IV

Up to this point, however, we have considered only the relation

between purely formal beauty and the various shades of emotional

response to it; now we may turn to the original question which

we set ourselves, how to provide, in our definition of beauty,

for the presence of ideas in the work of art. No one will deny

that the full aesthetic experience cannot be dismissed with the

treatment of formal beauty; and, although Professor Santayana's

"beauty in the second term" may be rejected as a pure individual,

arbitrary, interested, and hence unaesthetic element, the

explicit content of a work of art cannot be ignored. The

suggested ideas aroused by an old rose garden may be no addition

to its beauty, but the same cannot be said of the great ideas

contained directly in Shakespeare's poetry. Yet great ideas

alone do not make great art, else we must count Aristotle and

Spinoza and Kant great poets too. Must we then be satisfied to

rest in the dualism of those who maintain that great creations

of art are the expression of great truths under the laws of

poetic form? Is the aesthetic expression indeed the recognition

of truth plus the feeling of beauty of form, or is it a fusion

of these into a third undivided pulse of aesthetic emotion? Is

there no way of overcoming, for those arts which do express

ideas, this dualism of form and content in our theory of the

beautiful?

Let us analyze a little more closely this notion of the content.

Music and architecture cannot properly be said to have any

content, although they have a meaning according to their uses,

like a funeral dirge and a hymn of joy, a prison and a temple.

But this meaning is extraneous. It is given by the work itself

only in so far as the form induces the emotion which belongs to

the idea,--as the dirge, sadness; the temple, awe. The idea of

burial or of worship is nowhere to be found in the work of art.

In the hierarchy of arts, paining and sculpture show the first

trace of a content. This content, however, is at once seen to

be susceptible of farther analysis. The "Sistine Madonna"

pictures a mother and child worshiped, which may be called the

subject,--but this does not exhaust the content. The real

meaning of the picture, to which may be given the name of THEME,

is the divine element in maternal love. The subjects of

Donatello's "John the Baptist" and "Saint George," of Michael

Angelo's "David" and "Moses," can be described only as men of

Different types in different attitudes; their themes, however,

are moral ideas, expressing the moral significance of each

personality. The subject of "The Angelus" is given in its

name; its theme is humble piety. From the infinite number of

possible examples one more will suffice,--the well-known "War"

by Franz Stuck, in the Neue Pinacothek,--the subject a youth,

under a lurid sky, trampling under his horse's feet the bodies

of the slain. The theme is again a moral idea,--the horrors of

war.

If we now ask whether we can attribute beauty to the ideas of

painting and sculpture, a negative answer is at once suggested.

It is manifestly impossible to establish an order of aesthetic

excellence between these subjects. The idea of peasants telling

their beads is more beautiful than the idea of a ruthless

destroyer only in so far as it is morally higher; and this

distinction, therefore, has reference to the theme and not to

the subject. How far, however, moral and aesthetic excellence

are coincident is a question for which we are not yet ready.

At this point we care only to point out that the mere idea of

a picture is neither aesthetic nor the reverse.

But, it may be objected, is not our first thought in stopping

before a picture like the "War," "What a wonderful idea"? It

is the idea and not the form which strikes us, it may be said,

even though we may be quite unimpressed by the value of its

moral significance. Nevertheless, this view of our own mental

processes may be held to the illusory. What really strikes us

is the UNITY of the conception. The lurid sky, the dark, livid

faces of the dead--the whole color scheme, in short, is so

contrived as to impress directly, as previously explained,

without the medium of an idea, with that particular tinge of

emotional tone which ought to be also the accompaniment of the

idea of the horrors of war. The emotion is thus the enveloping

unity which binds the subject and theme and the pictorial form

together. In this sense, when we say, "What a wonderful idea!"

we really mean, what a wonderful fitness of form to idea,--

which is the same as saying, what a wonderful form, or more

technically, what a wonderful unity. That part of the effect

of beauty in a picture which is due to the idea is thus the

fundamental but merely abstract element of unity, contributing

to the complex aesthetic state only the simplest condition.

The case of literature presents an entirely new problem, for

the material of literature is itself, first of all, idea.

Literature deals with words, and words exist only by virtue of

their meanings. Even the sound of words is of importance

primarily for the additional meanings which it suggests, as the

word liquid first means a fluid substance, and then by its

sound suggests ease and smoothness, and only last of all is

noted as melodious. Thus since meanings, ideas, are the

material of literature, we can speak of the beauty of ideas

in literature only by an artificial sundering of elements that

are properly in fusion. Yet as we may speak of a motive or

musical idea and its working out, although strictly the idea

involves its own working out, so we may conceive of the central

thought of a literary work, and of its development. But the

relation here is not of content and form, like the content and

form of a picture; rather that of concentrated and diluted

form. So, too, as in music, we may distinguish form and

structure. Structure is offered to the intellect--it clears

and vivifies understanding; it is not felt, it is perceived.

Anything which is made up of parts--beginning, middle, and end,

climax and resolution--possesses structure. But form in the

intimate sense is the intrinsic, inevitable relation of cause

and effect; in this sense, it is seen to be truly content also.

In literature, as to structure, it is the relation of parts:

as to form, it is the succession of events, the movement,

combination and resolution of separate ideas and emotions,

which give us aesthetic pleasure or the reverse. As action

must follow excitement, or despair satiety, so the relation

of parts, the order of presentation, must be adapted to mutual

reinforcement. Thus the porter's scene in "Macbeth" is related

to the neighboring scenes, as De Quincey has shown in his famous

essay. And just as in music the feeling of "rightness" ensues

when the awaited note slips into place, so the feeling of

"rightness" comes when the inevitable consequences follow the

premise of a plot.

The particular separate ideas of such a development partake of

beauty, then, in so far as they minister to the movement of the

whole, just as the separate lines in a swaying, swirling robe

of one of Botticelli's women minister to the whole conception.

The catastrophe, in other words, must be as inevitably related

to the sequence of ideas as the final chords of a symphony to

the sequence of notes. The attitude of mind with which we

welcome it is the same, whether on the plane of the responses

of the psychological organism or of the ideal understanding.

V

But before finally relegating the idea to its place in the

aesthetic scheme, we must ask whether the specific emotional

content can claim independent aesthetic value; for we can

scarcely ignore the fact that almost all naive response to

literature, and indeed to all forms of art, is, or is believed

to be, specifically emotional. Maupassant, in his introduction

to "Pierre et Jean," distinguishes thus between the demand of

the critic--"Make me something fine according to your temperament,"

--and the cry of the public--"Move me, terrify me, make we weep!"

And yet to the assertion of common sense that the desire of the

naive enjoyer of art is definite emotional excitement, we may

venture to oppose a negative. The average person who weeps at

the theatre, or over a novel, would no doubt repudiate the

suggestion that it is not primarily the emotion of terror, or

pity, that he feels. But a closer interpretation shows that

it is almost impossible to disengage, in such an experience, the

particular emotions. What is felt is rather pleasurable excitement,

pleasure raised to the pitch of exaltation, with a fringe of

emotional association. The notion of specific emotions is

illusory in the same sense that our notion of pleasure from

specific emotions in listening to music is illusory. The ordinary

descriptions of music are all couched in emotional or even

ideational terms,--from the musical adventures of "Charles

Auchester" down,--and yet we know, as Gurney says, that when, in

listening to music, we think we are yearning after the unutterable,

we are really yearning after the next note; and when we think it

is the yearning that gives us pleasure, it is really the triumphant

acceptance of the melodic rightness of that next note. So the

much-discussed Katharsis, or emotion of Tragedy, is not the

experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but

rather pleasure in the experience of ideas, tinged with emotion,

which belong to each other with precisely that musical rightness.

Katharsis is indeed not the mark of Tragedy alone, although in

Tragedy it has a very great relative intensity; it is ultimately

only a designation for the specific aesthetic pleasure, to which

I can give no better name than the oft-repeated one of triumphant

acquiescence in the rightness of relations. We think we feel a

situation directly, but what we really feel is pleasure in the

rightness of the manner of the event, and in the moment of perfect

experience it gives us. Such specific emotion as may be detected

in any aesthetic experience is, then, covered by the definition

of beauty only in so far as it has become form rather than content,

--is valuable only in its relations rather than in itself. The

experience of pity or fear, even though generalized, unselfish,

etc.,--after the various formulas of the expounders of dramatic

emotion,--does not impart aesthetic character of itself; it

becomes aesthetic only if it appears at such a point in the

tragedy, linked in such a way to the developing plot, that it

belongs to the unified and reciprocally harmonious circle of

experiences.