But we have up to this time consistently neglected the central
idea of the work of art, and its claim to be included in the
aesthetic formula. We have defined beauty as that which brings
about a state of harmonious completeness, of repose in activity,
in the psychophysical and psychological realms. This harmonious
repose can exist only with a disinterested attitude toward the
objects which have brought this state about. Whether the Melian
Venus or "Hamlet" or "Lohengrin" live, we care not; only that
if they live, it shall be SO. In this sense, our attitude is
interested, our will is active, but only toward the existence
of the form. But with the introduction of the central theme, we
cease to be disinterested,--our hypothetical is changed to an
affirmative. The moral idea we must accept or reject, for it
bears a direct relation to our personality. We will, or do not
will, that, in the real world in which we ourselves have to live
and struggle, certain forces shall be operative,--that there
shall be the beauty of health, as in the "Discobolus;" material
love which is divine, as in the "Sistine Madonna;" that war shall
be horrible; that sloth unstriven against shall triumph over
love, as in "The Statue and the Bust;" that defiance of the
social organism shall involve self-destruction, as in "Anna
Karenina." The person or the combination of events expressing
this idea we do not seek in our personal experience, but we do
demand for our own a world in which this idea rules. Thus it
must be admitted that there is, strictly speaking, at the core
of every aesthetic response to a work of art containing an idea,
a non-aesthetic element, an element of personal and interested
judgment.
On the other hand, this affirmation or acceptance of a moral idea
implies the quietude of the will; just that state of harmony, of
repose, which we have found to be the mark of the aesthetic on
the lower planes of being. In so far, then, as we accept the
moral idea which a work of art presents, in so far that idea has
the power of bringing us to the state of harmony, and in so far
it is beautiful. And vice versa, works of art which leave us in
a state of moral rebellion are unbeautiful, not because they are
immoral, but because they are disturbing to the moral sense.
Literature which ignores the fundamental moral principle of the
freedom of the will, like the works of Flaubert, Maupassant, much
of Zola, Loti, and Thomas Hardy, fails of beauty, inasmuch as it
fails of the perfect reposeful harmony of human nature in its
entirety.
Thus a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the aesthetic
experience in its simplest and most sensuous form has given us
a principle,--the principle of unity in harmonious functioning,--
which has enabled us to follow the track of beauty into the more
complex realms of ideas and of moral attitudes, and to discover
that there also the law of internal relation and of fitness for
imitative response holds for all embodiments of beauty. That
harmonious, imitative response, the psychophysical state known
on its feeling side as aesthetic pleasure, we have seen to be,
first, a kind of physiological equilibrium, a "coexistence of
opposing impulses which heightens the sense of being while it
prevents action," like the impulses to movement corresponding
to geometrical symmetry; secondly, a psychological equilibrium,
in which the flow of ideas and impulses is a circle rounding
upon itself, all associations, emotions, expectations indissolubly
linked with the central thought and leading back only to it, and
proceeding in an irrevocable order, which it yet adapted to the
possibilities of human experience; and thirdly, a quietude of
the will, in the acceptance of the given moral attitude for the
whole scheme of life. Thus is given, in the fusion of these
three orders of mental life, the perfect moment of unity and
self-completeness.