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."

II

In spite of this, however, a place for ideas must clearly be found in our definition of beauty; and yet it must be so limited and bound to the beautiful form that corollaries such as we have just drawn will be impossible. An interesting attempt to reconcile these two points of view—to establish an organic relation between form and idea—is found in "The Sense of Beauty" by Professor George Santayana. The central point of this writer's theory is his definition of beauty as the objectification of pleasure. Aesthetic experience, he says, is based partly on form, partly on expression, but the pleasure felt is always projected into the object, and is felt as a quality of it. All kinds of external associations may connect themselves with the work of art, but so long as they remain external, and keep, so to speak, their values for themselves, they cannot be said to add beauty to the object. But when they are present only in their effect,— a diffused feeling of pleasure,—that diffused feeling is attributed directly to the object, is felt as if it inheres therein, and so the object becomes more beautiful, for beauty is objectified pleasure. Professor Santayana designates form as beauty in the first term, and expression as beauty in the second term. Beauty in the first term can exist alone,—not so beauty in the second term. It must have a little beauty of the first term to graft itself upon. "A map, for instance, is not usually thought of as an aesthetic object, and yet, let the tints of it be a little subtle, let the lines be a little delicate, and the masses of land and sea somewhat balanced, and we really have a beautiful thing, the charm of which consists almost entirely in its meaning.

Now here, it seems to me, is a weak point in Professor Santanaya's armor. If such wonderful elements of beauty can be projected into a fairly colorless object by virtue of its fringe of suggestiveness, why should not beauty of the second term be felt in objects without that little bit of intrinsic worth of form? Is not such indeed the fact? What else is the meaning of the story of "Beauty and the Beast"? The squat and hideous Indian idol, the scarabaeus, the bit of Aztec pottery, become attractive and desired for themselves by virtue of their halo of pleasure from dim associations. And all these values are felt as completely OBJECTIFIED, and so fulfill the requirements for "beauty in the second term." That small amount of intrinsic beauty on which to graft the beauty of the second term is, therefore, not a necessary condition, so that we are left, on Professor Santayana's theory, with the strange paradox of so-called beautiful objects which are, nevertheless, confessedly ugly.

What, then, is the flaw in this definition? While we concede the objectification of pleasure in all these cases, we cannot, it would seem, admit a corresponding change from non-aesthetic to aesthetic feelings. The personal attitude towards an object, based on sentiments objectified in it, and the aesthetic attitude are two different things. The truth is, that all this objectified tone-feeling is directly dependent on the original real existence of the object that calls it up, and on our practical personal relation to it, and is thus, by universal agreement, definitely non-aesthetic. I enjoy the cast of the great Venus very nearly as much as the original,—but who cares for casts of the Aztec gods, or of the prehistoric carvings of the reindeer period? Who wants an imitation scarabaeus? To have the real thing, to see it, to touch it, to know that it has had real experiences that would fill me with wonder and with awe, "to love it for the danger it has passed,"—to feel that I myself am through it actually linked with its mysterious history,—that is the value it has for me; not a pleasure of perception at all, but a very definite, practical interest in my own personality. If the pleasure lay only in disinterested perception, any representation of the object ought to have the same value.

What, then, the author of "The Sense of Beauty" calls "the beauty of the second term,"—the power to suggest feeling through the medium of associated ideas,—we may deny to impart any aesthetic character whatever. Professor Santayana has, indeed, mediated between the formalists and the idealists; but his theory would lead us to attributions of beauty from which common sense revolts; and we have seen the secret of its deficiency to lie in the confusion of the personal with the aesthetic attitude. If now we amend his definition, "Beauty is objectified pleasure," to "Beauty is objectified aesthetic pleasure," we are advanced no further.

III

The problem stands, then: how to provide for the presence of ideas in the work of art, and the definite emotions aroused by it, either by bringing them somehow into the definition of beauty in itself, or by showing how their presence is related to the full aesthetic experience. But, first of all, we have to ask how the aesthetic pleasure even in formal beauty is constituted, and to what extent expression belongs to the beauty of pure form. Form is impressive, or directly beautiful, through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of its combinations of suggestions and impulses with the entire organism. I enjoy a well-composed picture like Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love," because the good composition means such a balanced relation of impulses of attention, of incipient movements, as harmonizes with such an organism as mine, tending to move toward both sides, and yet unified and stable; and because the combination of colors is at once stimulating and soothing to my eyes. So much for IMPRESSION, beauty of the first term. But it is not only that harmonious state of my visual and motor functions that I get out of the form of a picture. No, I have, besides all this pleasure, a real exhilaration or emotion, a definite mood of repose or gayety or triumph, without any fringe of association, which yet certainly contributes to my feeling of the beauty of the experience, and so of the work of art. How did it come out of the form?

Well, this very harmonious excitation of the organism has brought with it just such an organic reverberation as, the current theory of emotion asserts, must be at the bottom of all our emotional states. A certain sequence of nervous shocks and of vasomotor changes, certain stimulations and relations and contractions of the internal organs have been set up as the "diffusive wave" from the sense-stimulations, and a particular emotional tinge is the result. That is a direct impression, but an expression too. Take the same case on a much lower level. A glass of wine makes me cheerful, not because it arouses cheerful ideas directly, but because the organic changes it sets up are such as belong to the MOTIVATED expression of joy, and have the same effect. A deep, slow movement played by an orchestra can affect me in two ways. It may be that I have usually connected that sort of music with religious experiences, and all the profound and inspiring feelings belonging thereto; and so I transfer those feelings to the music and give it those adjectives. Or the slowness of the rhythmic pulse that is set up in me, the largeness, the volume, the depth of sound, all bring about in me the kind of nervous state that belongs to a reposeful and yet deeply moved feeling. The second experience is expression through impression, through the inward changes that the form itself sets up. The first is expression through the medium of something external,—an idea which brings with it a feeling,—something that does not belong to the music itself, but to my own individual experiences.

This distinction between internal and external expressiveness is perfectly clear for music, and also for architecture. In painting, too, it can easily be traced. We know the effect that is produced by broken lines, by upward moving ones,—like the "always aspiring" of the Gothic cathedral. The low-lying, wide expanses of some of the old Dutch landscapists give us repose, not because they remind us of the peaceful happiness of the land, but because we cannot melt ourselves into all those horizontal lines without that restful feeling which accompanies such relaxation; and our emotion is read into the picture as AESTHETIC pleasure, because it came out of the abstract forms,—the PAINTING in the picture.

The beauty of form is thus seen to be inseparably allied with a certain degree of emotional expressiveness in a way that does not distract, like the association of ideas, from the pure aesthetic experience. This quality of expressiveness should not, however, become a part of the definition of beauty, so that it should be said that the greater the emotional expressiveness, the more beautiful the object. For if that were true, such music, for instance, as all acknowledge quite mediocre, would be felt as most beautiful by those who find in it a strong and definite emotion; and a Strauss waltz, which makes us more merry than one by Mendelssohn, should be in so far more beautiful. This, of course, we are not ready to concede; and it seems, therefore, most logical to regard the special emotional effects of formal beauty rather as a corollary to, than as a part of, the essential aesthetic mood. But if we give the name emotion to that perfectly vague but unmistakable excitement with which we respond to purely formal beauty,—that indescribable exaltation with which we listen to "absolute" music,—then we must say that that emotion is but another name for aesthetic pleasure. Objectively, we have formal beauty; subjectively, on the physiological side, a harmonious action of the organism, and on the mental side the undefined exaltation which is known as aesthetic pleasure.

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.

VI

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.

THE END