EXPRESSION
_Expression defined._
§ 48. We have found in the beauty of material and form the
objectification of certain pleasures connected with the process of
direct perception, with the formation, in the one case of a sensation,
or quality, in the other of a synthesis of sensations or qualities. But
the human consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with
distinct boundaries and clear-cut images, determinate in number
and exhaustively perceived. Our ideas half emerge for a moment
from the dim continuum of vital feeling and diffused sense, and are
hardly fixed before they are changed and transformed, by the
shifting of attention and the perception of new relations, into ideas
of really different objects. This fluidity of the mind would make
reflection impossible, did we not fix in words and other symbols
certain abstract contents; we thus become capable of recognizing
in one perception the repetition of another, and of recognizing in
certain recurrences of impressions a persistent object. This
discrimination and classification of the contents of consciousness
is the work of perception and understanding, and the pleasures that
accompany these activities make the beauty of the sensible world.
But our hold upon our thoughts extends even further. We not only
construct visible unities and recognizable types, but remain aware
of their affinities to what is not at the time perceived; that is, we
find in them a certain tendency and quality, not original to them, a
meaning and a tone, which upon investigation we shall see to have
been the proper characteristics of other objects and feelings,
associated with them once in our experience. The hushed
reverberations of these associated feelings continue in the brain,
and by modifying our present reaction, colour the image upon
which our attention is fixed. The quality thus acquired by objects
through association is what we call their expression. Whereas in
form or material there is one object with its emotional effect, in
expression there are two, and the emotional effect belongs to the
character of the second or suggested one. Expression may thus
make beautiful by suggestion things in themselves indifferent, or it
may come to heighten the beauty which they already possess.
Expression is not always distinguishable in consciousness
from the value of material or form, because we do not always
have a distinguishable memory of the related idea which the
expressiveness implies. When we have such a memory, as at
the sight of some once frequented garden, we clearly and
spontaneously attribute our emotion to the memory and not to the
present fact which it beautifies. The revival of a pleasure and its
embodiment in a present object which in itself might have been
indifferent, is here patent and acknowledged.
The distinctness of the analysis may indeed be so great as to
prevent the synthesis; we may so entirely pass to the suggested
object, that our pleasure will be embodied in the memory of that,
while the suggestive sensation will be overlooked, and the
expressiveness of the present object will fail to make it beautiful.
Thus the mementos of a lost friend do not become beautiful by
virtue of the sentimental associations which may make them
precious. The value is confined to the images of the memory; they
are too clear to let any of that value escape and diffuse itself over
the rest of our consciousness, and beautify the objects which we
actually behold. We say explicitly: I value this trifle for its
associations. And so long as this division continues, the worth of
the thing is not for us aesthetic.
But a little dimming of our memory will often make it so. Let the
images of the past fade, let them remain simply as a halo and
suggestion of happiness hanging about a scene; then this scene,
however empty and uninteresting in itself, will have a deep and
intimate charm; we shall be pleased by its very vulgarity. We shall
not confess so readily that we value the place for its associations;
we shall rather say: I am fond of this landscape; it has for me an
ineffable attraction. The treasures of the memory have been melted
and dissolved, and are now gilding the object that supplants them;
they are giving this object expression.
Expression then differs from material or formal value only as habit
differs from instinct -- in its origin. Physiologically, they are both
pleasurable radiations of a given stimulus; mentally, they are both
values incorporated in an object. But an observer, looking at the
mind historically, sees in the one case the survival of an experience,
in the other the reaction of an innate disposition. This experience,
moreover, is generally rememberable, and then the extrinsic source
of the charm which expression gives becomes evident even to the
consciousness in which it arises. A word, for instance, is often
beautiful simply by virtue of its meaning and associations; but
sometimes this expressive beauty is added to a musical quality in
the world itself. In all expression we may thus distinguish two
terms: the first is the object actually presented, the word, the image,
the expressive thing; the second is the object suggested, the further
thought, emotion, or image evoked, the thing expressed.
These lie together in the mind, and their union constitutes
expression. If the value lies wholly in the first term, we have no
beauty of expression. The decorative inscriptions in Saracenic
monuments can have no beauty of expression for one who does not
read Arabic; their charm is wholly one of material and form. Or if
they have any expression, it is by virtue of such thoughts as they
might suggest, as, for instance, of the piety and oriental
sententiousness of the builders and of the aloofness from us of all
their world. And even these suggestions, being a wandering of our
fancy rather than a study of the object, would fail to arouse a
pleasure which would be incorporated in the present image. The
scroll would remain without expression, although its presence
might have suggested to us interesting visions of other things. The
two terms would be too independent, and the intrinsic values of
each would remain distinct from that of the other. There would be
no visible expressiveness, although there might have been
discursive suggestions.
Indeed, if expression were constituted by the external relation of
object with object, everything would be expressive equally,
indeterminately, and universally. The flower in the crannied wall
would express the same thing as the bust of Caesar or the _Critique
of Pure Reason._ What constitutes the individual expressiveness of
these things is the circle of thoughts allied to each in a given mind;
my words, for instance, express the thoughts which they actually
arouse in the reader; they may express more to one man than to
another, and to me they may have expressed more or less than to
yon. My thoughts remain unexpressed, if my words do not arouse
them in you, and very likely your greater wisdom will find in what
I say the manifestation of a thousand principles of which I never
dreamed. Expression depends upon the union of two terms, one of
which must be furnished by the imagination; and a mind cannot
furnish what it does not possess. The expressiveness of everything
accordingly increases with the intelligence of the observer.
But for expression to be an element of beauty, it must, of course,
fulfil another condition. I may see the relations of an object, I may
understand it perfectly, and may nevertheless regard it with entire
indifference. If the pleasure fails, the very substance and
protoplasm of beauty is wanting. Nor, as we have seen, is even the
pleasure enough; for I may receive a letter full of the most joyous
news, but neither the paper, nor the writing, nor the style, need
seem beautiful to me. Not until I confound the impressions, and
suffuse the symbols themselves with the emotions they arouse, and
find joy and sweetness in the very words I hear, will the
expressiveness constitute a beauty; as when they sing, _Gloria in
excelsis Deo_.
The value of the second term must be incorporated in the first; for
the beauty of expression is as inherent in the object as that of
material or form, only it accrues to that object not from the bare act
of perception, but from the association with it of further processes,
due to the existence of former impressions. We may conveniently
use the word "expressiveness" to mean all the capacity of
suggestion possessed by a thing, and the word "expression" for the
aesthetic modification which that expressiveness may cause in it.
Expressiveness is thus the power given by experience to any image
to call up others in the mind; and this expressiveness becomes an
aesthetic value, that is, becomes expression, when the value
involved in the associations thus awakened are incorporated in the
present object.
_The associative process._
§ 49. The purest case in which, an expressive value could arise
might seem to be that in which both terms were indifferent in
themselves, and what pleased was the activity of relating them. We
have such a phenomenon in mathematics, and in any riddle, puzzle,
or play with symbols. But such pleasures fall without the aesthetic
field in the absence of any objectification; they are pleasures of
exercise, and the objects involved are not regarded as the
substances in which those values inhere. We think of more or less
interesting problems or calculations, but it never occurs to the
mathematician to establish a hierarchy of forms according to their
beauty. Only by a metaphor could he say that (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab +
b2 was a more beautiful formula than 2 + 2 = 4. Yet in proportion
as such conceptions become definite and objective in the mind,
they approach aesthetic values, and the use of aesthetic epithets in
describing them becomes more constant and literal.
The beauties of abstract music are but one step beyond such
mathematical relations -- they are those relations presented in a
sensible form, and constituting an imaginable object. But, as we
see clearly in this last case, when the relation and not the terms
constitute the object, we have, if there is beauty at all, a beauty of
form, not of expression; for the more mathematical the charm of
music is the more form and the less expression do we see in it. In
fact, the sense of relation is here the essence of the object itself,
and the activity of passing from term to term, far from taking us
beyond our presentation to something extrinsic, constitutes that
presentation. The pleasure of this relational activity is therefore the
pleasure of conceiving a determined form, and nothing could be
more thoroughly a formal beauty.
And we may here insist upon a point of fundamental importance;
namely, that the process of association enters consciousness as
directly, and produces as simple a sensation, as any process in any
organ. The pleasures and pains of cerebration, the delight and the
fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impressions; they have the
same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is
not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them
disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to
the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical
necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind.
We involve ourselves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce
excellence and beauty, unity and necessity, from the describable
qualities of things; we repeat the rationalistic fiction of turning the
notions which we abstract from the observation of facts into the
powers that give those facts character and being.
We have, for instance, in the presence of two images a sense of
their incongruity; and we say that the character of the images
causes this emotion; whereas in dreams we constantly have the
most rapid transformations and patent contradictions without any
sense of incongruity at all; because the brain is dozing and the
necessary shock and mental inhibition is avoided. Add this
stimulation, and the incongruity returns. Had such a shock never
been felt, we should not know what incongruity meant; no more
than without eyes we should know the meaning of blue or yellow.
In saying this, we are not really leaning upon physiological theory.
The appeal to our knowledge of the brain facilitates the conception
of the immediacy of our feelings of relation; but that immediacy
would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We do not need to
think of the eye or skin to feel that light and heat are ultimate data;
no more do we need to think of cerebral excitements to see that
right and left, before and after, good and bad, one and two, like and
unlike, are irreducible feelings. The categories are senses without
organs, or with organs unknown. Just as the discrimination of our
feelings of colour and sound might never have been distinct and
constant, had we not come upon the organs that seem to convey
and control them; so perhaps our classification of our inner
sensations will never be settled until their respective organs are
discovered; for psychology has always been physiological, without
knowing it. But this truth remains -- quite apart from physical
conceptions, not to speak of metaphysical materialism -- that
whatever the historical conditions of any state of mind may be said
to be, it exists, when it does exist, immediately and absolutely;
each of its distinguishable parts might conceivably have been
absent from it; and its character, as well as its existence, is a mere
datum of sense.
The pleasure that belongs to the consciousness of relations is
therefore as immediate as any other; indeed, our emotional
consciousness is always single, but we treat it as a resultant of
many and even of conflicting feelings because we look at it
historically with a view to comprehending it, and distribute it into
as many factors as we find objects or causes to which to attribute it.
The pleasure of association is an immediate feeling, which we
account for by its relation to a feeling in the past, or to cerebral
structure modified by a former experience; just as memory itself,
which we explain by a reference to the past, is a peculiar
complication of present consciousness.
_Kinds of value in the second term._
§ 50. These reflections may make less surprising to us what is the
most striking fact about the philosophy of expression; namely, that
the value acquired by the expressive thing is often of an entirely
different kind from that which the thing expressed possesses. The
expression of physical pleasure, of passion, or even of pain, may
constitute beauty and please the beholder. Thus the value of the
second term may be physical, or practical, or even negative; and it
may be transmuted, as it passes to the first term, into a value at
once positive and aesthetic. The transformation of practical values
into aesthetic has often been noted, and has even led to the theory
that beauty is utility seen at arm's length; a premonition of pleasure
and prosperity, much as smell is a premonition of taste. The
transformation of negative values into positive has naturally
attracted even more attention, and given rise to various theories of
the comic, tragic, and sublime. For these three species of aesthetic
good seem to please us by the suggestion of evil; and the problem
arises how a mind can be made happier by having suggestions of
unhappiness stirred within it; an unhappiness it cannot understand
without in some degree sharing in it. We must now turn to the
analysis of this question.
The expressiveness of a smile is not discovered exactly through
association of images. The child smiles (without knowing it) when
he feels pleasure; and the nurse smiles back; his own pleasure is
associated with her conduct, and her smile is therefore expressive
of pleasure. The fact of his pleasure at her smile is the ground of
his instinctive belief in her pleasure in it. For this reason the
circumstances expressive of happiness are not those that are
favourable to it in reality, but those that are congruous with it in
idea. The green of spring, the bloom of youth, the variability of
childhood, the splendour of wealth and beauty, all these are
symbols of happiness, not because they have been known to
accompany it in fact, -- for they do not, any more than their
opposites, -- but because they produce an image and echo of it in
us aesthetically. We believe those things to be happy which it
makes us happy to think of or to see; the belief in the blessedness
of the supreme being itself has no other foundation. Our joy in the
thought of omniscience makes us attribute joy to the possession of
it, which it would in fact perhaps be very far from involving or
even allowing.
The expressiveness of forms has a value as a sign of the life that
actually inhabits those forms only when they resemble our own
body; it is then probable that similar conditions of body involve, in
them and in us, similar emotions; and we should not long continue
to regard as the expression of pleasure an attitude that we know, by
experience in our own person, to accompany pain. Children,
indeed, may innocently torture animals, not having enough sense
of analogy to be stopped by the painful suggestions of their
writhings; and, although in a rough way we soon correct these
crying misinterpretations by a better classification of experience,
we nevertheless remain essentially subject to the same error. We
cannot escape it, because the method which involves it is the only
one that justifies belief in objective consciousness at all. Analogy
of bodies helps us to distribute and classify the life we conceive
about us; but what leads us to conceive it is the direct association
of our own feeling with images of things, an association which
precedes any clear representation of our own gestures and attitude.
I know that smiles mean pleasure before I have caught myself
smiling in the glass; they mean pleasure because they give it.
Since these aesthetic effects include some of the most moving and
profound beauties, philosophers have not been slow to turn the
unanalyzed paradox of their formation into a principle, and to
explain by it the presence and necessity of evil. As in the tragic and
the sublime, they have thought, the sufferings and dangers to
which a hero is exposed seem to add to his virtue and dignity, and
to our sacred joy in the contemplation of him, so the sundry evils
of life may be elements in the transcendent glory of the whole.
And once fired by this thought, those who pretend to justify the
ways of God to man have, naturally, not stopped to consider
whether so edifying a phenomenon was not a hasty illusion. They
have, indeed, detested any attempt to explain it rationally, as
tending to obscure one of the moral laws of the universe. In
venturing, therefore, to repeat such an attempt, we should not be
too sanguine of success; for we have to encounter not only the
intrinsic difficulties of the problem, but also a wide-spread and
arrogant metaphysical prejudice.
For the sake of greater clearness we may begin by classifying the
values that can enter into expression; we shall then be better able to
judge by what combinations of them various well-known effects
and emotions are produced. The intrinsic value of the first term can
be entirely neglected, since it does not contribute to expression. It
does, however, contribute greatly to the beauty of the expressive
object. The first term is the source of stimulation, and the
acuteness and pleasantness of this determine to a great extent the
character and sweep of the associations that will be aroused. Very
often the pleasantness of the medium will counterbalance the
disagreeableness of the import, and expressions, in themselves
hideous or inappropriate, may be excused for the sake of the object
that conveys them. A beautiful voice will redeem a vulgar song, a
beautiful colour and texture an unmeaning composition. Beauty in
the first term -- beauty of sound, rhythm, and image -- will make
any thought whatever poetic, while no thought whatever can be so
without that immediate beauty of presentation.[14]
_Aesthetic value in the second term._
§ 51. That the noble associations of any object should embellish
that object is very comprehensible. Homer furnishes us with a
good illustration of the constant employment of this effect. The
first term, one need hardly say, leaves with him little to be desired.
The verse is beautiful. Sounds, images, and composition conspire
to stimulate and delight. This immediate beauty is sometimes used
to clothe things terrible and sad; there is no dearth of the tragic in
Homer. But the tendency of his poetry is nevertheless to fill the
outskirts of our consciousness with the trooping images of things
no less fair and noble than the verse itself. The heroes are virtuous.
There is none of importance who is not admirable in his way. The
palaces, the arms, the horses, the sacrifices, are always excellent.
The women are always stately and beautiful. The ancestry and the
history of every one are honourable and good. The whole Homeric
world is clean, clear, beautiful, and providential, and no small part
of the perennial charm of the poet is that he thus immerses us in an
atmosphere of beauty; a beauty not concentrated and reserved for
some extraordinary sentiment, action, or person, but permeating
the whole and colouring the common world of soldiers and sailors,
war and craft, with a marvellous freshness and inward glow. There
is nothing in the associations of life in this world or in another to
contradict or disturb our delight. All is beautiful, and beautiful
through and through.
Something of this quality meets us in all simple and idyllic
compositions. There is, for instance, a popular demand that stories
and comedies should "end well." The hero and heroine must be
young and handsome; unless they die, -- which is another matter, --
they must not in the end be poor. The landscape in the play must
be beautiful; the dresses pretty; the plot without serious mishap. A
pervasive presentation of pleasure must give warmth and ideality
to the whole. In the proprieties of social life we find the same
principle; we study to make our surroundings, manner, and
conversation suggest nothing but what is pleasing. We hide the
ugly and disagreeable portion of our lives, and do not allow the
least hint of it to come to light upon festive and public occasions.
Whenever, in a word, a thoroughly pleasing effect is found, it is
found by the expression, as well as presentation, of what is in itself
pleasing -- and when this effect is to be produced artificially, we
attain it by the suppression of all expression that is not suggestive
of something good.
If our consciousness were exclusively aesthetic, this kind of
expression would be the only one allowed in art or prized in nature.
We should avoid as a shock or an insipidity, the suggestion of
anything not intrinsically beautiful. As there would be no values
not aesthetic, our pleasure could never be heightened by any other
kind of interest. But as contemplation is actually a luxury in our
lives, and things interest us chiefly on passionate and practical
grounds, the accumulation of values too exclusively aesthetic
produces in our minds an effect of closeness and artificiality. So
selective a diet cloys, and our palate, accustomed to much daily
vinegar and salt, is surfeited by such unmixed sweet.
Instead we prefer to see through the medium of art -- through the
beautiful first term of our expression -- the miscellaneous world
which is so well known to us -- perhaps so dear, and at any rate so
inevitable, an object. We are more thankful for this presentation, of
the unlovely truth in a lovely form, than for the like presentation of
an abstract beauty; what is lost in the purity of the pleasure is
gained in the stimulation of our attention, and in the relief of
viewing with aesthetic detachment the same things that in practical
life hold tyrannous dominion over our souls. The beauty that is
associated only with other beauty is therefore a sort of aesthetic
dainty; it leads the fancy through a fairyland of lovely forms,
where we must forget the common objects of our interest. The
charm of such an idealization is undeniable; but the other
important elements of our memory and will cannot long be
banished. Thoughts of labour, ambition, lust, anger, confusion,
sorrow, and death must needs mix with our contemplation and lend
their various expressions to the objects with which in experience
they are so closely allied. Hence the incorporation in the beautiful
of values of other sorts, and the comparative rareness in nature or
art of expressions the second term of which has only aesthetic
value.
_Practical value in the same._
§ 52. More important and frequent is the case of the expression of
utility. This is found whenever the second term is the idea of
something of practical advantage to us, the premonition of which
brings satisfaction; and this satisfaction prompts an approval of the
presented object. The tone of our consciousness is raised by the
foretaste of a success; and this heightened pleasure is objectified in
the present image, since the associated image to which the
satisfaction properly belongs often fails to become distinct. We do
not conceive clearly what this practical advantage will be; but the
vague sense that an advantage is there, that something desirable
has been done, accompanies the presentation, and gives it
expression.
The case that most resembles that of which we have been just
speaking, is perhaps that in which the second term is a piece of
interesting information, a theory, or other intellectual datum. Our
interest in facts and theories, when not aesthetic, is of course
practical; it consists in their connexion with our interests, and in
the service they can render us in the execution of our designs.
Intellectual values are utilitarian in their origin but aesthetic in
their form, since the advantage of knowledge is often lost sight of,
and ideas are prized for their own sake. Curiosity can become a
disinterested passion, and yield intimate and immediate satisfaction
like any other impulse.
When we have before us, for instance, a fine map, in which the line
of coast, now rocky, now sandy, is clearly indicated, together with
the windings of the rivers, the elevations of the land, and the
distribution of the population, we have the simultaneous
suggestion of so many facts, the sense of mastery over so much
reality, that we gaze at it with delight, and need no practical motive
to keep us studying it, perhaps for hours together. A map is not
naturally thought of as an aesthetic object; it is too exclusively
expressive. The first term is passed over as a mere symbol, and the
mind is filled either with imaginations of the landscape the country
would really offer, or with thoughts about its history and
inhabitants. These circumstances prevent the ready objectification
of our pleasure in the map itself. And yet, let the tints of it be a
little subtle, let the lines be a little delicate, and the masses of land
and sea somewhat balanced, and we really have a beautiful thing; a
thing the charm of which consists almost entirely in its meaning,
but which nevertheless pleases us in the same way as a picture or a
graphic symbol might please. Give the symbol a little intrinsic
worth of form, line, and colour, and it attracts like a magnet all the
values of the things it is known to symbolize. It becomes beautiful
in its expressiveness.
Hardly different from this example is that of travel or of reading;
for in these employments we get many aesthetic pleasures, the
origin of which is in the satisfaction of curiosity and intelligence.
When we say admiringly of anything that it is characteristic, that it
embodies a whole period or a whole man, we are absorbed by the
pleasant sense that it offers innumerable avenues of approach to
interesting and important things. The less we are able to specify
what these are, the more beautiful will the object be that expresses
them. For if we could specify them, the felt value would
disintegrate, and distribute itself among the ideas of the suggested
things, leaving the expressive object bare of all interest, like the
letters of a printed page.
The courtiers of Philip the Second probably did not regard his
rooms at the Escurial as particularly interesting, but simply as
small, ugly, and damp. The character which we find in them and
which makes us regard them as eminently expressive of whatever
was sinister in the man, probably did not strike them. They knew
the king, and had before them words, gestures, and acts enough in
which to read his character. But all these living facts are wanting to
our experience; and it is the suggestion of them in their
unrealizable vagueness that fills the apartments of the monarch
with such pungent expression. It is not otherwise with all emphatic
expressiveness -- moonlight and castle moats, minarets and
cypresses, camels filing through the desert -- such images get their
character from the strong but misty atmosphere of sentiment and
adventure which clings about them. The profit of travel, and the
extraordinary charm of all visible relics of antiquity, consists in the
acquisition of images in which to focus a mass of discursive
knowledge, not otherwise felt together. Such images are concrete
symbols of much latent experience, and the deep roots of
association give them the same hold upon our attention which
might be secured by a fortunate form or splendid material.
_Cost as an element of effect._
§ 53. There is one consideration which often adds much to the
interest with which we view an object, but which we might be
virtuously inclined not to admit among aesthetic values. I mean
cost. Cost is practical value expressed in abstract terms, and from
the price of anything we can often infer what relation it has to the
desires and efforts of mankind. There is no reason why cost, or the
circumstances which are its basis, should not, like other practical
values, heighten the tone of consciousness, and add to the pleasure
with which we view an object. In fact, such is our daily experience;
for great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their rarity and price
adds an expression of distinction to them, which they would never
have if they were cheap.
The circumstance that makes the appreciation of cost often
unaesthetic is the abstractness of that quality. The price of an
object is an algebraic symbol, it is a conventional term, invented to
facilitate our operations, which remains arid and unmeaning if we
stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its
concrete equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that
intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the calculator's senses
are muffled by his intellect and by his habit of abbreviated thinking.
His mental process is a reckoning that loses sight of its original
values, and is over without reaching any concrete image. Therefore
the knowledge of cost, when expressed in terms of money, is
incapable of contributing to aesthetic effect, but the reason is not
so much that the suggested value is not aesthetic, as that no real
value is suggested at all. No object of any kind is presented to the
mind by the numerical expression. If we reinterpret our price,
however, and translate it back into the facts which constitute it,
into the materials employed, their original place and quality, and
the labour and art which transformed them into the present thing,
then we add to the aesthetic value of the object, by the expression
which we find in it, not of its price in money, but of its human cost.
We have now the consciousness of the real values which it
represents, and these values, sympathetically present to the fancy,
increase our present interest and admiration.
I believe economists count among the elements of the value of an
object the rarity of its material, the labour of its manufacture, and
the distance from which it is brought. Now all these qualities, if
attended to in themselves, appeal greatly to the imagination. We
have a natural interest in what is rare and affects us with unusual
sensations. What comes from a far country carries our thoughts
there, and gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its
associations. And that on which human labour has been spent,
especially if it was a labour of love, and is apparent in the product,
has one of the deepest possible claims to admiration. So that the
standard of cost, the most vulgar of all standards, is such only
when it remains empty and abstract. Let the thoughts wander back
and consider the elements of value, and our appreciation, from
being verbal and commercial, becomes poetic and real.
We have in this one more example of the manner in which
practical values, when suggested by and incorporated in any object,
contribute to its beauty. Our sense of what lies behind, unlovely
though that background may be, gives interest and poignancy to
that which is present; our attention and wonder are engaged, and a
new meaning and importance is added to such intrinsic beauty as
the presentation may possess.
_The expression of economy and fitness._
§ 54. The same principle explains the effect of evident cleanliness,
security, economy, and comfort. This Dutch charm hardly needs
explanation; we are conscious of the domesticity and neatness
which pleases us in it. There are few things more utterly
discomforting to our minds than waste: it is a sort of pungent
extract and quintessence of folly. The visible manifestation of it is
therefore very offensive; and that of its absence very reassuring.
The force of our approval of practical fitness and economy in
things rises into an appreciation that is half-aesthetic, and which
becomes wholly so when the fit form becomes fixed in a type, to
the lines of which we are accustomed; so that the practical
necessity of the form is heightened and concentrated into the
aesthetic propriety of it.
The much-praised expression of function and truth in architectural
works reduces itself to this principle. The useful contrivance at
first appeals to our practical approval; while we admire its
ingenuity, we cannot fail to become gradually accustomed to its
presence, and to register with attentive pleasure the relation of its
parts. Utility, as we have pointed out in its place, is thus the
guiding principle in the determination of forms.
The recurring observation of the utility, economy, and fitness of
the traditional arrangement in buildings or other products of art,
re-enforces this formal expectation with a reflective approval. We are
accustomed, for instance, to sloping roofs; the fact that they were
necessary has made them familiar, and the fact that they are
familiar has made them objects of study and of artistic enjoyment.
If at any moment, however, the notion of condemning them passes
through the mind, -- if we have visions of the balustrade against
the sky, -- we revert to our homely image with kindly loyalty,
when we remember the long months of rain and snow, and the
comfortless leaks to be avoided. The thought of a glaring, practical
unfitness is enough to spoil our pleasure in any form, however
beautiful intrinsically, while the sense of practical fitness is enough
to reconcile us to the most awkward and rude contrivances.
This principle is, indeed, not a fundamental, but an auxiliary one;
the expression of utility modifies effect, but does not constitute it.
There would be a kind of superstitious haste in the notion that what
is convenient and economical is necessarily and by miracle
beautiful. The uses and habits of one place and society require
works which are or may easily become intrinsically beautiful; the
uses and habits of another make these beautiful works impossible.
The beauty has a material and formal basis that we have already
studied; no fitness of design will make a building of ten equal
storeys as beautiful as a pavilion or a finely proportioned tower; no
utility will make a steamboat as beautiful as a sailing vessel. But
the forms once established, with their various intrinsic characters,
the fitness we know to exist in them will lend them some added
charm, or their unfitness will disquiet us, and haunt us like a
conscientious qualm. The other interests of our lives here mingle
with the purely aesthetic, to enrich or to embitter it.
If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory -- and who is without
some Sybaris of his own? -- if the image of it is so tormenting and
in the end so disgusting, this is not because we no longer think its
marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes strong, or its roses
fragrant; but because, mingled with all these supreme beauties,
there is the ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will
and a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral
condition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt. If this
beauty did not exist, and was not still desired, the tragedy would
disappear and Jehovah would be deprived of the worth of his
victim. The sternness of moral forces lies precisely in this, that the
sacrifices morality imposes upon us are real, that the things it
renders impossible are still precious.
We are accustomed to think of prudence as estranging us only
from low and ignoble things; we forget that utility and the need of
system in our lives is a bar also to the free flights of the spirit. The
highest instincts tend to disorganization as much as the lowest,
since order and benefit is what practical morality everywhere
insists upon, while sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man
only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the
understanding. For this reason, utility keeps close watch over
beauty, lest in her wilfulness and riot she should offend against our
practical needs and ultimate happiness. And when the conscience
is keen, this vigilance of the practical imagination over the
speculative ceases to appear as an eventual and external check. The
least suspicion of luxury, waste, impurity, or cruelty is then a
signal for alarm and insurrection. That which emits this _sapor
hoereticus_ becomes so initially horrible, that naturally no beauty
can ever be discovered in it; the senses and imagination are in that
case inhibited by the conscience.
For this reason, the doctrine that beauty is essentially nothing but
the expression of moral or practical good appeals to persons of
predominant moral sensitiveness, not only because they wish it
were the truth, but because it largely describes the experience of
their own minds, somewhat warped in this particular. It will further
be observed that the moralists are much more able to condemn
than to appreciate the effects of the arts. Their taste is delicate
without being keen, for the principle on which they judge is one
which really operates to control and extend aesthetic effects; it is a
source of expression and of certain _nuances_ of satisfaction; but it
is foreign to the stronger and more primitive aesthetic values to
which the same persons are comparatively blind.
_The authority of morals over aesthetics._
§ 55. The extent to which aesthetic goods should be sacrificed is,
of course, a moral question; for the function of practical reason is
to compare, combine, and harmonize all our interests, with a view
to attaining the greatest satisfactions of which our nature is capable.
We must expect, therefore, that virtue should place the same
restraint upon all our passions -- not from superstitious aversion to
any one need, but from an equal concern for them all. The
consideration to be given to our aesthetic pleasures will depend
upon their greater or less influence upon our happiness; and as this
influence varies in different ages and countries, and with different
individuals, it will be right to let aesthetic demands count for more
or for less in the organization of life.
We may, indeed, according to our personal sympathies, prefer one
type of creature to another. We may love the martial, or the angelic,
or the political temperament. We may delight to find in others that
balance of susceptibilities and enthusiasms which we feel in our
own breast. But no moral precept can require one species or
individual to change its nature in order to resemble another, since
such a requirement can have no power or authority over those on
whom we would impose it. All that morality can require is the
inward harmony of each life: and if we still abhor the thought of a
possible being who should be happy without love, or knowledge,
or beauty, the aversion we feel is not moral but instinctive, not
rational but human. What revolts us is not the want of excellence
in that other creature, but his want of affinity to ourselves. Could
we survey the whole universe, we might indeed assign to each
species a moral dignity proportionate to its general beneficence
and inward wealth; but such an absolute standard, if it exists, is
incommunicable to us; and we are reduced to judging of the
excellence of every nature by its relation to the human.
All these matters, however, belong to the sphere of ethics, nor
should we give them here even a passing notice, but for the
influence which moral ideas exert over aesthetic judgments. Our
sense of practical benefit not only determines the moral value of
beauty, but sometimes even its existence as an aesthetic good.
Especially in the right _selection_ of effects, these considerations
have weight. Forms in themselves pleasing may become disagreeable
when the practical interests then uppermost in the mind
cannot, without violence, yield a place to them. Thus too
much eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter,
or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense, but
also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of
sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli.
If things of moment are before us, we cannot stop to play with
symbols and figures of speech. We cannot attend to them with
pleasure, and therefore they lose the beauty they might elsewhere
have had. They are offensive, not in themselves, -- for nothing is
intrinsically ugly, -- but by virtue of our present demand for
something different. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church as dumb
as a prison, offend by their failure to support by their aesthetic
quality the moral emotion with, which we approach them. The arts
must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until
they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This is the
consequence of the superficial stratum on which they flourish;
their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the world, and they
appear only as unstable, superadded activities, employments of our
freedom, after the work of life is done and the terror of it is allayed.
They must, therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to the stouter
growths to which they cling.
Herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of art. It must not only
create things abstractly beautiful, but it must conciliate all the
competitors these may have to the attention of the world, and must
know how to insinuate their charms among the objects of our
passion. But this subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is
not without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic habit lie under the
necessity of respecting and observing our passions, it possesses the
privilege of soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terrible
that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to
contemplate it aesthetically.
Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain; a sweetness is
added to it by our reflection. The saddest scenes may lose their
bitterness in their beauty. This ministration makes, as it were, the
piety of the Muses, who succour their mother, Life, and repay her
for their nurture by the comfort of their continual presence. The
aesthetic world is limited in its scope; it must submit to the control
of the organizing reason, and not trespass upon more useful and
holy ground. The garden must not encroach upon the corn-fields;
but the eye of the gardener may transform the corn-fields
themselves by dint of loving observation into a garden of a soberer
kind. By finding grandeur in our disasters, and merriment in our
mishaps, the aesthetic sense thus mollifies both, and consoles us
for the frequent impossibility of a serious and perfect beauty.
_Negative values in the second term._
§ 56. All subjects, even the most repellent, when the
circumstances of life thrust them before us, can thus be observed
with curiosity and treated with art. The calling forth of these
aesthetic functions softens the violence of our sympathetic reaction.
If death, for instance, did not exist and did not thrust itself upon
our thoughts with painful importunity, art would never have been
called upon to soften and dignify it, by presenting it in beautiful
forms and surrounding it with consoling associations. Art does not
seek out the pathetic, the tragic, and the absurd; it is life that has
imposed them upon our attention, and enlisted art in their service,
to make the contemplation of them, since it is inevitable, at least as
tolerable as possible.
The agreeableness of the presentation is thus mixed with the horror
of the thing; and the result is that while we are saddened by the
truth we are delighted by the vehicle that conveys it to us. The
mixture of these emotions constitutes the peculiar flavour and
poignancy of pathos. But because unlovely objects and feelings are
often so familiar as to be indifferent or so momentous as to be
alone in the mind, we are led into the confusion of supposing that
beauty depends upon them for its aesthetic value; whereas the truth
is that only by the addition of positive beauties can these evil
experiences be made agreeable to contemplation.
There is, in reality, no such paradox in the tragic, comic, and
sublime, as has been sometimes supposed. We are not pleased by
virtue of the suggested evils, but in spite of them; and if ever the
charm of the beautiful presentation sinks so low, or the vividness
of the represented evil rises so high, that the balance is in favour of
pain, at that very moment the whole object becomes horrible,
passes out of the domain of art, and can be justified only by its
scientific or moral uses. As an aesthetic value it is destroyed; it
ceases to be a benefit; and the author of it, if he were not made
harmless by the neglect that must soon overtake him, would have
to be punished as a malefactor who adds to the burden of mortal
life. For the sad, the ridiculous, the grotesque, and the terrible,
unless they become aesthetic goods, remain moral evils.
We have, therefore, to study the various aesthetic, intellectual, and
moral compensations by which the mind can be brought to
contemplate with pleasure a thing which, if experienced alone,
would be the cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of avoiding
this inquiry. We might assert that since all moderate excitement is
pleasant, there is nothing strange in the fact that the representation
of evil should please; for the experience is evil by virtue of the
pain it gives; but it gives pain only when felt with great intensity.
Observed from afar, it is a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough
to interest, but not acute enough to wound. This simple explanation
is possible in all those cases where aesthetic effect is gained by the
inhibition of sympathy.
The term "evil" is often a conventional epithet; a conflagration
may be called an evil, because it usually involves loss and
suffering; but if, without caring for a loss and suffering we do not
share, we are delighted by the blaze, and still say that what pleases
us is an evil, we are using this word as a conventional appellation,
not as the mark of a felt value. We are not pleased by an evil; we
are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but
which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an
evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not
thinking at all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, perhaps,
which is not an evil; nothing which is not unfavourable to some
interest, and does not involve some infinitesimal or ultimate
suffering in the universe of life.
But when we are ignorant or thoughtless, this suffering is to us as
if it did not exist. The pleasures of drinking and walking are not
tragic to us, because we may be poisoning some bacillus or
crushing some worm. To an omniscient intelligence such acts may
be tragic by virtue of the insight into their relations to conflicting
impulses; but unless these impulses are present to the same mind,
there is no consciousness of tragedy. The child that, without
understanding of the calamity, should watch a shipwreck from the
shore, would hare a simple emotion of pleasure as from a jumping
jack; what passes for tragic interest is often nothing but this. If he
understood the event, but was entirely without sympathy, he would
have the aesthetic emotion of the careless tyrant, to whom the
notion of suffering is no hindrance to the enjoyment of the lyre. If
the temper of his tyranny were purposely cruel, he might add to
that aesthetic delight the luxury of _Schadenfreude;_ but the
pathos and horror of the sight could only appeal to a man who
realized and shared the sufferings he beheld.
A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured in the world
because the rudeness of the representation, or of the public, or of
both, did not allow a really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all
smile when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The treatment
and not the subject is what makes a tragedy. A parody of _Hamlet_
or of _King Lear_ would not be a tragedy; and these tragedies
themselves are not wholly such, but by the strain of wit and
nonsense they contain are, as it were, occasional parodies on
themselves. By treating a tragic subject bombastically or satirically
we can turn it into an amusement for the public; they will not feel
the griefs which we have been careful to harden them against by
arousing in them contrary emotions. A work, nominally a work of
art, may also appeal to non-aesthetic feelings by its political bias,
brutality, or obscenity. But if an effect of true pathos is sought, the
sympathy of the observer must be aroused; we must awaken in him
the emotion we describe. The intensity of the impression must not
be so slight that its painful quality is not felt; for it is this very
sense of pain, mingling with the aesthetic excitement of the
spectacle, that gives it a tragic or pathetic colouring.
We cannot therefore rest in the assertion that the slighter degree of
excitement is pleasant, when a greater degree of the same would be
disagreeable; for that principle does not express the essence of the
matter, which is that we must be aware of the evil, and conscious
of it as such, absorbed more or less in the experience of the
sufferer, and consequently suffering ourselves, before we can
experience the essence of tragic emotion. This emotion must
therefore be complex; it must contain an element of pain
overbalanced by an element of pleasure; in our delight there must
be a distinguishable touch of shrinking and sorrow; for it is this
conflict and rending of our will, this fascination by what is
intrinsically terrible or sad, that gives these turbid feelings their
depth and pungency.
_Influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of self._
§ 57. A striking proof of the compound nature of tragic effects can
be given by a simple experiment. Remove from any drama -- say
from _Othello_ -- the charm of the medium of presentation; reduce
the tragedy to a mere account of the facts and of the words spoken,
such as our newspapers almost daily contain; and the tragic dignity
and beauty is entirely lost. Nothing remains but a disheartening
item of human folly, which may still excite curiosity, but which
will rather defile than purify the mind that considers it. A French
poet has said:
Il n'est de vulgaire chagrin
Qua celui d'une âme vulgaire.
The counterpart of this maxim is equally true. There is no noble
sorrow except in a noble mind, because what is noble is the
reaction upon the sorrow, the attitude of the man in its presence,
the language in which he clothes it, the associations with which he
surrounds it, and the fine affections and impulses which shine
through it. Only by suffusing some sinister experience with this
moral light, as a poet may do who carries that light within him, can
we raise misfortune into tragedy and make it better for us to
remember our lives than to forget them.
There are times, although rare, when men are noble in the very
moment of passion: when that passion is not unqualified, but
already mastered by reflection and levelled with truth. Then the
experience is itself the tragedy, and no poet is needed to make it
beautiful in representation, since the sufferer has been an artist
himself, and has moulded what he has endured. But usually these
two stages have to be successive: first we suffer, afterwards we
sing. An interval is necessary to make feeling presentable, and
subjugate it to that form in which alone it is beautiful.
This form appeals to us in itself, and without its aid no
subject-matter could become an aesthetic object. The more terrible the
experience described, the more powerful must the art be which is
to transform it. For this reason prose and literalness are more
tolerable in comedy than in tragedy; any violent passion, any
overwhelming pain, if it is not to make us think of a demonstration
in pathology, and bring back the smell of ether, must be rendered
in the most exalted style. Metre, rhyme, melody, the widest nights
of allusion, the highest reaches of fancy, are there in place. For
these enable the mind swept by the deepest cosmic harmonies, to
endure and absorb the shrill notes which would be intolerable in a
poorer setting.
The sensuous harmony of words, and still more the effects of
rhythm, are indispensable at this height of emotion. Evolutionists
have said that violent emotion naturally expresses itself in rhythm.
That is hardly an empirical observation, nor can the expressiveness
of rhythms be made definite enough to bear specific association
with complex feelings. But the suspension and rush of sound and
movement have in themselves a strong effect; we cannot undergo
them without profound excitement; and this, like martial music,
nerves us to courage and, by a sort of intoxication, bears us along
amid scenes which might otherwise be sickening. The vile effect of
literal and disjointed renderings of suffering, whether in writing or
acting, proves how necessary is the musical quality to tragedy -- a
fact Aristotle long ago set forth. The afflatus of rhythm, even if it
be the pomp of the Alexandrine, sublimates the passion, and
clarifies its mutterings into poetry. This breadth and rationality are
necessary to art, which is not skill merely, but skill in the service
of beauty.
_Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth._
§ 58. To the value of these sensuous and formal elements must be
added the continual suggestion of beautiful and happy things,
which no tragedy is sombre enough to exclude. Even if we do not
go so far as to intersperse comic scenes and phrases into a pathetic
subject, -- a rude device, since the comic passages themselves need
that purifying which they are meant to effect, -- we must at least
relieve our theme with pleasing associations. For this reason we
have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtue in our heroes,
nobility in their passions and in their fate, and altogether a sort of
glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in depth
of pathos -- since things so precious are destroyed -- and in
subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.
Indeed, one of the chief charms that tragedies have is the
suggestion of what they might have been if they had not been
tragedies. The happiness which glimmers through them, the hopes,
loves, and ambitions of which it is made, these things fascinate us,
and win our sympathy; so that we are all the more willing to suffer
with our heroes, even if we are at the same time all the more
sensitive to their suffering. Too wicked a character or too
unrelieved a situation revolts us for this reason. We do not find
enough expression of good to make us endure the expression of the
evil.
A curious exception to this rule, which, however, admirably
illustrates the fundamental principle of it, is where by the diversity
of evils represented the mind is relieved from painful absorption in
any of them. There is a scene in _King Lear,_ where the horror of
the storm is made to brood over at least four miseries, that of the
king, of the fool, of Edgar in his real person, and of Edgar in his
assumed character. The vividness of each of these portrayals, with
its different note of pathos, keeps the mind detached and free,
forces it to compare and reflect, and thereby to universalize the
spectacle. Yet even here, the beautiful effect is not secured without
some touches of good. How much is not gained by the dumb
fidelity of the fool, and by the sublime humanity of Lear, when he
says, "Art cold? There is a part of me is sorry for thee yet."
Yet all these compensations would probably be unavailing but for
another which the saddest things often have, -- the compensation
of being true. Our practical and intellectual nature is deeply
interested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us for that reason;
it has an inalienable interest. However unpleasant truth may prove,
we long to know it, partly perhaps because experience has shown
us the prudence of this kind of intellectual courage, and chiefly
because the consciousness of ignorance and the dread of the
unknown is more tormenting than any possible discovery. A
primitive instinct makes us turn the eyes full on any object that
appears in the dim borderland of our field of vision -- and this all
the more quickly, the more terrible that object threatens to be.
This physical thirst for seeing has its intellectual extension. We
covet truth, and to attain it, amid all accidents, is a supreme
satisfaction. Now this satisfaction the representation of evil can
also afford. Whether we hear the account of some personal
accident, or listen to the symbolic representation of the inherent
tragedy of life, we crave the same knowledge; the desire for truth
makes us welcome eagerly whatever comes in its name. To be sure,
the relief of such instruction does not of itself constitute an
aesthetic pleasure: the other conditions of beauty remain to be
fulfilled. But the satisfaction of so imperious an intellectual instinct
insures our willing attention to the tragic object, and strengthens
the hold which any beauties it may possess will take upon us. An
intellectual value stands ready to be transmuted into an aesthetic
one, if once its discursiveness is lost, and it is left hanging about
the object as a vague sense of dignity and meaning.
To this must be added the specific pleasure of recognition, one of
the keenest we have, and the sentimental one of nursing our own
griefs and dignifying them by assimilation to a less inglorious
representation of them. Here we have truth on a small scale;
conformity in the fiction to incidents of our personal experience.
Such correspondences are the basis of much popular appreciation
of trivial and undigested works that appeal to some momentary
phase of life or feeling, and disappear with it. They have the value
of personal stimulants only; they never achieve beauty. Like the
souvenirs of last season's gayeties, or the diary of an early love,
they are often hideous in themselves in proportion as they are
redolent with personal associations. But however hopelessly mere
history or confession may fail to constitute a work of art, a work of
art that has an historical warrant, either literal or symbolical, gains
the support of that vivid interest we have in facts. And many
tragedies and farces, that to a mind without experience of this
sublunary world might seem monstrous and disgusting fictions,
may come to be forgiven and even perhaps preferred over all else,
when they are found to be a sketch from life.
Truth is thus the excuse which ugliness has for being. Many people,
in whom the pursuit of knowledge and the indulgence in sentiment
have left no room for the cultivation of the aesthetic sense, look in
art rather for this expression of fact or of passion than for the
revelation of beauty. They accordingly produce and admire works
without intrinsic value. They employ the procedure of the fine arts
without an eye to what can give pleasure in the effect. They invoke
rather the _a priori_ interest which men are expected to have in the
subject-matter, or in the theories and moral implied in the
presentation of it. Instead of using the allurements of art to inspire
wisdom, they require an appreciation of wisdom to make us endure
their lack of art.
Of course, the instruments of the arts are public property and any
one is free to turn them to new uses. It would be an interesting
development of civilization if they should now be employed only
as methods of recording scientific ideas and personal confessions.
But the experiment has not succeeded and can hardly succeed.
There are other simpler, clearer, and more satisfying ways of
expounding truth. A man who is really a student of history or
philosophy will never rest with the vague and partial oracles of
poetry, not to speak of the inarticulate suggestions of the plastic
arts. He will at once make for the principles which art cannot
express, even if it can embody them, and when those principles are
attained, the works of art, if they had no other value than that of
suggesting them, will lapse from his mind. Forms will give place
to formulas as hieroglyphics have given place to the letters of the
alphabet.
If, on the other hand, the primary interest is really in beauty, and
only the confusion of a moral revolution has obscured for a while
the vision of the ideal, then as the mind regains its mastery over the
world, and digests its new experience, the imagination will again
be liberated, and create its forms by its inward affinities, leaving
all the weary burden, archaeological, psychological, and ethical, to
those whose business is not to delight. But the sudden inundation
of science and sentiment which has made the mind of the
nineteenth century so confused, by overloading us with materials
and breaking up our habits of apperception and our ideals, has led
to an exclusive sense of the value of expressiveness, until this has
been almost identified with beauty. This exaggeration can best
prove how the expression of truth may enter into the play of
aesthetic forces, and give a value to representations which, but for
it, would be repulsive.
_The liberation of self._
§ 59. Hitherto we have been considering those elements of a
pathetic presentation which may mitigate our sympathetic emotion,
and make it on the whole agreeable. These consist in the intrinsic
beauties of the medium of presentation, and in the concomitant
manifestation of various goods, notably of truth. The mixture of
these values is perhaps all we have in mildly pathetic works, in the
presence of which we are tolerably aware of a sort of balance and
compensation of emotions. The sorrow and the beauty, the
hopelessness and the consolation, mingle and merge into a kind of
joy which has its poignancy, indeed, but which is far too passive
and penitential to contain the louder and sublimer of our tragic
moods. In these there is a wholeness, a strength, and a rapture,
which still demands an explanation.
Where this explanation is to be found may be guessed from the
following circumstance. The pathetic is a quality of the object, at
once lovable and sad, which we accept and allow to flow in upon
the soul; but the heroic is an attitude of the will, by which the
voices of the outer world are silenced, and a moral energy, flowing
from within, is made to triumph over them. If we fail, therefore, to
discover, by analysis of the object, anything which could make it
sublime, we must not be surprised at our failure. We must
remember that the object is always but a portion of our
consciousness: that portion which has enough coherence and
articulation to be recognized as permanent and projected into the
outer world. But consciousness remains one, in spite of this
diversification of its content, and the object is not really
independent, but is in constant relation to the rest of the mind, in
the midst of which it swims like a bubble on a dark surface of
water.
The aesthetic effect of objects is always due to the total emotional
value of the consciousness in which they exist. We merely attribute
this value to the object by a projection which is the ground of the
apparent objectivity of beauty. Sometimes this value may be
inherent in the process by which the object itself is perceived; then
we have sensuous and formal beauty; sometimes the value may be
due to the incipient formation of other ideas, which the perception
of this object evokes; then we have beauty of expression. But
among the ideas with which every object has relation there is one
vaguest, most comprehensive, and most powerful one, namely, the
idea of self. The impulses, memories, principles, and energies
which we designate by that word baffle enumeration; indeed, they
constantly fade and change into one another; and whether the self
is anything, everything, or nothing depends on the aspect of it
which we momentarily fix, and especially on the definite object
with which we contrast it.
Now, it is the essential privilege of beauty to so synthesize and
bring to a focus the various impulses of the self, so to suspend
them to a single image, that a great peace falls upon that perturbed
kingdom. In the experience of these momentary harmonies we
have the basis of the enjoyment of beauty, and of all its mystical
meanings. But there are always two methods of securing harmony:
one is to unify all the given elements, and another is to reject and
expunge all the elements that refuse to be unified. Unity by
inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition,
and isolation gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures: but the
pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; that of the
other cold, imperious, and keen. The one identifies us with the
world, the other raises us above it.
There can be no difficulty in understanding how the expression of
evil in the object may be the occasion of this heroic reaction of the
soul. In the first place, the evil may be felt; but at the same time the
sense that, great as it may be in itself, it cannot touch us, may
stimulate extraordinarily the consciousness of our own wholeness.
This is the sublimity which Lucretius calls "sweet" in the famous
lines in which he so justly analyzes it. We are not pleased because
another suffers an evil, but because, seeing it is an evil, we see at
the same time our own immunity from it. We might soften the
picture a little, and perhaps make the principle even clearer by so
doing. The shipwreck observed from the shore does not leave us
wholly unmoved; we suffer, also, and if possible, would help. So,
too, the spectacle of the erring world must sadden the philosopher
even in the Acropolis of his wisdom; he would, if it might be,
descend from his meditation and teach. But those movements of
sympathy are quickly inhibited by despair of success; impossibility
of action is a great condition of the sublime. If we could count the
stars, we should not weep before them. While we think we can
change the drama of history, and of our own lives, we are not awed
by our destiny. But when the evil is irreparable, when our life is
lived, a strong spirit has the sublime resource of standing at bay
and of surveying almost from the other world the vicissitudes of
this.
The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is able to look back
upon with calmness, the more sublime that calmness is, and the
more divine the ecstasy in which he achieves it. For the more of
the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip ourselves of, the
more naked and simple is the surviving spirit; the more complete
its superiority and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified
its joy. There remains little in us, then, but that intellectual essence,
which several great philosophers have called eternal and identified
with the Divinity.
A single illustration may help to fix these principles in the mind.
When Othello has discovered his fatal error, and is resolved to take
his own life, he stops his groaning, and addresses the ambassadors
of Venice thus:
Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak
Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this:
And say, besides, that in Aleppo once
When a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.