Chapter 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.