VII

The phenomenon of our aesthetic reaction on the so-called

painful experiences of the drama has then been discussed at

length and accounted for. There is an undoubted emotional

experience of great intensity; and yet that emotion turns

out to be not the emotion IN the drama, but rather the

emotion FROM the drama,--a unique independent emotion of

tension, otherwise a form of the characteristic aesthetic

emotion with which we have been before engaged. The playwright

who scornfully rejects the spectator supposed to be aesthetic,

ideally contemplative and emotionally indifferent, is

vindicated. There must be a vivid emotional effect, but it

is the spectator's very own, and not a copy of the hero's

emotion, because it is the product of the essential form of

the drama itself, the confrontation of forces.

Secondly, that confrontation of forces has revealed itself

as indeed essential. This is not the time-honored view of

tragedy as collision, which has been arrived at simply by

observing that great tragic dramas are mostly collisions,

making the drama a picture thereof, but not explaining why

it must be such. I have tried, on the contrary, to show that confrontation is a necessary product of the bare form of

dramatic representation,--two people face to face. But if

this bare form or scheme of confrontation is understood and

interpreted as profoundly as possible, then all the other characteristics of the tragic drama are seen to flow from it;

and thus for the first time to be really explained by being

accounted for. The tragic drama not only is, but must be,

collision, because confrontation, understood as richly as

possible, must be collision. It must be "inevitable," and

it must have movement, because only so is the confrontation

reinforced.

In brief, others have said that the drama, or tragedy, is

conflict, the perfect opposition of two forces. We should

rather say that the drama is first of all picture, living

representation of colloquy; as such, it is balance,

confrontation; and confrontation to its ideal degree of

intensity is conflict. No drama can dispense with picture;

and so no drama is free from the obligation to add unto itself

these other qualities also. The acting play is the play of

confrontations.

VIII

THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS

VIII

THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS

I

THE Idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of

Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in

variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; to-day we hold

that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty

of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing

is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its

power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable;

and that the definition of beauty should have been extended

to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive,

or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience,

all that emotionally stirs us in representation. But while

this view is a natural development, it is not of necessity

unassailable; and it is open to question whether the addition

of an independent element of expression to the older definition

of beauty can be justified by its consequences for art.

Such an inquiry, however, cannot stop with the relation of the

deeper meanings of modern art to the conception of beauty. It

must go further and find out what elements, the sensuous form

or the ideas that are bound up with it, in a work of art, of

the classical as well as of the idealistic type, really

constitute its aesthetic value. What is it that makes the

beauty of the "Venus of Milo"? Is it the pose and the modeling,

or the idea of the eternal feminine that it expresses to us?

What is it that makes the beauty of St. Mark's or of Giotto's

tower? the relation of the lines and masses or the sacred

significance of the edifices they go to form? What is it that

makes the beauty of the Ninth Symphony? the perfection of the

melodic sequence, or the Hymn of Joy, the message from the

Infinite which they are meant to utter?

The antithesis between these two points of view is, of course,

not the same as that other antithesis between "art for art's

sake" and art in the light of its moral meanings and effects.

What we now call romantic or expressive art can certainly be

made the more fruitful in moral suggestions; but this fact

bears not at all on the question of what belongs fundamentally

to the nature of beauty. We know, moreover, that on this

matter the camps of the formalists and the romanticists are

divided. The Greeks, the lovers of formal beauty, were so

alive to the moral effects of art that their theories were in

danger of being quite overwhelmed by this view. On the other

hand, the lovers of ideas in art, the natural enemies, as one

would have thought, of art for art's sake, have been most often

impatient of any consideration of its moral elements or effects.

This second question, then, of art as pleasure or as moral

influence can be once for all excluded from the discussion. So

far as yet appears, the issue is between form and expression.

There is, perhaps, some point of common agreement from which

to survey and distinguish more exactly these two diverging

tendencies. Such a coign of vantage is offered by the nature

of the aesthetic attitude,--for since Kant there has been among

aestheticians no essential difference of opinion on this point.

The aesthetic attitude, all agree, is disinterested. We care

for the image or appearance of the object, for the way its

form affects us, and not for the actual existence of the object

itself. If I delight aesthetically in a cluster of grapes, I

do not want to eat them, but only to enjoy their image, and my

feeling of pleasure, as aesthetic, would not be changed if

before me were only a mirage, an hallucination, or a picture.

It is just the pleasure in perception that appeals to me,--

therein both schools agree,--and the only matter at issue is

the question of what this disinterested pleasure of perception

includes. Is that pleasure bound up with the mechanisms of

perception itself, or does it come from the end of the process

and the ease with which it is reached,--from the IDEA, in the

contemplation of which we delight?

One school asserts that the real pleasure in perception comes

only from form. The given object is beautiful, through its

original qualities of line, color, or sound, which strike the

special senses in a way that is pleasing to them; and through

its combinations of these qualities, which affect the whole

human organism in a directly pleasurable way. What is outside

of the given object of art--is meant, suggested, or recalled

by it--belongs, it is said, to absolutely unaesthetic processes,

as is shown by the fact that many things, which we are the first

to acknowledge as ugly, are the exciting cause of great thoughts

and delightful associations. The opposed school maintains that

the meanings of a work of art are all that it exists for. The

presentation of an idea, by whatever sensuous means, so only

that they be transparent, and the joy of the soul in contemplating

this idea, must be the object and the end of art. The later

idealists admit value to the form only in so far a it may

express, convey, symbolize, or suggest the content, whether as

pure idea, or as a shadowing forth of the Divine World-Meaning.

These theories are certainly intelligible; but the results of

applying them with logical consistency are rather terrifying.

Andrew Lang says somewhere that the logical consequence of the

formal theory of art in all its nakedness would make Tennyson

the youth, Swinburne, and Edgar Poe the greatest poets of the

world, and those delicious effusions of Edward Lear, "The

Jumblies" and "On the Coast of Coromandel," masterpieces. Yet

if we allow the idealists to pass sentence, what shall become

of our treasures in "Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln," or

"La Nuit de Decembre"? The results of such a judgment day

would be even more appalling to the true lover of poetry.

Moreover, if the idea, the end of art, need not reside in the

object itself, but may arise therefrom by subtle suggestion,

the complications of poetry or painting are unnecessary. A

geometric figure may remind us of the constitution of the

world of space, a sundial, of the transitoriness of human

existence, and with a "chorus-ending from Euripedes," the whole

sweep of the cosmic meanings is upon us. In the words of Fra

Lippo Lippi:--

"Why, for this,

What need of art at all? A skull and bones,

Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or what's best,

A bell to chime the hours with, does as well."