Chapter XIII: Part IV: Expression (3)

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.