degree of determination needed for perception is

much less than that needed for comprehension or ideality. Hence

there is room for hypothesis and for art. As hypothesis organizes

experiences imaginatively in ways in which observation has not

been able to do, so art organizes objects in ways to which nature,

perhaps, has never condescended.

The chief thing which the imitative arts add to nature is

permanence, the lack of which is the saddest defect of many

natural beauties. The forces which determine natural forms,

therefore, determine also the forms of the imitative arts. But the

non-imitative arts supply organisms different in kind from those

which nature affords. If we seek the principle by which these

objects are organized, we shall generally find that it is likewise

utility. Architecture, for instance, has all its forms suggested by

practical demands. Use requires our buildings to assume certain

determinate forms; the mechanical properties of our materials, the

exigency of shelter, light, accessibility, economy, and convenience,

dictate the arrangements of our buildings.

Houses and temples have an evolution like that of animals and

plants. Various forms arise by mechanical necessity, like the cave,

or the shelter of overhanging boughs. These are perpetuated by a

selection in which the needs and pleasures of man are the

environment to which the structure must be adapted. Determinate

forms thus establish themselves, and the eye becomes accustomed

to them. The line of use, by habit of apperception, becomes the line

of beauty. A striking example may be found in the pediment of the

Greek temple and the gable of the northern house. The exigencies

of climate determine these forms differently, but the eye in each

case accepts what utility imposes. We admire height in one and

breadth in the other, and we soon find the steep pediment heavy

and the low gable awkward and mean.

It would be an error, however, to conclude that habit alone

establishes the right proportion in these various types of building.

We have the same intrinsic elements to consider as in natural

forms. That is, besides the unity of type and correspondence of

parts which custom establishes, there are certain appeals to more

fundamental susceptibilities of the human eye and imagination.

There is, for instance, the value of abstract form, determined by the

pleasantness and harmony of implicated retinal or muscular

tensions. Different structures contain or suggest more or less of

this kind of beauty, and in that proportion may be called

intrinsically better or worse. Thus artificial forms may be arranged

in a hierarchy like natural ones, by reference to the absolute values

of their contours and masses. Herein lies the superiority of a Greek

to a Chinese vase, or of Gothic to Saracenic construction. Thus

although every useful form is capable of proportion and beauty,

when once its type is established, we cannot say that this beauty is

always potentially equal; and an iron bridge, for instance, although

it certainly possesses and daily acquires aesthetic interest, will

probably never, on the average, equal a bridge of stone.

_Form and adventitious ornament._

§ 41. Beauty of form is the last to be found or admired in artificial

as in natural objects. Time is needed to establish it, and training

and nicety of perception to enjoy it. Motion or colour is what first

interests a child in toys, as in animals; and the barbarian artist

decorates long before he designs. The cave and wigwam are

daubed with paint, or hung with trophies, before any pleasure is

taken in their shape; and the appeal to the detached senses, and to

associations of wealth and luxury, precedes by far the appeal to the

perceptive harmonies of form. In music we observe the same

gradation; first, we appreciate its sensuous and sentimental value;

only with education can we enjoy its form. The plastic arts begin,

therefore, with adventitious ornament and with symbolism. The

aesthetic pleasure is in the richness of the material, the profusion of

the ornament, the significance of the shape -- in everything, rather

than in the shape itself.

We have accordingly, in works of art two independent sources of

effect. The first is the useful form, which generates the type, and

ultimately the beauty of form, when the type has been idealized by

emphasizing its intrinsically pleasing traits. The second is the

beauty of ornament, which comes from the excitement of the

senses, or of the imagination, by colour, or by profusion or

delicacy of detail. Historically, the latter is first developed, and

applied to a form as yet merely useful. But the very presence of

ornament attracts contemplation; the attention lavished on the

object helps to fix its form in the mind, and to make us

discriminate the less from the more graceful. The two kinds of

beauty are then felt, and, yielding to that tendency to unity which

the mind always betrays, we begin to subordinate and organize

these two excellences. The ornament is distributed so as to

emphasize the aesthetic essence of the form; to idealize it even

more, by adding adventitious interests harmoniously to the

intrinsic interest of the lines of structure.

There is here a great field, of course, for variety of combination

and compromise. Some artists are fascinated by the decoration, and

think of the structure merely as the background on which it can be

most advantageously displayed. Others, of more austere taste,

allow ornament only to emphasize the main lines of the design, or

to conceal such inharmonious elements as nature or utility may

prevent them from eliminating.[12] We may thus oscillate between

decorative and structural motives, and only in one point, for each

style, can we find the ideal equilibrium, in which the greatest

strength and lucidity is combined with the greatest splendour.

A less subtle, but still very effective, combination is that hit upon

by many oriental and Gothic architects, and found, also, by

accident perhaps, in many buildings of the plateresque style; the

ornament and structure are both presented with extreme emphasis,

but locally divided; a vast rough wall, for instance, represents the

one, and a profusion of mad ornament huddled around a central

door or window represents the other.

Gothic architecture offers us in the pinnacle and flying buttress a

striking example of the adoption of a mechanical feature, and its

transformation into an element of beauty. Nothing could at first

sight be more hopeless than the external half-arch propping the

side of a pier, or the chimney-like weight of stones pressing it

down from above; but a courageous acceptance of these necessities,

and a submissive study of their form, revealed a new and strange

effect: the bewildering and stimulating intricacy of masses

suspended in mid-air; the profusion of line, variety of surface, and

picturesqueness of light and shade. It needed but a little applied

ornament judiciously distributed; a moulding in the arches; a florid

canopy and statue amid the buttresses; a few grinning monsters

leaning out of unexpected nooks; a leafy budding of the topmost

pinnacles; a piercing here and there of some little gallery, parapet,

or turret into lacework against the sky -- and the building became a

poem, an inexhaustible emotion. Add some passing cloud casting

its moving shadow over the pile, add the circling of birds about the

towers, and you have an unforgettable type of beauty; not perhaps

the noblest, sanest, or most enduring, but one for the existence of

which the imagination is richer, and the world more interesting.

In this manner we accept the forms imposed upon us by utility, and

train ourselves to apperceive their potential beauty. Familiarity

breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. When the mind is

absorbed and dominated by its perceptions, it incorporates into

them more and more of its own functional values, and makes them

ultimately beautiful and expressive. Thus no language can be ugly

to those who speak it well, no religion unmeaning to those who

have learned to pour their life into its moulds.

Of course these forms vary in intrinsic excellence; they are by their

specific character more or less fit and facile for the average mind.

But the man and the age are rare who can choose their own path;

we have generally only a choice between going ahead in the

direction already chosen, or halting and blocking the path for

others. The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from

within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the

traditional forms. Disaster follows rebellion against tradition or

against utility, which are the basis and root of our taste and

progress. But, within the given school, and as exponents of its

spirit, we can adapt and perfect our works, if haply we are better

inspired than our predecessors. For the better we know a given

thing, and the more we perceive its strong and weak points, the

more capable we are of idealizing it.

_Form in words._

§ 42. The main effect of language consists in its meaning, in the

ideas which it expresses. But no expression is possible without a

presentation, and this presentation must have a form. This form of

the instrument of expression is itself an element of effect, although

in practical life we may overlook it in our haste to attend to the

meaning it conveys. It is, moreover, a condition of the kind of

expression possible, and often determines the manner in which the

object suggested shall be apperceived. No word has the exact value

of any other in the same or in another language.[13] But the

intrinsic effect of language does not stop there. The single word is

but a stage in the series of formations which constitute language,

and which preserve for men the fruit of their experience, distilled

and concentrated into a symbol.

This formation begins with the elementary sounds themselves,

which have to be discriminated and combined to make recognizable

symbols. The evolution of these symbols goes on spontaneously,

suggested by our tendency to utter all manner of sounds,

and preserved by the ease with which the ear discriminates

these sounds when made. Speech would be an absolute and

unrelated art, like music, were it not controlled by utility. The

sounds have indeed no resemblance to the objects they symbolize;

but before the system of sounds can represent the system of objects,

there has to be a correspondence in the groupings of both. The

structure of language, unlike that of music, thus becomes a mirror

of the structure of the world as presented to the intelligence.

Grammar, philosophically studied, is akin to the deepest

metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of speech, it

reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those

categories by which we conceive the world. It is by virtue of this

parallel development that language has its function of expressing

experience with exactness, and the poet -- to whom language is an

instrument of art -- has to employ it also with a constant reference

to meaning and veracity; that is, he must be a master of experience

before he can become a true master of words. Nevertheless,

language is primarily a sort of music, and the beautiful effects

which it produces are due to its own structure, giving, as it

crystallizes in a new fashion, an unforeseen form to experience.

Poets may be divided into two classes: the musicians and the

psychologists. The first are masters of significant language

as harmony; they know what notes to sound together and in

succession; they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and

images, by the fugue of passion and the snap of wit, a thousand

brilliant effects out of old materials. The Ciceronian orator, the

epigrammatic, lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art.

The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their effect not by the

intrinsic mastery of language, but by the closer adaptation of it to

things. The dramatic poets naturally furnish an illustration.

But however transparent we may wish to make our language,

however little we may call for its intrinsic effects, and direct our

attention exclusively to its expressiveness, we cannot avoid the

limitations of our particular medium. The character of the tongue a

man speaks, and the degree of his skill in speaking it, must always

count enormously in the aesthetic value of his compositions; no

skill in observation, no depth of thought or feeling, but is spoiled

by a bad style and enhanced by a good one. The diversities of

tongues and their irreducible aesthetic values, begins with the very

sound of the letters, with the mode of utterance, and the

characteristic inflections of the voice; notice, for instance, the

effect of the French of these lines of Alfred de Musset,

Jamais deux yeux plus doux n'ont du ciel le plus pur

Sondé la profondeur et réfléchi l'azur.

and compare with its flute-like and treble quality the breadth, depth,

and volume of the German in this inimitable stanza of Goethe's:

Ueber alien Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.

Even if the same tune could be played on both these vocal

instruments, the difference in their _timbre_ would make the value

of the melody entirely distinct in each case.

_Syntactical form._

§ 43. The known impossibility of adequate translation appears here

at the basis of language. The other diversities are superadded upon

this diversity of sound. The syntax is the next source of effect.

What could be better than Homer, or what worse than almost any

translation of him? And this holds even of languages so closely

allied as the Indo-European, which, after all, have certain

correspondences of syntax and inflection. If there could be a

language with other parts of speech than ours, -- a language

without nouns, for instance, -- how would that grasp of experience,

that picture of the world, which all our literature contains, be

reproduced in it? Whatever beauties that language might be

susceptible of, none of the effects produced on us, I will not say by

poets, but even by nature itself, could be expressed in it.

Nor is such a language inconceivable. Instead of summarizing all

our experiences of a thing by one word, its name, we should have

to recall by appropriate adjectives the various sensations we had

received from it; the objects we think of would be disintegrated, or,

rather, would never have been unified. For "sun," they would say

"high, yellow, dazzling, round, slowly moving," and the

enumeration of these qualities (as we call them), without any

suggestion of a unity at their source, might give a more vivid, and

profound, if more cumbrous, representation of the facts. But how

could the machinery of such an imagination be capable of

repeating the effects of ours, when the objects to us most obvious

and real would be to those minds utterly indescribable?

The same diversity appears in the languages we ordinarily know,

only in a lesser degree. The presence or absence of case-endings in

nouns and adjectives, their difference of gender, the richness of

inflections in the verbs, the frequency of particles and conjunctions,

-- all these characteristics make one language differ from another

entirely in genius and capacity of expression. Greek is probably the

best of all languages in melody, richness, elasticity, and simplicity;

so much so, that in spite of its complex inflections, when once a

vocabulary is acquired, it is more easy and natural for a modern

than his ancestral Latin itself. Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by

nature at once laconic and grandiloquent, and the exceptional

condensation and transposition of which it is capable make its

effects entirely foreign to a modern, scarcely inflected, tongue.

Take, for instance, these lines of Horace:

me tabula sacer

votiva paries indicat uvida

suspendisse potenti

vestimenta maris deo,

or these of Lucretius:

Jauaque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator

Crebrius incassum magnum cecidisse laborem.

What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time could utter the

stately grandeur of these Lucretian words, every one of which is

noble, and wears the toga?

As a substitute for the inimitable interpenetration of the words in

the Horatian strophe, we might have the external links of rhyme;

and it seems, in fact, to be a justification of rhyme, that besides

contributing something to melody and to the distribution of parts, it

gives an artificial relationship to the phrases between which it

obtains, which, but for it, would run away from one another in a

rapid and irrevocable flux. In such a form as the sonnet, for

instance, we have, by dint of assonance, a real unity forced upon

the thought; for a sonnet in which the thought is not distributed

appropriately to the structure of the verse, has no excuse for being

a sonnet. By virtue of this interrelation of parts, the sonnet, the

_non plus ultra_ of rhyme, is the most classic of modern poetical

forms: much more classic in spirit than blank verse, which lacks

almost entirely the power of synthesizing the phrase, and making

the unexpected seem the inevitable.

This beauty given to the ancients by the syntax of their language,

the moderns can only attain by the combination of their rhymes. It

is a bad substitute perhaps, but better than the total absence of form,

favoured by the atomic character of our words, and the flat

juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making

a gem of every prose sentence, -- the art which, carried, perhaps, to,

a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of

Tacitus a series of cameos, -- that art is inapplicable to our looser

medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our

poetry and speech in general, therefore, start out upon a lower level;

the same effort will not, with this instrument, attain the same

beauty. If equal beauty is ever attained, it comes from the wealth of

suggestion, or the refinement of sentiment. The art of words

remains hopelessly inferior. And what best proves this, is that

when, as in our time, a reawakening of the love of beauty has

prompted a refinement of our poetical language, we pass so soon

into extravagance, obscurity, and affectation. Our modern

languages are not susceptible of great formal beauty.

_Literary form. The plot._

§ 44. The forms of composition in verse and prose which are

practised in each language are further organizations of words, and

have formal values. The most exacting of these forms and that

which has been carried to the greatest perfection is the drama; but

it belongs to rhetoric and poetics to investigate the nature of these

effects, and we have here sufficiently indicated the principle which

underlies them. The plot, which Aristotle makes, and very justly,

the most important element in the effect of a drama, is the formal

element of the drama as such: the ethos and sentiments are the

expression, and the versification, music, and stage settings are the

materials. It is in harmony with the romantic tendency of modern

times that modern dramatists -- Shakespeare as well as Molière,

Calderon, and the rest -- excel in ethos rather than in plot; for it is

the evident characteristic of modern genius to study and enjoy

expression, -- the suggestion of the not-given, -- rather than form,

the harmony of the given.

Ethos is interesting mainly for the personal observations which it

summarizes and reveals, or for the appeal to one's own actual or

imaginative experience; it is portrait-painting, and enshrines

something we love independently of the charm which at this

moment and in this place it exercises over us. It appeals to our

affections; it does not form them. But the plot is the synthesis of

actions, and is a reproduction of those experiences from which our

notion of men and things is originally derived; for character can

never be observed in the world except as manifested in action.

Indeed, it would be more fundamentally accurate to say that a

character is a symbol and mental abbreviation for a peculiar set of

acts, than to say that acts are a manifestation of character. For the

acts are the data, and the character the inferred principle, and a

principle, in spite of its name, is never more than a description _a

posteriori,_ and a summary of what is subsumed under it. The plot,

moreover, is what gives individuality to the play, and exercises

invention; it is, as Aristotle again says, the most difficult portion of

dramatic art, and that for which practice and training are most

indispensable. And this plot, giving by its nature a certain picture

of human experience, involves and suggests the ethos of its actors.

What the great characterizes, like Shakespeare, do, is simply to

elaborate and develope (perhaps far beyond the necessities of the

plot) the suggestion of human individuality which that plot

contains. It is as if, having drawn from daily observation some

knowledge of the tempers of our friends, we represented them

saying and doing all manner of ultra-characteristic things, and in

an occasional soliloquy laying bare, even more clearly than by any

possible action, that character which their observed behaviour had

led us to impute to them. This is an ingenious and fascinating

invention, and delights us with the clear discovery of a hidden

personality; but the serious and equable development of a plot has

a more stable worth in its greater similarity to life, which allows us

to see other men's minds through the medium of events, and not

events through the medium of other men's minds.

_Character as an aesthetic form._

§ 45. We have just come upon one of the unities most coveted in

our literature, and most valued by us when attained, -- the portrait,

the individuality, the character. The construction of a plot we call

invention, but that of a character we dignify with the name of

creation. It may therefore not be amiss, in finishing our discussion

of form, to devote a few pages to the psychology of character-drawing.

How does the unity we call a character arise, how is it described, and

what is the basis of its effect?

We may set it down at once as evident that we have here a case of

the type: the similarities of various persons are amalgamated, their

differences cancelled, and in the resulting percept those traits

emphasized which have particularly pleased or interested us. This,

in the abstract, may serve for a description of the origin of an idea

of character quite as well as of an idea of physical form. But the

different nature of the material -- the fact that a character is not a

presentation to sense, but a rationalistic synthesis of successive

acts and feelings, not combinable into any image -- makes such a

description much more unsatisfying in this case than in that

of material forms. We cannot understand exactly how these

summations and cancellings take place when we are not dealing

with a visible object. And we may even feel that there is a

wholeness and inwardness about the development of certain ideal

characters, that makes such a treatment of them fundamentally

false and artificial. The subjective element, the spontaneous

expression of our own passion and will, here counts for so much,

that the creation of an ideal character becomes a new and peculiar

problem.

There is, however, a way of conceiving and delineating character

which still bears a close resemblance to the process by which the

imagination produces the type of any physical species. We may

gather, for instance, about the nucleus of a word, designating some

human condition or occupation, a number of detached observations.

We may keep a note-book in our memory, or even in our pocket,

with studious observations of the language, manners, dress, gesture,

and history of the people _we_ meet, classifying our statistics

under such heads as innkeepers, soldiers, housemaids, governesses,

adventuresses, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Americans, actors,

priests, and professors. And then, when occasion offers, to describe,

or to put into a book or a play, any one of these types, all we have

to do is to look over our notes, to select according to the needs of

the moment, and if we are skilful in reproduction, to obtain by that

means a life-like image of the sort of person we wish to represent.

This process, which novelists and playwrights may go through

deliberately, we all carry on involuntarily. At every moment

experience is leaving in our minds some trait, some expression,

some image, which will remain there attached to the name of a

person, a class, or a nationality. Our likes and dislikes, our

summary judgments on whole categories of men, are nothing but

the distinct survival of some such impression. These traits have

vivacity. If the picture they draw is one-sided and inadequate, the

sensation they recall may be vivid, and suggestive of many other

aspects of the thing. Thus the epithets in Homer, although they are

often far from describing the essence of the object -- glankopis Athena

enkeides Achaioi -- seem to recall a sensation, and to give

vitality to the narrative. By bringing you, through one sense, into

the presence of the object, they give you that same hint of further

discovery, that same expectation of experience, which we have at

the sight of whatever we call real.

The graphic power of this method of observation and aggregation

of characteristic traits is thus seen to be great. But it is not by this

method that the most famous or most living characters have been

conceived. This method gives the average, or at most the salient,

points of the type, but the great characters of poetry -- a Hamlet, a

Don Quixote, an Achilles -- are no averages, they are not even a

collection of salient traits common to certain classes of men. They

seem to be persons; that is, their actions and words seem to spring

from the inward nature of an individual soul. Goethe is reported to

have said that he conceived the character of his Gretchen entirely

without observation of originals. And, indeed, he would probably

not have found any. His creation rather is the original to which we

may occasionally think we see some likeness in real maidens. It is

the fiction here that is the standard of naturalness. And on this, as

on so many occasions, we may repeat the saying that poetry is

truer than history. Perhaps no actual maid ever spoke and acted so

naturally as this imaginary one.

If we think there is any paradox in these assertions, we should

reflect that the standard of naturalness, individuality, and truth is in

us. A real person seems to us to have character and consistency

when his behaviour is such as to impress a definite and simple

image upon our mind. In themselves, if we could count all their

undiscovered springs of action, all men have character and

consistency alike: all are equally fit to be types. But their

characters are not equally intelligible to us, their behaviour is not

equally deducible, and their motives not equally appreciable.

Those who appeal most to us, either in themselves or by the

emphasis they borrow from their similarity to other individuals, are

those we remember and regard as the centres around which

variations oscillate. These men are natural: all others are more or

less eccentric.

_Ideal characters._

§ 46. The standard of naturalness being thus subjective, and

determined by the laws of our imagination, we can understand why

a spontaneous creation of the mind can be more striking and living

than any reality, or any abstraction from realities. The artist can

invent a form which, by its adaptation to the imagination, lodges

there, and becomes a point of reference for all observations, and a

standard of naturalness and beauty. A type may be introduced to

the mind suddenly, by the chance presentation of a form that by its

intrinsic impressiveness and imaginative coherence, acquires that

pre-eminence which custom, or the mutual reinforcement of

converging experiences, ordinarily gives to empirical percepts.

This method of originating types is what we ordinarily describe as

artistic creation. The name indicates the suddenness, originality,

and individuality of the conception thus attained. What we call

idealization is often a case of it. In idealization proper, however,

what happens is the elimination of individual eccentricities; the

result is abstract, and consequently meagre. This meagreness is

often felt to be a greater disadvantage than the accidental and

picturesque imperfection of real individuals, and the artist

therefore turns to the brute fact, and studies and reproduces that

with indiscriminate attention, rather than lose strength and

individuality in the presentation of an insipid type. He seems

forced to a choice between an abstract beauty and an unlovely

example.

But the great and masterful presentations of the ideal are somehow

neither the one nor the other. They present ideal beauty with just

that definiteness with which nature herself sometimes presents it.

When we come in a crowd upon an incomparably beautiful face,

we know it immediately as an embodiment of the ideal; while it

contains the type, -- for if it did not we should find it monstrous

and grotesque, -- it clothes that type in a peculiar splendour of

form, colour, and expression. It has an individuality. And just so

the imaginary figures of poetry and plastic art may have an

individuality given them by the happy affinities of their elements

in the imagination. They are not idealizations, they are

spontaneous variations, which can arise in the mind quite as easily

as in the world. They spring up in

The wreathèd trellis of a working brain;

. . . With all the gardener fancy e'er could feign

Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.

Imagination, in a word, generates as well as abstracts; it observes,

combines, and cancels; but it also dreams. Spontaneous syntheses

arise in it which are not mathematical averages of the images it

receives from sense; they are effects of diffused excitements left in

the brain by sensations. These excitements vary constantly in their

various renewals, and occasionally take such a form that the soul is

surprised by the inward vision of an unexampled beauty. If this

inward vision is clear and steady, we have an aesthetic inspiration,

a vocation to create; and if we can also command the technique of

an appropriate art, we shall hasten to embody that inspiration, and

realize an ideal. This ideal will be gradually recognized as

supremely beautiful for the same reason that the object, had it been

presented in the real world, would have been recognized as

supremely beautiful; because while embodying a known type of

form, -- being, that is, a proper man, animal, or vegetable, -- it

possessed in an extraordinary degree those direct charms which

most subjugate our attention.

Imaginary forms then differ in dignity and beauty not according to

their closeness to fact or type in nature, but according to the ease

with which the normal imagination reproduces the synthesis they

contain. To add wings to a man has always been a natural fancy;

because man can easily imagine himself to fly, and the idea is

delightful to him. The winged man is therefore a form generally

recognized as beautiful; although it can happen, as it did to

Michael Angelo, that our appreciation of the actual form of the

human body should be too keen and overmastering to allow us to

relish even so charming and imaginative an extravagance. The

centaur is another beautiful monster. The imagination can easily

follow the synthesis of the dream in which horse and man melted

into one, and first gave the glorious suggestion of their united

vitality.

The same condition determines the worth of imaginary

personalities. From the gods to the characters of comedy, all are, in

proportion to their beauty, natural and exhilarating expressions of

possible human activity. We sometimes remould visible forms into

imaginary creatures; but our originality in this respect is meagre

compared with the profusion of images of action which arise in us,

both asleep and awake; we constantly dream of new situations,

extravagant adventures, and exaggerated passions. Even our

soberer thoughts are very much given to following the possible

fortunes of some enterprise, and foretasting the satisfactions of

love and ambition. The mind is therefore particularly sensitive to

pictures of action and character; we are easily induced to follow

the fortunes of any hero, and share his sentiments.

Our will, as Descartes said in a different context, is infinite, while

our intelligence is finite; we follow experience pretty closely in our

ideas of things, and even the furniture of fairyland bears a sad

resemblance to that of earth; but there is no limit to the elasticity of

our passion; and we love to fancy ourselves kings and beggars,

saints and villains, young and old, happy and unhappy. There

seems to be a boundless capacity of development in each of us,

which the circumstances of life determine to a narrow channel; and

we like to revenge ourselves in our reveries for this imputed

limitation, by classifying ourselves with all that we are not, but

might so easily have been. We are full of sympathy for every

manifestation of life, however unusual; and even the conception of

infinite knowledge and happiness -- than which nothing could be

more removed from our condition or more unrealizable to our

fancy -- remains eternally interesting to us.

The poet, therefore, who wishes to delineate a character need not

keep a note-book. There is a quicker road to the heart -- if he has

the gift to find it. Probably his readers will not themselves have

kept note-books, and his elaborate observations will only be

effective when he describes something which they also happen to

have noticed. The typical characters describable by the empirical

method are therefore few: the miser, the lover, the old nurse, the

ingénue, and the other types of traditional comedy. Any greater

specification would appeal only to a small audience for a short

time, because the characteristics depicted would no longer exist to

be recognized. But whatever experience a poet's hearers may have

had, they are men. They will have certain imaginative capacities to

conceive and admire those forms of character and action which,

although never actually found, are felt by each man to express

what he himself might and would have been, had circumstances

been more favourable.

The poet has only to study himself, and the art of expressing his

own ideals, to find that he has expressed those of other people. He

has but to enact in himself the part of each of his personages, and if

he possesses that pliability and that definiteness of imagination

which together make genius, he may express for his fellows those

inward tendencies which in them have remained painfully dumb.

He will be hailed as master of the human soul. He may know

nothing of men, he may have almost no experience; but his

creations will pass for models of naturalness, and for types of

humanity. Their names will be in every one's mouth, and the lives

of many generations will be enriched by the vision, one might

almost say by the friendship, of these imaginary beings. They have

individuality without having reality, because individuality is a

thing acquired in the mind by the congeries of its impressions.

They have power, also, because that depends on the appropriateness

of a stimulus to touch the springs of reaction in the soul.

And they of course have beauty, because in them is embodied

the greatest of our imaginative delights, -- that of giving body to

our latent capacities, and of wandering, without the strain and

contradiction of actual existence, into all forms of possible being.

_The religious imagination._

§ 47. The greatest of these creations hare not been the work of any

one man. They have been the slow product of the pious and poetic

imagination. Starting from some personification of nature or some

memory of a great man, the popular and priestly tradition has

refined and developed the ideal; it has made it an expression of

men's aspiration and a counterpart of their need. The devotion of

each tribe, shrine, and psalmist has added some attribute to the god

or some parable to his legend; and thus, around the kernel of some

original divine function, the imagination of a people has gathered

every possible expression of it, creating a complete and beautiful

personality, with its history, its character, and its gifts. No poet has

ever equalled the perfection or significance of these religious

creations. The greatest characters of fiction are uninteresting and

unreal compared with the conceptions of the gods; so much so that

men have believed that their gods have objective reality.

The forms men see in dreams might have been a reason for

believing in vague and disquieting ghosts; but the belief in

individual and well-defined divinities, with which the visions of

the dreams might be identified, is obviously due to the intrinsic

coherence and impressiveness of the conception of those deities.

The visions would never have suggested the legend and attributes

of the god; but when the figure of the god was once imaginatively

conceived, and his name and aspect fixed in the imagination, it

would be easy to recognize him in any hallucination, or to interpret

any event as due to his power. These manifestations, which

constitute the evidence of his actual existence, can be regarded as

manifestations of him, rather than of a vague, unknown power,

only when the imagination already possesses a vivid picture of him,

and of his appropriate functions. This picture is the work of a

spontaneous fancy.

No doubt, when the belief is once specified, and the special and

intelligible god is distinguished in the night and horror of the

all-pervading natural power, the belief in his reality helps to

concentrate our attention on his nature, and thus to develope and

enrich our idea. The belief in the reality of an ideal personality

brings about its further idealization. Had it ever occurred to any

Greek seer to attribute events to the influence of Achilles, or to

offer sacrifices to him in the heat of the enthusiasm kindled by the

thought of his beauty and virtue, the legend of Achilles, now

become a god, would have grown and deepened; it would have

been moralized like the legend of Hercules, or naturalized like that

of Persephone, and what is now but a poetic character of

extraordinary force and sublimity would have become the adored

patron of generation after generation, and a manifestation of the

divine man.

Achilles would then have been as significant and unforgettable a

figure as Apollo or his sister, as Zeus, Athena, and the other

greater gods. If ever, while that phase of religion lasted, his

character had been obscured and his features dimmed, he would

have been recreated by every new votary: poets would never have

tired of singing his praises, or sculptors of rendering his form.

When, after the hero had been the centre and subject of so much

imaginative labour, the belief in his reality lapsed, to be transferred

to some other conception of cosmic power, he would have

remained an ideal of poetry and art, and a formative influence of

all cultivated minds. This he is still, like all the great creations of

avowed fiction, but he would have been immensely more so, had

belief in his reality kept the creative imagination continuously

intent upon his nature.

The reader can hardly fail to see that all this applies with equal

force to the Christian conception of the sacred personalities. Christ,

the Virgin Mary, and the saints may have been exactly what our

imagination pictures them to be; that is entirely possible; nor can I

see that it is impossible that the conceptions of other religions

might themselves have actual counterparts somewhere in the

universe. That is a question of faith and empirical evidence with

which we are not here concerned. But however descriptive of truth

our conceptions may be, they have evidently grown up in our

minds by an inward process of development. The materials of

history and tradition have been melted and recast by the devout

imagination into those figures in the presence of which our piety

lives.

That is the reason why the reconstructed logical gods of the

metaphysicians are always an offence and a mockery to the

religious consciousness. There is here, too, a bare possibility that

some one of these absolutes may be a representation of the truth;

but the method by which this representation is acquired is violent

and artificial; while the traditional conception of God is the

spontaneous embodiment of passionate contemplation and long

experience.

As the God of religion differs from that of metaphysics, so does

the Christ of tradition differ from that of our critical historians.

Even if we took the literal narrative of the Gospels and accepted it

as all we could know of Christ, without allowing ourselves any

imaginative interpretation of the central figure, we should get an

ideal of him, I will not say very different from that of St. Francis or

St. Theresa, but even from that of the English, prayer-book. The

Christ men have loved and adored is an ideal of their own hearts,

the construction of an ever-present personality, living and

intimately understood, out of the fragments of story and doctrine

connected with a name. This subjective image has inspired all the

prayers, all the conversions, all the penances, charities, and

sacrifices, as well as half the art of the Christian world.

The Virgin Mary, whose legend is so meagre, but whose power

over the Catholic imagination is so great, is an even clearer

illustration of this inward building up of an ideal form. Everything

is here spontaneous sympathetic expansion of two given events:

the incarnation and the crucifixion. The figure of the Virgin, found

in these mighty scenes, is gradually clarified and developed, until

we come to the thought on the one hand of her freedom from

original sin, and on the other to that of her universal maternity. We

thus attain the conception of one of the noblest of conceivable

rôles and of one of the most beautiful of characters. It is a pity that

a foolish iconoclasm should so long have deprived the Protestant

mind of the contemplation of this ideal.

Perhaps it is a sign of the average imaginative dulness or fatigue of

certain races and epochs that they so readily abandon these

supreme creations. For, if we are hopeful, why should we not

believe that the best we can fancy is also the truest; and if we are

distrustful in general of our prophetic gifts, why should we cling

only to the most mean and formless of our illusions? From the

beginning to the end of our perceptive and imaginative activity, we

are synthesizing the material of experience into unities the

independent reality of which is beyond proof, nay, beyond the

possibility of a shadow of evidence. And yet the life of intelligence,

like the joy of contemplation, lies entirely in the formation and

inter-relation of these unities. This activity yields us all the objects

with which we can deal, and endows them with the finer and more

intimate part of their beauty. The most perfect of these forms,

judged by its affinity to our powers and its stability in the presence

of our experience, is the one with which we should be content; no

other kind of veracity could add to its value.

The greatest feats of synthesis which the human mind has yet

accomplished will, indeed, be probably surpassed and all ideals yet

formed be superseded, because they were not based upon enough

experience, or did not fit that experience with adequate precision.

It is also possible that changes in the character of the facts, or in

the powers of intelligence, should necessitate a continual

reconstruction of our world. But unless human nature suffers an

inconceivable change, the chief intellectual and aesthetic value of

our ideas will always come from the creative action of the

imagination.