figures of speech, and wandering reflections, an unnatural
rendering of suicide. The man, we might be told, should have
muttered a few broken phrases, and killed himself without this
pomp of declamation, like the jealous husbands in the daily papers.
But the conventions of the tragic stage are more favourable to
psychological truth than the conventions of real life. If we may
trust the imagination (and in imagination lies, as we have seen, the
test of propriety), this is what Othello would have felt. If he had
not expressed it, his dumbness would have been due to external
hindrances, not to the failure in his mind of just such complex and
rhetorical thoughts as the poet has put into his mouth. The height
of passion is naturally complex and rhetorical. Love makes us
poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it
from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if
the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to
live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute
to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself
with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he
was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I
have been, says he, this I have done.
This comprehensive and impartial view, this synthesis and
objectification of experience, constitutes the liberation of the soul
and the essence of sublimity. That the hero attains it at the end
consoles us, as it consoles him, for his hideous misfortunes. Our
pity and terror are indeed purged; we go away knowing that,
however tangled the net may be in which we feel ourselves caught,
there is liberation beyond, and an ultimate peace.
_The sublime independent of the expression of evil._
§ 60. So natural is the relation between the vivid conception of
great evils, and that self-assertion of the soul which gives the
emotion of the sublime, that the sublime is often thought to depend
upon the terror which these conceived evils inspire. To be sure,
that terror would have to be inhibited and subdued, otherwise we
should have a passion too acute to be incorporated in any object;
the sublime would not appear as an aesthetic quality in things, but
remain merely an emotional state in the subject. But this subdued
and objectified terror is what is commonly regarded as the essence
of the sublime, and so great an authority as Aristotle would seem
to countenance some such definition. The usual cause of the
sublime is here confused, however, with the sublime itself. The
suggestion of terror makes us withdraw into ourselves: there with
the supervening consciousness of safety or indifference comes a
rebound, and we have that emotion of detachment and liberation in
which the sublime really consists.
Thoughts and actions are properly sublime, and visible things only
by analogy and suggestion when they induce a certain moral
emotion; whereas beauty belongs properly to sensible things, and
can be predicated of moral facts only by a figure of rhetoric. What
we objectify in beauty is a sensation. What we objectify in the
sublime is an act. This act is necessarily pleasant, for if it were not
the sublime would be a bad quality and one we should rather never
encounter in the world. The glorious joy of self-assertion in the
face of an uncontrollable world is indeed so deep and entire, that it
furnishes just that transcendent element of worth for which we
were looking when we tried to understand how the expression of
pain could sometimes please. It can please, not in itself, but
because it is balanced and annulled by positive pleasures,
especially by this final and victorious one of detachment. If the
expression of evil seems necessary to the sublime, it is so only as a
condition of this moral reaction.
We are commonly too much engrossed in objects and too little
centred in ourselves and our inalienable will, to see the sublimity
of a pleasing prospect. We are then enticed and flattered,
and won over to a commerce with these external goods, and
the consummation of our happiness would lie in the perfect
comprehension and enjoyment of their nature. This is the office of
art and of love; and its partial fulfilment is seen in every perception
of beauty. But when we are checked in this sympathetic endeavour
after unity and comprehension; when we come upon a great evil or
an irreconcilable power, we are driven to seek our happiness by the
shorter and heroic road; then we recognize the hopeless
foreignness of what lies before us, and stiffen ourselves against it.
We thus for the first time reach the sense of our possible separation
from our world, and of our abstract stability; and with this comes
the sublime.
But although experience of evil is the commonest approach to this
attitude of mind, and we commonly become philosophers only
after despairing of instinctive happiness, yet there is nothing
impossible in the attainment of detachment by other channels. The
immense is sublime as well as the terrible; and mere infinity of the
object, like its hostile nature, can have the effect of making the
mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like hostility, removes us from
things, and makes us conscious of our independence. The
simultaneous view of many things, innumerable attractions felt
together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as effectually as
the exclusion of all. If we may call the liberation of the self by the
consciousness of evil in the world, the Stoic sublime, we may
assert that there is also an Epicurean sublime, which consists in
liberation by equipoise. Any wide survey is sublime in that fashion.
Each detail may be beautiful. We may even be ready with a
passionate response to its appeal. We may think we covet every
sort of pleasure, and lean to every kind of vigorous, impulsive life.
But let an infinite panorama be suddenly unfolded; the will is
instantly paralyzed, and the heart choked. It is impossible to desire
everything at once, and when all is offered and approved, it is
impossible to choose everything. In this suspense, the mind soars
into a kind of heaven, benevolent but unmoved.
This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of interest or
length of years has brought balance and dignity. The sacerdotal
quality of old age comes from this same sympathy in disinterestedness.
Old men full of hurry and passion appear as fools, because
we understand that their experience has not left enough
mark upon their brain to qualify with the memory of other
goods any object that may be now presented. We cannot venerate
any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And
this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon
any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the
gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a
natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on
no other model.
When the pantheists try to conceive all the parts of nature as
forming a single being, which shall contain them all and yet have
absolute unity, they find themselves soon denying the existence of
the world they are trying to deify; for nature, reduced to the unity it
would assume in an omniscient mind, is no longer nature, but
something simple and impossible, the exact opposite of the real
world. Such an opposition would constitute the liberation of the
divine mind from nature, and its existence as a self-conscious
individual. The effort after comprehensiveness of view reduces
things to unity, but this unity stands out in opposition to the
manifold phenomena which it transcends, and rejects as unreal.
Now this destruction of nature, which the metaphysicians since
Parmenides have so often repeated (nature nevertheless surviving
still), is but a theoretical counterpart and hypostasis of what
happens in every man's conscience when the comprehensiveness of
his experience lifts him into thought, into abstraction. The sense of
the sublime is essentially mystical: it is the transcending of distinct
perception in favour of a feeling of unity and volume. So in the
moral sphere, we have the mutual cancelling of the passions in the
breast that includes them all, and their final subsidence beneath the
glance that comprehends them. This is the Epicurean approach to
detachment and perfection; it leads by systematic acceptance of
instinct to the same goal which the stoic and the ascetic reach by
systematic rejection of instinct. It is thus possible to be moved to
that self-enfranchisement which constitutes the sublime, even
when the object contains no expression of evil.
This conclusion supports that part of our definition of beauty
which declares that the values beauty contains are all positive; a
definition which we should have had to change if we had found
that the sublime depended upon the suggestion of evil for its effect.
But the sublime is not the ugly, as some descriptions of it might
lead us to suppose; it is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful.
It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such an intensity that it
begins to lose its objectivity, and to declare itself, what it always
fundamentally was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in the
beautiful we find the perfection of life by sinking into the object, in
the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable perfection by
defying the object altogether. The surprised enlargement of vision,
the sudden escape from our ordinary interests and the identification
of ourselves with something permanent and superhuman, something
much more abstract and inalienable than our changing personality,
all this carries us away from the blurred objects before us,
and raises us into a sort of ecstasy.
In the trite examples of the sublime, where we speak of the vast
mass, strength, and durability of objects, or of their sinister aspect,
as if we were moved by them on account of our own danger, we
seem to miss the point. For the suggestion of our own danger
would produce a touch of fear; it would be a practical passion, or if
it could by chance be objectified enough to become aesthetic, it
would merely make the object hateful and repulsive, like a
mangled corpse. The object is sublime when we forget our danger,
when we escape from ourselves altogether, and live as it were in
the object itself, energizing in imitation of its movement, and
saying, "Be thou me, impetuous one!" This passage into the object,
to live its life, is indeed a characteristic of all perfect contemplation.
But when in thus translating ourselves we rise and play a higher
personage, feeling the exhilaration of a life freer and wilder than
our own, then the experience is one of sublimity. The emotion
comes not from the situation we observe, but from the powers we
conceive; we fail to sympathize with the struggling sailors because
we sympathize too much with the wind and waves. And this
mystical cruelty can extend even to ourselves; we can so feel the
fascination of the cosmic forces that engulf us as to take a fierce
joy in the thought of our own destruction. We can identify
ourselves with the abstractest essence of reality, and, raised to that
height, despise the human accidents of our own nature. Lord, we
say, though thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee. The sense of
suffering disappears in the sense of life and the imagination
overwhelms the understanding.
_The comic._
§ 61. Something analogous takes place in the other spheres where
an aesthetic value seems to arise out of suggestions of evil, in the
comic, namely, and the grotesque. But here the translation of our
sympathies is partial, and we are carried away from ourselves only
to become smaller. The larger humanity, which cannot be absorbed,
remains ready to contradict the absurdity of our fiction. The
excellence of comedy lies in the invitation to wander along some
by-path of the fancy, among scenes not essentially impossible, but
not to be actually enacted by us on account of the fixed
circumstances of our lives. If the picture is agreeable, we allow
ourselves to dream it true. We forget its relations; we forbid the
eye to wander beyond the frame of the stage, or the conventions of
the fiction. We indulge an illusion which deepens our sense of the
essential pleasantness of things.
So far, there is nothing in comedy that is not delightful, except,
perhaps, the moment when it is over. But fiction, like all error or
abstraction, is necessarily unstable; and the awakening is not
always reserved for the disheartening moment at the end.
Everywhere, when we are dealing with pretension or mistake, we
come upon sudden and vivid contradictions; changes of view,
transformations of apperception which are extremely stimulating to
the imagination. We have spoken of one of these: when the sudden
dissolution of our common habits of thought lifts us into a mystical
contemplation, filled with the sense of the sublime; when the
transformation is back to common sense and reality, and away
from some fiction, we have a very different emotion. We feel
cheated, relieved, abashed, or amused, in proportion as our
sympathy attaches more to the point of view surrendered or to that
attained.
The disintegration of mental forms and their redintegration is the
life of the imagination. It is a spiritual process of birth and death,
nutrition and generation. The strongest emotions accompany these
changes, and vary infinitely with their variations. All the qualities
of discourse, wit, eloquence, cogency, absurdity, are feelings
incidental to this process, and involved in the juxtapositions,
tensions, and resolutions of our ideas. Doubtless the last
explanation of these things would be cerebral; but we are as yet
confined to verbal descriptions and classifications of them, which
are always more or less arbitrary.
The most conspicuous headings under which comic effects are
gathered are perhaps incongruity and degradation. But clearly it
cannot be the logical essence of incongruity or degradation that
constitutes the comic; for then contradiction and deterioration
would always amuse. Amusement is a much more directly physical
thing. We may be amused without any idea at all, as when we are
tickled, or laugh in sympathy with others by a contagious imitation
of their gestures. We may be amused by the mere repetition of a
thing at first not amusing. There must therefore be some nervous
excitement on which the feeling of amusement directly depends,
although this excitement may most often coincide with a sudden
transition to an incongruous or meaner image. Nor can we suppose
that particular ideational excitement to be entirely dissimilar to all
others; wit is often hardly distinguishable from brilliancy, as
humour from pathos. We must, therefore, be satisfied with saying
vaguely that the process of ideation involves various feelings of
movement and relation, -- feelings capable of infinite gradation
and complexity, and ranging from sublimity to tedium and from
pathos to uncontrollable merriment.
Certain crude and obvious cases of the comic seem to consist of
little more than a shock of surprise: a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box,
popping from nowhere into our plodding thoughts. The liveliness
of the interruption, and its futility, often please; _dulce est
desipere in loco;_ and yet those who must endure the society of
inveterate jokers know how intolerable this sort of scintillation can
become. There is something inherently vulgar about it; perhaps
because our train of thought cannot be very entertaining in itself
when we are so glad to break in upon it with irrelevant nullities.
The same undertone of disgust mingles with other amusing
surprises, as when a dignified personage slips and falls, or some
disguise is thrown off, or those things are mentioned and described
which convention ignores. The novelty and the freedom please, yet
the shock often outlasts the pleasure, and we have cause to wish
we had been stimulated by something which did not involve this
degradation. So, also, the impossibility in plausibility which tickles
the fancy in Irish bulls, and in wild exaggerations, leaves an
uncomfortable impression, a certain aftertaste of foolishness.
The reason will be apparent if we stop to analyze the situation. We
have a prosaic background of common sense and every-day reality;
upon this background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges. But
the thing is a futility. The comic accident falsifies the nature before
us, starts a wrong analogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be
carried out. In a word, we are in the presence of an absurdity; and
man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he
can like hunger or cold. A pinch of either may not be so bad, and
he will endure it merrily enough if you repay him with abundance
of warm victuals; so, too, he will play with all kinds of nonsense
for the sake of laughter and good fellowship and the tickling of his
fancy with a sort of caricature of thought. But the qualm remains,
and the pleasure is never perfect. The same exhilaration might
have come without the falsification, just as repose follows more
swiftly after pleasant than after painful exertions.
Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better. The
best place for absurdity is in the midst of what is already absurd --
then we have the play of fancy without the sense of ineptitude.
Things amuse us in the mouth of a fool that would not amuse us in
that of a gentleman; a fact which shows how little incongruity and
degradation have to do with our pleasure in the comic. In fact,
there is a kind of congruity and method even in fooling. The
incongruous and the degraded displease us even there, as by their
nature they must at all times. The shock which they bring may
sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleasure, by attracting
our attention, or by stimulating passions, such as scorn, or cruelty,
or self-satisfaction (for there is a good deal of malice in our love of
fun); but the incongruity and degradation, as such, always remain
unpleasant. The pleasure comes from the inward rationality and
movement of the fiction, not from its inconsistency with anything
else. There are a great many topsy-turvy worlds possible to our
fancy, into which we like to drop at times. We enjoy the
stimulation and the shaking up of our wits. It is like getting into a
new posture, or hearing a new song.
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited. For
reason, after all, is one convention picked out of a thousand. We
love expansion, not disorder, and when we attain freedom without
incongruity we have a much greater and a much purer delight. The
excellence of wit can dispense with absurdity. For on the same
prosaic background of common sense, a novelty might have
appeared that was not absurd, that stimulated the attention quite as
much as the ridiculous, without so baffling the intelligence. This
purer and more thoroughly delightful amusement comes from what
we call wit.
_Wit._
§ 62. Wit also depends upon transformation and substitution of
ideas. It has been said to consist in quick association by similarity.
The substitution must here be valid, however, and the similarity
real, though unforeseen. Unexpected justness makes wit, as sudden
incongruity makes pleasant foolishness. It is characteristic of wit to
penetrate into hidden depths of things, to pick out there some
telling circumstance or relation, by noting which the whole object
appears in a new and clearer light. Wit often seems malicious
because analysis in discovering common traits and universal
principles assimilates things at the poles of being; it can apply to
cookery the formulas of theology, and find in the human heart a
case of the fulcrum and lever. We commonly keep the departments
of experience distinct; we think that different principles hold in
each and that the dignity of spirit is inconsistent with the
explanation of it by physical analogy, and the meanness of matter
unworthy of being an illustration of moral truths. Love must not be
classed under physical cravings, nor faith under hypnotization.
When, therefore, an original mind overleaps these boundaries, and
recasts its categories, mixing up our old classifications, we feel that
the values of things are also confused. But these depended upon a
deeper relation, upon their response to human needs and
aspirations. All that can be changed by the exercise of intelligence
is our sense of the unity and homogeneity of the world. We may
come to hold an object of thought in less isolated respect, and
another in less hasty derision; but the pleasures we derive from all,
or our total happiness and wonder, will hardly be diminished. For
this reason the malicious or destructive character of intelligence
must not be regarded as fundamental. Wit belittles one thing and
dignifies another; and its comparisons are as often flattering as
ironical.
The same process of mind that we observed in wit gives rise to
those effects we call charming, brilliant, or inspired. When
Shakespeare says,
Come and kiss me, _sweet and twenty,_
Youth's a stuff will not endure,
the fancy of the phrase consists in a happy substitution, a merry
way of saying something both true and tender. And where could
we find a more exquisite charm? So, to take a weightier example,
when St. Augustine is made to say that pagan virtues were
_splendid vices,_ we have -- at least if we catch the full meaning --
a pungent assimilation of contrary things, by force of a powerful
principle; a triumph of theory, the boldness of which can only be
matched by its consistency. In fact, a phrase could not be more
brilliant, or better condense one theology and two civilizations.
The Latin mind is particularly capable of this sort of excellence.
Tacitus alone could furnish a hundred examples. It goes with the
power of satirical and bitter eloquence, a sort of scornful rudeness
of intelligence, that makes for the core of a passion or of a
character, and affixes to it a more or less scandalous label. For in
our analytical zeal it is often possible to condense and abstract too
much. Reality is more fluid and elusive than reason, and has, as it
were, more dimensions than are known even to the latest geometry.
Hence the understanding, when not suffused with some glow of
sympathetic emotion or some touch of mysticism, gives but a dry,
crude image of the world. The quality of wit inspires more
admiration than confidence. It is a merit we should miss little in
any one we love.
The same principle, however, can have more sentimental
embodiments. When our substitutions are brought on by the
excitement of generous emotion, we call wit inspiration. There is
the same finding of new analogies, and likening of disparate things;
there is the same transformation of our apperception. But the
brilliancy is here not only penetrating, but also exalting. For
instance:
Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awakened from the dream of life:
'Tis we that wrapped in stormy visions keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
There is here paradox, and paradox justified by reflection. The poet
analyzes, and analyzes without reserve. The dream, the storm, the
phantoms, and the unprofitableness could easily make a satirical
picture. But the mood is transmuted; the mind takes an upward
flight, with a sense of liberation from the convention it dissolves,
and of freer motion in the vagueness beyond. The disintegration of
our ideal here leads to mysticism, and because of this effort
towards transcendence, the brilliancy becomes sublime.
_Humour._
§ 63. A different mood can give a different direction to the same
processes. The sympathy by which we reproduce the feeling of
another, is always very much opposed to the aesthetic attitude to
which the whole world is merely a stimulus to our sensibility. In
the tragic, we have seen how the sympathetic feeling, by which
suffering is appreciated and shared, has to be overlaid by many
incidental aesthetic pleasures, if the resulting effect is to be on the
whole good. We have also seen how the only way in which the
ridiculous can be kept within the sphere of the aesthetically good is
abstracting it from its relations, and treating it as an independent
and curious stimulus; we should stop laughing and begin to be
annoyed if we tried to make sense out of our absurdity. The less
sympathy we have with men the more exquisite is our enjoyment
of their folly: satirical delight is closely akin to cruelty. Defect and
mishap stimulate our fancy, as blood and tortures excite in us the
passions of the beast of prey. The more this inhuman attitude
yields to sympathy and reason, the less are folly and error capable
of amusing us. It would therefore seem impossible that we should
be pleased by the foibles or absurdities of those we love. And in
fact we never enjoy seeing our own persons in a satirical light, or
any one else for whom we really feel affection. Even in farces, the
hero and heroine are seldom made ridiculous, because that would
jar upon the sympathy with which we are expected to regard them.
Nevertheless, the essence of what we call humour is that amusing
weaknesses should be combined with an amicable humanity.
Whether it be in the way of ingenuity, or oddity, or drollery, the
humorous person must have an absurd side, or be placed in an
absurd situation. Yet this comic aspect, at which we ought to wince,
seems to endear the character all the more. This is a parallel case to
that of tragedy, where the depth of the woe we sympathize with
seems to add to our satisfaction. And the explanation of the
paradox is the same. We do not enjoy the expression of evil, but
only the pleasant excitements that come with it; namely, the
physical stimulus and the expression of good. In tragedy, the
misfortunes help to give the impression of truth, and to bring out
the noble qualities of the hero, but are in themselves depressing, so
much so that over-sensitive people cannot enjoy the beauty of the
representation. So also in humour, the painful suggestions are felt
as such, and need to be overbalanced by agreeable elements. These
come from both directions, from the aesthetic and the sympathetic
reaction. On the one hand there is the sensuous and merely
perceptive stimulation, the novelty, the movement, the vivacity of
the spectacle. On the other hand, there is the luxury of imaginative
sympathy, the mental assimilation of another congenial experience,
the expansion into another life.
The juxtaposition of these two pleasures produces just that tension
and complication in which the humorous consists. We are satirical,
and we are friendly at the same time. The consciousness of the
friendship gives a regretful and tender touch to the satire, and the
sting of the satire makes the friendship a trifle humble and sad.
Don Quixote is mad; he is old, useless, and ridiculous, but he is the
soul of honour, and in all his laughable adventures we follow him
like the ghost of our better selves. We enjoy his discomfitures too
much to wish he had been a perfect Amadis; and we have besides a
shrewd suspicion that he is the only kind of Amadis there can ever
be in this world. At the same time it does us good to see the
courage of his idealism, the ingenuity of his wit, and the simplicity
of his goodness. But how shall we reconcile our sympathy with his
dream and our perception of its absurdity? The situation is
contradictory. We are drawn to some different point of view, from
which the comedy may no longer seem so amusing. As humour
becomes deep and really different from satire, it changes into
pathos, and passes out of the sphere of the comic altogether. The
mischances that were to amuse us as scoffers now grieve us as men,
and the value of the representation depends on the touches of
beauty and seriousness with which it is adorned.
_The grotesque._
§ 64. Something analogous to humour can appear in plastic forms,
when we call it the grotesque. This is an interesting effect
produced by such a transformation of an ideal type as exaggerates
one of its elements or combines it with other types. The real
excellence of this, like that of all fiction, consists in re-creation; in
the formation of a thing which nature has not, but might
conceivably have offered. We call these inventions comic and
grotesque when we are considering their divergence from the
natural rather than their inward possibility. But the latter
constitutes their real charm; and the more we study and develope
them, the better we understand it. The incongruity with the
conventional type than disappears, and what was impossible and
ridiculous at first takes its place among recognized ideals. The
centaur and the satyr are no longer grotesque; the type is accepted.
And the grotesqueness of an individual has essentially the same
nature. If we like the inward harmony, the characteristic balance of
his features, we are able to disengage this individual from the class
into which we were trying to force him; we can forget the
expectation which he was going to disappoint. The ugliness then
disappears, and only the reassertion of the old habit and demand
can make us regard him as in any way extravagant.
What appears as grotesque may be intrinsically inferior or superior
to the normal. That is a question of its abstract material and form.
But until the new object impresses its form on our imagination, so
that we can grasp its unity and proportion, it appears to us as a
jumble and distortion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute,
the object is simply null; it does not exist aesthetically, except by
virtue of materials. But if the confusion is not absolute, and we
have an inkling of the unity and character in the midst of the
strangeness of the form, then we have the grotesque. It is the
half-formed, the perplexed, and the suggestively monstrous.
The analogy to the comic is very close, as we can readily conceive
that it should be. In the comic we have this same juxtaposition of a
new and an old idea, and if the new is not futile and really
inconceivable, it may in time establish itself in the mind, and cease
to be ludicrous. Good wit is novel truth, as the good grotesque is
novel beauty. But there are natural conditions of organization, and
we must not mistake every mutilation for the creation of a new
form. The tendency of nature to establish well-marked species of
animals shows what various combinations are most stable in the
face of physical forces, and there is a fitness also for survival in the
mind, which is determined by the relation of any form to our fixed
method of perception. New things are therefore generally bad
because, as has been well said, they are incapable of becoming old.
A thousand originalities are produced by defect of faculty, for one
that is produced by genius. For in the pursuit of beauty, as in that
of truth, an infinite number of paths lead to failure, and only one to
success.
_The possibility of finite perfection._
§ 65. If these observations have any accuracy, they confirm this
important truth, -- that no aesthetic value is really founded on the
experience or the suggestion of evil. This conclusion will doubtless
seem the more interesting if we think of its possible extension to
the field of ethics and of the implied vindication of the ideal of
moral perfection as something essentially definable and attainable.
But without insisting on an analogy to ethics, which might be
misleading, we may hasten to state the principle which emerges
from our analysis of expression. Expressiveness may be found in
any one thing that suggests another, or draws from association with
that other any of its emotional colouring. There may, therefore, of
course, be an expressiveness of evil; but this expressiveness will
not have any aesthetic value. The description or suggestion of
suffering may have a worth as science or discipline, but can never
in itself enhance any beauty. Tragedy and comedy please in spite
of this expressiveness and not by virtue of it; and except for the
pleasures they give, they have no place among the fine arts. Nor
have they, in such a case, any place in human life at all; unless they
are instruments of some practical purpose and serve to preach a
moral, or achieve a bad notoriety. For ugly things can attract
attention, although they cannot keep it; and the scandal of a new
horror may secure a certain vulgar admiration which follows
whatever is momentarily conspicuous, and which is attained even
by crime. Such admiration, however, has nothing aesthetic about it,
and is only made possible by the bluntness of our sense of beauty.
The effect of the pathetic and comic is therefore never pure; since
the expression of some evil is mixed up with those elements by
which the whole appeals to us. These elements we have seen to be
the truth of the presentation, which involves the pleasures of
recognition and comprehension, the beauty of the medium, and the
concomitant expression of things intrinsically good. To these
sources all the aesthetic value of comic and tragic is due; and the
sympathetic emotion which arises from the spectacle of evil must
never be allowed to overpower these pleasures of contemplation,
else the entire object becomes distasteful and loses its excuse for
being. Too exclusive a relish for the comic and pathetic is
accordingly a sign of bad taste and of comparative insensibility to
beauty.
This situation has generally been appreciated in the practice of the
arts, where effect is perpetually studied; but the greatest care has
not always succeeded in avoiding the dangers of the pathetic, and
history is full of failures due to bombast, caricature, and
unmitigated horror. In all these the effort to be expressive has
transgressed the conditions of pleasing effect. For the creative and
imitative impulse is indiscriminate. It does not consider the
eventual beauty of the effect, but only the blind instinct of
self-expression. Hence an untrained and not naturally sensitive mind
cannot distinguish or produce anything good. This critical
incapacity has always been a cause of failure and a just ground for
ridicule; but it remained for some thinkers of our time -- a time of
little art and much undisciplined production -- to erect this abuse
into a principle and declare that the essence of beauty is to express
the artist and not to delight the world. But the conditions of effect,
and the possibility of pleasing, are the only criterion of what is
capable and worthy of expression. Art exists and has value by its
adaptation to these universal conditions of beauty.
Nothing but the good of life enters into the texture of the beautiful.
What charms us in the comic, what stirs us in the sublime and
touches us in the pathetic, is a glimpse of some good; imperfection
has value only as an incipient perfection. Could the labours and
sufferings of life be reduced, and a better harmony between man
and nature be established, nothing would be lost to the arts; for the
pure and ultimate value of the comic is discovery, of the pathetic,
love, of the sublime, exaltation; and these would still subsist.
Indeed, they would all be increased; and it has ever been,
accordingly, in the happiest and most prosperous moments of
humanity, when the mind and the world were knit into a brief
embrace, that natural beauty has been best perceived, and art has
won its triumphs. But it sometimes happens, in moments less
propitious, that the soul is subdued to what it works in, and loses
its power of idealization and hope. By a pathetic and superstitious
self-depreciation, we then punish ourselves for the imperfection of
nature. Awed by the magnitude of a reality that we can no longer
conceive as free from evil, we try to assert that its evil also is a
good; and we poison the very essence of the good to make its
extension universal. We confuse the causal connexion of those
things in nature which we call good or evil by an adventitious
denomination with the logical opposition between good and evil
themselves; because one generation makes room for another, we
say death is necessary to life; and because the causes of sorrow and
joy are so mingled in this world, we cannot conceive how, in a
better world, they might be disentangled.
This incapacity of the imagination to reconstruct the conditions of
life and build the frame of things nearer to the heart's desire is
dangerous to a steady loyalty to what is noble and fine. We
surrender ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation,
without standard or goal; and calling every vexatious apparition by
the name of beauty, we become incapable of discriminating its
excellence or feeling its value. We need to clarify our ideals, and
enliven our vision of perfection. No atheism is so terrible as the
absence of an ultimate ideal, nor could any failure of power be
more contrary to human nature than the failure of moral
imagination, or more incompatible with healthy life. For we have
faculties, and habits, and impulses. These are the basis of our
demands. And these demands, although variable, constitute an
ever-present intrinsic standard of value by which we feel and judge.
The ideal is immanent in them; for the ideal means that
environment in which our faculties would find their freest
employment, and their most congenial world. Perfection would be
nothing but life under those conditions. Accordingly our
consciousness of the ideal becomes distinct in proportion as we
advance in virtue and in proportion to the vigour and definiteness
with which our faculties work. When the vital harmony is
complete, when the _act_ is _pure,_ faith in perfection passes into
vision. That man is unhappy indeed, who in all his life has had no
glimpse of perfection, who in the ecstasy of love, or in the delight
of contemplation, has never been able to say: It is attained. Such
moments of inspiration are the source of the arts, which have no
higher function than to renew them.
A work of art is indeed a monument to such a moment, the
memorial to such a vision; and its charm varies with its power of
recalling us from the distractions of common life to the joy of a
more natural and perfect activity.
_The stability of the ideal._
§ 66. The perfection thus revealed is relative to our nature and
faculties; if it were not, it could have no value for us. It is revealed
to us in brief moments, but it is not for that reason an unstable or
fantastic thing. Human attention inevitably flickers; we survey
things in succession, and our acts of synthesis and our realization
of fact are only occasional. This is the tenure of all our possessions;
we are not uninterruptedly conscious of ourselves, our physical
environment, our ruling passions, or our deepest conviction. What
wonder, then, that we are not constantly conscious of that
perfection which is the implicit ideal of all our preferences and
desires? We view it only in parts, as passion or perception
successively directs our attention to its various elements. Some of
us never try to conceive it in its totality. Yet our whole life is an act
of worship to this unknown divinity; every heartfelt prayer is
offered before one or another of its images.
This ideal of perfection varies, indeed, but only with the variations
of our nature of which it is the counterpart and entelechy. There is
perhaps no more frivolous notion than that to which Schopenhauer
has given a new currency, that a good, once attained, loses all its
value. The instability of our attention, the need of rest and repair in
our organs, makes a round of objects necessary to our minds; but
we turn from a beautiful thing, as from a truth or a friend, only to
return incessantly, and with increasing appreciation. Nor do we
lose all the benefit of our achievements in the intervals between
our vivid realizations of what we have gained. The tone of the
mind is permanently raised; and we live with that general sense of
steadfastness and resource which is perhaps the kernel of
happiness. Knowledge, affection, religion, and beauty are not less
constant influences in a man's life because his consciousness of
them is intermittent. Even when absent, they fill the chambers of
the mind with a kind of fragrance. They have a continual efficacy,
as well as a perennial worth.
There are, indeed, other objects of desire that if attained leave
nothing but restlessness and dissatisfaction behind them. These are
the objects pursued by fools. That such objects ever attract us is a
proof of the disorganization of our nature, which drives us in
contrary directions and is at war with itself. If we had attained
anything like steadiness of thought or fixity of character, if we
knew ourselves, we should know also our inalienable satisfactions.
To say that all goods become worthless in possession is either a
piece of superficial satire that intentionally denies the normal in
order to make the abnormal seem more shocking, or else it is a
confession of frivolity, a confession that, as an idiot never learns to
distinguish reality amid the phantasms of his brain, so we have
never learned to distinguish true goods amid our extravagances of
whim and passion. That true goods exist is nevertheless a fact of
moral experience. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"; a great
affection, a clear thought, a profound and well-tried faith, are
eternal possessions. And this is not merely a fact, to be asserted
upon the authority of those who know it by experience. It is a
psychological necessity. While we retain the same senses, we must
get the same impressions from the same objects; while we keep our
instincts and passions, we must pursue the same goods; while we
hare the same powers of imagination, we must experience the same
delight in their exercise. Age brings about, of course, variation in
all these particulars, and the susceptibility of two individuals is
never exactly similar. But the eventual decay of our personal
energies does not destroy the natural value of objects, so long as
the same will embodies itself in other minds, and human nature
subsists in the world. The sun is not now unreal because each one
of us in succession, and all of us in the end, must close our eyes
upon it; and yet the sun exists for us only because we perceive it.
The ideal has the same conditions of being, but has this advantage
over the sun, that we cannot know if its light is ever destined to fail
us.
There is then a broad foundation of identity in our nature, by virtue
of which we live in a common world, and have an art and a
religion in common. That the ideal should be constant within these
limits is as inevitable as that it should vary beyond them. And so
long as we exist and recognize ourselves individually as persons or
collectively as human, we must recognize also our immanent ideal,
the realization of which would constitute perfection for us. That
ideal cannot be destroyed except in proportion as we ourselves
perish. An absolute perfection, independent of human nature and
its variations, may interest the metaphysician; but the artist and the
man will be satisfied with a perfection that is inseparable from the
consciousness of mankind, since it is at once the natural vision of
the imagination, and the rational goal of the will.
_Conclusion._
§ 67. We have now studied the sense of beauty in what seem to be
its fundamental manifestations, and in some of the more striking
complications which it undergoes. In surveying so broad a field we
stand in need of some classification and subdivision; and we have
chosen the familiar one of matter, form, and expression, as least
likely to lead us into needless artificiality. But artificiality there
must always be in the discursive description of anything given in
consciousness. Psychology attempts what is perhaps impossible,
namely, the anatomy of life. Mind is a fluid; the lights and
shadows that flicker through it have no real boundaries, and no
possibility of permanence. Our whole classification of mental facts
is borrowed from the physical conditions or expressions of them.
The very senses are distinguished because of the readiness with
which we can isolate their outer organs. Ideas can be identified
only by identifying their objects. Feelings are recognized by their
outer expression, and when we try to recall an emotion, we must
do so by recalling the circumstances in which it occurred.
In distinguishing, then, in our sense of beauty, an appreciation of
sensible material, one of abstract form, and another of associated
values, we have been merely following the established method of
psychology, the only one by which it is possible to analyze the
mind. We have distinguished the elements of the object, and
treated the feeling as if it were composed of corresponding parts.
The worlds of nature and fancy, which are the object of aesthetic
feeling, can be divided into parts in space and time. We can then
distinguish the material of things from the various forms it may
successively assume; we can distinguish, also, the earlier and the
later impressions made by the same object; and we can ascertain
the coexistence of one impression with another, or with the
memory of others. But aesthetic feeling itself has no parts, and this
physiology of its causes is not a description of its proper nature.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what
it means can never be said. By appealing to experiment and
memory we can show that this feeling varies as certain things vary
in the objective conditions; that it varies with the frequency, for
instance, with which a form has been presented, or with the
associates which that form has had in the past. This will justify a
description of the feeling as composed of the various contributions
of these objects. But the feeling itself knows nothing of
composition nor contributions. It is an affection of the soul, a
consciousness of joy and security, a pang, a dream, a pure pleasure.
It suffuses an object without telling why; nor has it any need to ask
the question. It justifies itself and the vision it gilds; nor is there
any meaning in seeking for a cause of it, in this inward sense.
Beauty exists for the same reason that the object which is beautiful
exists, or the world in which that object lies, or we that look upon
both. It is an experience: there is nothing more to say about it.
Indeed, if we look at things teleologically, and as they ultimately
justify themselves to the heart, beauty is of all things what least
calls for explanation. For matter and space and time and principles
of reason and of evolution, all are ultimately brute, unaccountable
data. We may describe what actually is, but it might have been
otherwise, and the mystery of its being is as baffling and dark as
ever.
But we, -- the minds that ask all questions and judge of the validity
of all answers, -- we are not ourselves independent of this world in
which we live. We sprang from it, and our relations in it determine
all our instincts and satisfactions. This final questioning and sense
of mystery is an unsatisfied craving which nature has her way of
stilling. Now we only ask for reasons when we are surprised. If we
had no expectations we should have no surprises. And what gives
us expectation is the spontaneous direction of our thought,
determined by the structure of our brain and the effects of our
experience. If our spontaneous thoughts came to run in harmony
with the course of nature, if our expectations were then continually
fulfilled, the sense of mystery would vanish. We should be
incapable of asking why the world existed or had such a nature,
just as we are now little inclined to ask why anything is right, but
mightily disinclined to give up asking why anything is wrong.
This satisfaction of our reason, due to the harmony between our
nature and our experience, is partially realized already. The sense
of beauty is its realization. When our senses and imagination find
what they crave, when the world so shapes itself or so moulds the
mind that the correspondence between them is perfect, then
perception is pleasure, and existence needs no apology. The duality
which is the condition of conflict disappears. There is no inward
standard different from the outward fact with which that outward
fact may be compared. A unification of this kind is the goal of our
intelligence and of our affection, quite as much as of our aesthetic
sense; but we have in those departments fewer examples of success.
In the heat of speculation or of love there may come moments of
equal perfection, but they are unstable. The reason and the heart
remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in some
supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For
the eye is quick, and seems to have been more docile to the
education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able
sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to be
the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its
possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate
justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral
dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity
between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in
the supremacy of the good.
FOOTNOTES
1 Schopenhauer, indeed, who makes much of it, was a good critic,
but his psychology suffered much from the pessimistic generalities
of his system. It concerned him to show that the will was bad, and,
as he felt beauty to be a good if not a holy thing, he hastened to
convince himself that it came from the suppression of the will. But
even in his system this suppression is only relative. The desire of
individual objects, indeed, is absent in the perception of beauty,
but there is still present that initial love of the general type and
principles of things which is the first illusion of the absolute, and
drives it on to the fatal experiment of creation. So that, apart from
Schopenhauer's mythology, we have even in him the recognition
that beauty gives satisfaction to some dim and underlying demand
of our nature, just as particular objects give more special and
momentary pleasures to our individualized wills. His psychology
was, however, far too vague and general to undertake an analysis
of those mysterious feelings.
2 Cf. Stendhal, _De L'Amour, passim._
3 This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the
metaphysical value of the idea of space. Suffice it to point out that
in human experience serviceable knowledge of our environment is
to be had only in spatial symbols, and, for whatever reason or
accident, this is the language which the mind must speak if it is to
advance in clearness and efficiency.
4 The discussion is limited in this chapter to visible form, audible
form is probably capable of a parallel treatment, but requires
studies too technical for this place.
5 The relation to stability also makes us sensitive to certain kinds
of symmetry; but this is an adventitious consideration with which
we are not concerned.
6 Cf. Fechner, _Vorschule der Aesthetik,_ Erster Theil, S. 73, a
passage by which the following classification of forms was first
suggested.
7 See Introduction, p. 12.
8 The contention of Burke that the beautiful is small is due to an
arbitrary definition. By beautiful he means pretty and charming;
agreeable as opposed to impressive. He only exaggerates the then
usual opposition of the beautiful to the sublime.
9 When we speak of things definite in themselves, we of course
mean things made definite by some human act of definition. The
senses are instruments that define and differentiate sensation; and
the result of one operation is that definite object upon which the
next operation is performed. The memory, for example, classifies
in time what the senses may have classified in space. We are
nowhere concerned with objects other than objects of human
experience, and the epithets, definite and indefinite, refer
necessarily to their relation to our various categories of perception
and comprehension.
10 In the Aegina marbles the wounded and dying warriors still
wear this Buddha-like expression: their bodies, although
conventional, show a great progress in observation, compared with
the impossible Athena in the centre with her sacred feet in
Egyptian profile and her owl-like visage.
11 Symposium of Xenophon, V.
12 It is a superstition to suppose that a refined taste would
necessarily find the actual and useful to be the perfect; to conceal
structure is as legitimate as to emphasize it, and for the name
reason. We emphasize in the direction of abstract beauty, in the
direction of absolute pleasure; and we conceal or eliminate in the
same direction. The most exquisite Greek taste, for instance,
preferred to drape the lower part of the female figure, as in the
Venus of Milo; also in men to shave the hair of the face and body,
in order to maintain the purity and strength of the lines. In the one
case we conceal structure, in the other we reveal it, modifying
nature into greater sympathy with our faculties of perception. For,
after all, it must be remembered that beauty, or pleasure to be
given to the eye, is not a guiding principle in the world of nature or
in that of the practical arts. The beauty is in nature a result of the
functional adaptation of our senses and imagination to the
mechanical products of our environment. This adaptation is never
complete, and there is, accordingly, room for the fine arts, in which
beauty is a result of the intentional adaptation of mechanical forms
to the functions which our senses and imagination already have
acquired. This watchful subservience to our aesthetic demands is
the essence of fine art. Nature is the basis, but man is the goal.
13 Not only are words untranslatable when the exact object has no
name in another language, as "home" or "mon ami," but even when
the object is the same, the attitude toward it, incorporated in one
word, cannot be rendered by another. Thus, to my sense, "bread" is
as inadequate a translation of the human intensity of the Spanish
"pan" as "Dios" is of the awful mystery of the English "God." This
latter word does not designate an object at all, but a sentiment, a
psychosis, not to say a whole chapter of religious history. English
is remarkable for the intensity and variety of the colour of its
words. No language, I believe, has so many words specifically
poetic.
14 Curiously enough, common speech here reverses our use of
terms, because it looks at the matter from the practical instead of
from the aesthetic point of view, regarding (very unpsychologically)
the thought as the source of the image, not the image as the
source of the thought. People call the words the expression
of the thought: whereas for the observer, the hearer (and generally
for the speaker, too), the words are the datum and the thought is
their expressiveness -- that which they suggest.
INDEX
Achilles, 179, 187.
Aesthetic feeling, its importance, 1.
speculation, causes of its neglect, 2.
theory, its uses, 6, 7.
Aesthetics, Use of the word, 15.
Angels, 55, 182.
Apperception, 96 _et seq._
Arabic inscriptions as ornament, 195.
Architecture, Effects of Gothic, 165, 166.
governed by use, 161, 162.
Aristotelian forms, 156.
Aristotle, 174, 175, 288.
Associative process, 198 _et seq._
Augustine, Saint, quoted, 252.
Beauty a value, 14 _et seq._
as felt is indescribable, 267, 268.
a justification of things, 268, 269.
defined, 49 _et seq._
verbal definitions quoted, 14.
Beethoven, 43.
Breathing related to the sense of beauty, 56.
Burke, 124, note.
Byron, quoted, 136.
Byzantine architecture, 108, 109.
Calderon, 174.
Centaurs, 183, 256.
Character as an aesthetic form, 176 _et seq._
Characters, Ideal, 180 _et seq._
Charles V.'s palace at the Alhambra, 44.
Christ, the various ideas of his nature, 189.
Circle, its aesthetic quality, 89.
Classicism, French and English, 109.
Colonnades, 108.
Colour, 72 _et seq._
its analogy to other sensations, 74, 75.
possibility of an abstract art of colour, 75.
Comic, The, 245 _et seq._
Conscience, its representative character, 33, 34.
Cost as an element of effect, 211 _et seq._
Couplet, The, 108.
Criticism, Use of the word, 15.
Definite and indefinite, meaning of the terms, 138, note.
Degradation not what pleases in the comic, 247 _et seq._
Democracy, aesthetics of it, 109
Descartes, 16, 183.
Disinterestedness not the differentia of aesthetic pleasure,
37 _et seq._
Don Quixote, 179, 255.
Economy and fitness, 214 _et seq._
Emerson, 144.
Epicurean esthetics, 10, 11.
sublime, The, 241, 243.
Escurial, The, 95, 210.
Ethos, 174, 175.
Evil, life without it aesthetic, 29, 30.
in the second term of expression, 221 _et seq._
conventional use of the word, 223.
an occasion of the sublime, 235 _et seq._
excluded from the beautiful, 260, 261.
Evolution, its possible tendency to eliminate imagination, 26
Exclusiveness a sign of aesthetic vigour, 44.
Experience superior to theory in aesthetics, 11, 12.
Expression defined, 192 _et seq._
of feeling in another, 202, 203.
of practical values, 208 _et seq._
Expressiveness, Use of the word, 197.
Fechner, 97.
Form, There is a beauty of, 82 _et seq._
the unity of a manifold, 95 _et seq._
Functions of the mind may all contribute to the sense of beauty,
53 _et seq._
Geometrical figures, 88 _et seq._
God, the idea of him in tradition and in metaphysics, 188, 189.
Gods, development of their ideal characters, 185 _et seq._
Goethe, 9, 170, 179.
Grammar, its analogy to metaphysics, 169.
Gretchen, 179.
Grotesque, The, 256 _et seq._
Hamlet, 179.
Happiness and aesthetic interest, 63, 65.
Health a condition of aesthetic life, 54.
Hedonism opposed by the moral sense, 23, 24.
History an imaginative thing, 141, 142.
Home as a social and as an aesthetic idea, 64.
Homer, 171.
his aesthetic quality, 205, 206.
his epithets, 179.
Horace, quoted, 172.
Humour, 253 _et seq._
Ideals are modified averages, 121 _et seq._
immanent in human nature, 262.
stable, 263 _et seq._
Imagination has a universal creative function, 190, 191.
and sense alternately active, 55, 56.
Impression distinguished from expression, 84, 85.
Impressionism in painting, 134, 136.
incongruity not what pleases in the comic, 247 _et seq._
Indeterminate organizational _et seq._
Infinite beauty, the idea impossible, 148 _et seq._
Inspiration, 252, 253.
Kalokagathia, 31.
Kant, 105.
Keats, quoted, 67, 105, 181, 264.
King Lear, 229.
Kipling, R., quoted, 68.
Landscape, 133 _et seq._
with figures, 135, 136.
Liberation of self, 233 _et seq._
Love, influence of the passion, 56 _et seq._
Lowell, J. R., quoted, 148.
Lower senses, 65 _et seq._
Lucretius, quoted, 172.
on the sublime, 236.
Maps, 209, 210.
Material beauty most easily appreciated, 78 _et seq._
its effect the fundamental one, 78.
Materials of beauty surveyed, 76 _et seq._
Methods in aesthetics, 5.
Michael Angelo, 182.
Miser's fallacy, its parallel in morals and aesthetics, 31, 32.
Modern languages inferior to the ancient, 173, 174.
Molière, 174; quoted, 20.
Monarchy, its imaginative value, 34, 35.
Moral and aesthetic values, 23 _et seq._
the authority of morals over aesthetics, 218 _et seq._
Morality and utility jealous of art, 216, 217.
Multiplicity in uniformity, 97 _et seq._
its defects, 106 _et seq._
Musset, Alfred de, quoted, 170, 226.
Mysticism in aesthetics, 126 _et seq._
Naturalism, the ground of its value, 21.
Nature, its organization the source of apperceptive forms,
152 _et seq._
the love of it among the ancients, 137, 138.
New York, the plan of the streets, 95.
Nouns, idea of a language without them, 171.
Objectification the differentia of aesthetic pleasure, 44 _et seq._
Ornament and form, 63 _et seq._
Othello, 237.
Ovid, quoted, 149.
Pantheism, its contradictions, 242, 243.
Perception, the psychological theory of it, 45 _et seq._
Perfection, illusion of infinite, 146 _et seq._
possibility of finite, 258 _et seq._
Physical pleasure distinguished from aesthetic, 35 _et seq._
Physiology of the perception of form, 85 _et seq._
Picturesqueness contrasted with symmetry, 92.
Platonic ideas useless in explaining types, 117, 118.
Platonic intuitions, their nature and value, 8 _et seq._
Platonists, 159.
Plot, The, 174 _et seq._
Preference ultimately irrational, 18 _et seq._
necessary to value, 17, 18.
Principles consecrated aesthetically, 31 _et seq._
Purity, The aesthetic principle of, 70 _et seq._
Rationality, the source of its value, 19, 20.
Religious characters, their truth, 188.
imagination, 185 _et seq._
Rhyme, 173, 174.
Romanticism, 150.
Schopenhauer, 263.
criticised, 37,
note, on music, 69.
Scientific attitude in criticism opposed to the aesthetic, 20, 21.
Sculpture, its development, 153, 154.
Self not a primary object of interest, 39, 40.
Sensuous beauty of fundamental importance, 80, 81.
Sex, its relation to aesthetic life, 56 _et seq._
Shakespeare, 151, 174, 175;
quoted, 51, 114, 229, 237, 251.
Shelley quoted, 12, 244, 253.
Sight, its primacy in perception, 73, 74.
Size related to beauty, 123, 124.
Sky, The, its expressiveness, 8.
Social interests and their aesthetic influence, 62 _et seq._
Socrates, his utilitarian aesthetics, 157.
Sonnet, The, 173.
Sound, 68 _et seq._
Space, its metaphysical value, 66, note.
Stars, the effect analyzed, 100 _et seq._
Stendhal, 61.
Stoic Sublime, The, 241.
Straight lines, 89, 90.
Subjectivity of aesthetic values, 3,4.
Sublime, The, its independence of the expression of evil,
239 _et seq._
Sublimity, 233 _et seq._
Sybaris, 216.
Symbolists, 144.
Symmetry, 91 _et seq._
a principle of individuation, 93.
limits of its application, 95.
Syntactical form, 171 _et seq._
Tacitus, 173, 252.
Terms, the first and second terms in expression defined, 195.
influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of evil,
226 _et seq._
Theory a method of apperception, 138 _et seq._
Tragedy mitigated by beauty of form and the expression of good,
228, 229.
mitigated by the diversity of evils, 229.
mixed with comedy, 224, 225, 228.
consists in treatment not in subject, 224.
Translation necessarily inadequate, 168.
Truth, grounds of its value, 22, 23.
Truth, mixture of the expression of truth with that of evil,
228 _et seq._
Types, their origin, 116 _et seq._
their value and that of examples, 112 _et seq._
Ugly, The, not a cause of pain, 25.
Universality not the differentia of aesthetic pleasure, 40 _et seq._
Utility the principle of organization in nature, 155 _et seq._
its relation to beauty, 157 _et seq._
the principle of organization in the arts, 160 _et seq._
Value, aesthetic value in the second term of expression, 205 _et
seq._
all in one sense aesthetic, 28 _et seq._
physical, practical, and negative transformed into aesthetic,
201 _et seq._
Venus of Milo, 165, note.
Virgin Mary, The, 189, 190.
Whitman, 112.
Wit, 250 _et seq._
Words, 167 _et seq._
Wordsworth quoted, 105.
Work and play, 25 _et seq._
Xenophon quoted, 123.
his _Symposium,_ 157.