Produced by Ruth Hart




[Note:  for this online edition I have moved the Table of Contents
to the beginning of the text and slightly modified it to conform
with the online format. I have also made one spelling change:
"ominiscient intelligence" to "omniscient intelligence".]



THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

BEING THE OUTLINES OF AESTHETIC THEORY

by

GEORGE SANTAYANA


CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON


COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS


Printed in the United States of America


CONTENTS

Preface
Introduction  The Methods of Aesthetics                           1-13

Part I.  The Nature of Beauty
§ 1. The philosophy of beauty is a theory of values                    14
§ 2. Preference is ultimately irrational                               18
§ 3. Contrast between moral and aesthetic values                       28
§ 4. Work and play                                                     25
§ 5. All values are in one sense aesthetic                             28
§ 6. Aesthetic consecration of general principles                      31
§ 7. Contrast of aesthetic and physical pleasures                      35
§ 8. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its disinterestedness   37
§ 9. The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its universality        40
§ 10. The differential of aesthetic pleasure: its objectification     44
§ 11. The definition of beauty                                        49

Part II.  The Materials of Beauty
§ 12. All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty       53
§ 13. The influence of the passion of love                            56
§ 14. Social instincts and their aesthetic influence                  62
§ 15. The lower senses                                                65
§ 16. Sound                                                           68
§ 17. Colour                                                          72
§ 18. Materials surveyed                                              76

Part III.  Form
§ 19. There is a beauty of form                                       82
§ 20. Physiology of the perception of form                            85
§ 21. Values of geometrical figures                                   88
§ 22. Symmetry                                                        91
§ 23. Form the unity of a manifold                                    95
§ 24. Multiplicity in uniformity                                      97
§ 25. Example of the stars                                           100
§ 26. Defects of pure multiplicity                                   106
§ 27. Aesthetics of democracy                                        110
§ 28. Values of types and values of examples                         112
§ 29. Origin of types                                                116
§ 30. The average modified in the direction of pleasure              121
§ 31. Are all things beautiful?                                      126
§ 32. Effects of indeterminate form                                  131
§ 33. Example of landscape                                           133
§ 34. Extensions to objects usually not regarded aesthetically       138
§ 35. Further dangers of indeterminateness                           142
§ 36. The illusion of infinite perfection                            146
§ 37. Organized nature the source of apperceptive forms              152
§ 38. Utility the principle of organization in nature                155
§ 39. The relation of utility to beauty                              157
§ 40. Utility the principle of organization in the arts              160
§ 41. Form and adventitious ornament                                 163
§ 42. Syntactical form                                               167
§ 42. Literary form. The plot                                        171
§ 44. Character as an aesthetic form                                 174
§ 45. Ideal characters                                               176
§ 46. The religious imagination                                      180
§ 47. Preference is ultimately irrational                            185

Part IV.  Expression
§ 48. Expression defined                                             192
§ 49. The associative process                                        198
§ 50. Kinds of value in the second term                              201
§ 51. Aesthetic value in the second term                             205
§ 52. Practical value in the same                                    208
§ 53. Cost as an element of effect                                   211
§ 54. The expression of economy and fitness                          214
§ 55. The authority of morals over aesthetics                        218
§ 56. Negative values in the second term                             221
§ 57. Influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of evil 226
§ 58. Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth          228
§ 59. The liberation of self                                         233
§ 60. The sublime independent of the expression of evil              239
§ 61. The comic                                                      245
§ 62. Wit                                                            250
§ 63. Humour                                                         253
§ 64. The grotesque                                                  256
§ 65. The possibility of finite perfection                           258
§ 66. The stability of the ideal                                     263

§ 67. Conclusion                                                 266-270
Footnotes
Index                                                            271-275



PREFACE

This little work contains the chief ideas gathered together for a
course of lectures on the theory and history of aesthetics given at
Harvard College from 1892 to 1895. The only originality I can
claim is that which may result from the attempt to put together the
scattered commonplaces of criticism into a system, under the
inspiration of a naturalistic psychology. I have studied sincerity
rather than novelty, and if any subject, as for instance the
excellence of tragedy, is presented in a new light, the change
consists only in the stricter application to a complex subject of the
principles acknowledged to obtain in our simple judgments. My
effort throughout has been to recall those fundamental aesthetic
feelings the orderly extension of which yields sanity of judgment
and distinction of taste.

The influences under which the book has been written are rather
too general and pervasive to admit of specification; yet the student
of philosophy will not fail to perceive how much I owe to writers,
both living and dead, to whom no honour could be added by my
acknowledgments. I have usually omitted any reference to them in
foot-notes or in the text, in order that the air of controversy might
be avoided, and the reader might be enabled to compare what is
said more directly with the reality of his own experience.

          G. S.
     September, 1906.


INTRODUCTION

The sense of beauty has a more important place in life than
aesthetic theory has ever taken in philosophy. The plastic arts, with
poetry and music, are the most conspicuous monuments of this
human interest, because they appeal only to contemplation, and yet
have attracted to their service, in all civilized ages, an amount of
effort, genius, and honour, little inferior to that given to industry,
war, or religion. The fine arts, however, where aesthetic feeling
appears almost pure, are by no means the only sphere in which
men show their susceptibility to beauty. In all products of human
industry we notice the keenness with which the eye is attracted to
the mere appearance of things: great sacrifices of time and labour
are made to it in the most vulgar manufactures; nor does man
select his dwelling, his clothes, or his companions without
reference to their effect on his aesthetic senses. Of late we have
even learned that the forms of many animals are due to the survival
by sexual selection of the colours and forms most attractive to the
eye. There must therefore be in our nature a very radical and
wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of
the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so
conspicuous a faculty.

That aesthetic theory has received so little attention from the world
is not due to the unimportance of the subject of which it treats, but
rather to lack of an adequate motive for speculating upon it, and to
the small success of the occasional efforts to deal with it. Absolute
curiosity, and love of comprehension for its own sake, are not
passions we have much leisure to indulge: they require not only
freedom from affairs but, what is more rare, freedom from
prepossessions and from the hatred of all ideas that do not make
for the habitual goal of our thought.

Now, what has chiefly maintained such speculation as the world
has seen has been either theological passion or practical use. All
we find, for example, written about beauty may be divided into
two groups: that group of writings in which philosophers have
interpreted aesthetic facts in the light of their metaphysical
principles, and made of their theory of taste a corollary or footnote
to their systems; and that group in which artists and critics have
ventured into philosophic ground, by generalizing somewhat the
maxims of the craft or the comments of the sensitive observer. A
treatment of the subject at once direct and theoretic has been very
rare: the problems of nature and morals have attracted the
reasoners, and the description and creation of beauty have
absorbed the artists; between the two reflection upon aesthetic
experience has remained abortive or incoherent.

A circumstance that has also contributed to the absence or to the
failure of aesthetic speculation is the subjectivity of the
phenomenon with which it deals. Man has a prejudice against
himself: anything which is a product of his mind seems to him to
be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied
only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws
independent of our nature. The ancients long speculated about the
constitution of the universe before they became aware of that mind
which is the instrument of all speculation. The moderns, also, even
within the field of psychology, have studied first the function of
perception and the theory of knowledge, by which we seem to be
informed about external things; they have in comparison neglected
the exclusively subjective and human department of imagination
and emotion. We have still to recognize in practice the truth that
from these despised feelings of ours the great world of perception
derives all its value, if not also its existence. Things are interesting
because we care about them, and important because we need them.
Had our perceptions no connexion with our pleasures, we should
soon close our eyes on this world; if our intelligence were of no
service to our passions, we should come to doubt, in the lazy
freedom of reverie, whether two and two make four.

Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and
insignificance of things purely emotional, that those who have
taken moral problems to heart and felt their dignity have often
been led into attempts to discover some external right and beauty
of which, our moral and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions or
discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, in men's opinion, a
perception or discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem
to feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of
objective truth, and not merely expressions of human nature, they
stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A judgment is not trivial,
however, because it rests on human feelings; on the contrary,
triviality consists in abstraction from human interests; only those
judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which wander
beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the
ordering and enriching of life.

Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice
against the subjective. They have not suffered more because both
have a subject-matter which is partly objective. Ethics deals with
conduct as much as with emotion, and therefore considers the
causes of events and their consequences as well as our judgments
of their value. Esthetics also is apt to include the history and
philosophy of art, and to add much descriptive and critical matter
to the theory of our susceptibility to beauty. A certain confusion is
thereby introduced into these inquiries, but at the same time the
discussion is enlivened by excursions into neighbouring provinces,
perhaps more interesting to the general reader.

We may, however, distinguish three distinct elements of ethics and
aesthetics, and three different ways of approaching the subject. The
first is the exercise of the moral or aesthetic faculty itself, the
actual pronouncing of judgment and giving of praise, blame, and
precept. This is not a matter of science but of character, enthusiasm,
niceness of perception, and fineness of emotion. It is aesthetic or
moral activity, while ethics and aesthetics, as sciences, are
intellectual activities, having that aesthetic or moral activity for
their subject-matter.

The second method consists in the historical explanation of
conduct or of art as a part of anthropology, and seeks to discover
the conditions of various types of character, forms of polity,
conceptions of justice, and schools of criticism and of art. Of this
nature is a great deal of what has been written on aesthetics. The
philosophy of art has often proved a more tempting subject than
the psychology of taste, especially to minds which were not so
much fascinated by beauty itself as by the curious problem of the
artistic instinct in man and of the diversity of its manifestations in
history.

The third method in ethics and aesthetics is psychological, as the
other two are respectively didactic and historical. It deals with
moral and aesthetic judgments as phenomena of mind and products
of mental evolution. The problem here is to understand the origin
and conditions of these feelings and their relation to the rest of our
economy. Such an inquiry, if pursued successfully, would yield an
understanding of the reason why we think anything right or
beautiful, wrong or ugly, it would thus reveal the roots of
conscience and taste in human nature and enable us to distinguish
transitory preferences and ideals, which rest on peculiar conditions,
from those which, springing from those elements of mind which all
men share, are comparatively permanent and universal.

To this inquiry, as far as it concerns aesthetics, the following pages
are devoted. No attempt will be made either to impose particular
appreciations or to trace the history of art and criticism. The
discussion will be limited to the nature and elements of our
aesthetic judgments. It is a theoretical inquiry and has no directly
hortatory quality. Yet insight into the basis of our preferences, if it
could be gained, would not fail to have a good and purifying
influence upon them. It would show us the futility of a dogmatism
that would impose upon another man judgments and emotions for
which the needed soil is lacking in his constitution and experience;
and at the same time it would relieve us of any undue diffidence or
excessive tolerance towards aberrations of taste, when we know
what are the broader grounds of preference and the habits that
make for greater and more diversified aesthetic enjoyment.

Therefore, although nothing has commonly been less attractive
than treatises on beauty or less a guide to taste than disquisitions
upon it, we may yet hope for some not merely theoretical gain
from these studies. They have remained so often without practical
influence because they have been pursued under unfavourable
conditions. The writers have generally been audacious metaphysicians
and somewhat incompetent critics; they have represented
general and obscure principles, suggested by other parts
of their philosophy, as the conditions of artistic excellence
and the essence of beauty. But if the inquiry is kept close to the
facts of feeling, we may hope that the resulting theory may have a
clarifying effect on the experience on which it is based. That is,
after all, the use of theory. If when a theory is bad it narrows our
capacity for observation and makes all appreciation vicarious and
formal, when it is good it reacts favourably upon our powers,
guides the attention to what is really capable of affording
entertainment, and increases, by force of new analogies, the range
of our interests. Speculation is an evil if it imposes a foreign
organization on our mental life; it is a good if it only brings to light,
and makes more perfect by training, the organization already
inherent in it.

We shall therefore study human sensibility itself and our actual
feelings about beauty, and we shall look for no deeper,
unconscious causes of our aesthetic consciousness. Such value as
belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature of the beautiful,
comes to them not because they explain our primary feelings,
which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact
constitute, some of our later appreciations. There is no explanation,
for instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes.
Such a relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to
understand why the symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain
moments of contemplation, when much emotional experience lies
behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both of nature
and of life, our delight in any particular object may consist in
nothing but the thought that this object is a manifestation of
universal principles. The blue sky may come to please chiefly
because it seems the image of a serene conscience, or of the eternal
youth and purity of nature after a thousand partial corruptions. But
this expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the
sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a
mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in
an idea of God, bind it also to that idea.

So it may happen that the most arbitrary and unreal theories, which
must be rejected as general explanations of aesthetic life, may be
reinstated as particular moments of it. Those intuitions which we
call Platonic are seldom scientific, they seldom explain the
phenomena or hit upon the actual law of things, but they are often
the highest expression of that activity which they fail to make
comprehensible. The adoring lover cannot understand the natural
history of love; for he is all in all at the last and supreme stage of
its development. Hence the world has always been puzzled in its
judgment of the Platonists; their theories are so extravagant, yet
their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined and
beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies
conscience and utters our inmost hopes. Platonic philosophers have
therefore a natural authority, as standing on heights to which
the vulgar cannot attain, but to which they naturally and
half-consciously aspire.

When a man tells you that beauty is the manifestation of God to
the senses, you wish you might understand him, you grope for a
deep truth in his obscurity, you honour him for his elevation of
mind, and your respect may even induce you to assent to what he
says as to an intelligible proposition. Your thought may in
consequence be dominated ever after by a verbal dogma, around
which all your sympathies and antipathies will quickly gather, and
the less you have penetrated the original sense of your creed, the
more absolutely will you believe it. You will have followed
Mephistopheles' advice: --

     Im ganzen haltet euch an Worte,
     So geht euch durch die sichere Pforte
     Zum Tempel der Gewissheit ein.

Yet reflection might have shown you that the word of the master
held no objective account of the nature and origin of beauty, but
was the vague expression of his highly complex emotions.

It is one of the attributes of God, one of the perfections which we
contemplate in our idea of him, that there is no duality or
opposition between his will and his vision, between the impulses
of his nature and the events of his life. This is what we commonly
designate as omnipotence and creation.  Now, in the contemplation
of beauty, our faculties of perception have the same perfection: it is
indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the
occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that
we draw our conception of the divine life. There is, then, a real
propriety in calling beauty a manifestation of God to the senses,
since, in the region of sense, the perception of beauty exemplifies
that adequacy and perfection which in general we objectify in an
idea of God.

But the minds that dwell in the atmosphere of these analogies are
hardly those that will care to ask what are the conditions and the
varieties of this perfection of function, in other words, how it
comes about that we perceive beauty at all, or have any inkling of
divinity. Only the other philosophers, those that wallow in
Epicurus' sty, know anything about the latter question. But it is
easier to be impressed than to be instructed, and the public is very
ready to believe that where there is noble language not
without obscurity there must be profound knowledge. We should
distinguish, however, the two distinct demands in the case. One is
for comprehension; we look for the theory of a human function
which must cover all possible cases of its exercise, whether noble
or base. This the Platonists utterly fail to give us. The other
demand is for inspiration; we wish to be nourished by the maxims
and confessions of an exalted mind, in whom the aesthetic function
is pre-eminent. By responding to this demand the same thinkers
may win our admiration.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to
feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried
by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this
is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. The
poets and philosophers who express this aesthetic experience and
stimulate the same function in us by their example, do a greater
service to mankind and deserve higher honour than the discoverers
of historical truth. Reflection is indeed a part of life, but the last
part. Its specific value consists in the satisfaction of curiosity, in
the smoothing out and explanation of things: but the greatest
pleasure which we actually get from reflection is borrowed from
the experience on which we reflect. We do not often indulge in
retrospect for the sake of a scientific knowledge of human life, but
rather to revive the memories of what once was dear. And I should
have little hope of interesting the reader in the present analyses, did
I not rely on the attractions of a subject associated with so many of
his pleasures.

But the recognition of the superiority of aesthetics in experience to
aesthetics in theory ought not to make us accept as an explanation
of aesthetic feeling what is in truth only an expression of it. When
Plato tells us of the eternal ideas in conformity to which all
excellence consists, he is making himself the spokesman of the
moral consciousness. Our conscience and taste establish these
ideals; to make a judgment is virtually to establish an ideal, and all
ideals are absolute and eternal for the judgment that involves them,
because in finding and declaring a thing good or beautiful, our
sentence is categorical, and the standard evoked by our judgment is
for that case intrinsic and ultimate. But at the next moment, when
the mind is on another footing, a new ideal is evoked, no less
absolute for the present judgment than the old ideal was for the
previous one. If we are then expressing our feeling and confessing
what happens to us when we judge, we shall be quite right in
saying that we have always an absolute ideal before us, and that
value lies in conformity with that ideal. So, also, if we try to define
that ideal, we shall hardly be able to say of it anything less noble
and more definite than that it is the embodiment of an infinite good.
For it is that incommunicable and illusive excellence that haunts
every beautiful thing, and

          like a star
     Beacons from the abode where the eternal are.

For the expression of this experience we should go to the poets, to
the more inspired critics, and best of all to the immortal parables of
Plato. But if what we desire is to increase our knowledge rather
than to cultivate our sensibility, we should do well to close all
those delightful books; for we shall not find any instruction there
upon the questions which most press upon us; namely, how an
ideal is formed in the mind, how a given object is compared with it,
what is the common element in all beautiful things, and what the
substance of the absolute ideal in which all ideals tend to be lost;
and, finally, how we come to be sensitive to beauty at all, or to
value it. These questions must be capable of answers, if any
science of human nature is really possible. -- So far, then, are we
from ignoring the insight of the Platonists, that we hope to explain
it, and in a sense to justify it, by showing that it is the natural and
sometimes the supreme expression of the common principles of
our nature.


PART I

THE NATURE OF BEAUTY

_The philosophy of beauty is a theory of values._

§ 1.  It would be easy to find a definition of beauty that should give
in a few words a telling paraphrase of the word. We know on
excellent authority that beauty is truth, that it is the expression of
the ideal, the symbol of divine perfection, and the sensible
manifestation of the good. A litany of these titles of honour might
easily be compiled, and repeated in praise of our divinity. Such
phrases stimulate thought and give us a momentary pleasure, but
they hardly bring any permanent enlightenment. A definition that
should really define must be nothing less than the exposition of the
origin, place, and elements of beauty as an object of human
experience. We must learn from it, as far as possible, why, when,
and how beauty appears, what conditions an object must fulfil to
be beautiful, what elements of our nature make us sensible of
beauty, and what the relation is between the constitution of the
object and the excitement of our susceptibility. Nothing less will
really define beauty or make us understand what aesthetic
appreciation is. The definition of beauty in this sense will be the
task of this whole book, a task that can be only very imperfectly
accomplished within its limits.

The historical titles of our subject may give us a hint towards the
beginning of such a definition. Many writers of the last century
called the philosophy of beauty _Criticism,_ and the word is still
retained as the title for the reasoned appreciation of works of art.
We could hardly speak, however, of delight in nature as criticism.
A sunset is not criticised; it is felt and enjoyed. The word
"criticism," used on such an occasion, would emphasize too much
the element of deliberate judgment and of comparison with
standards. Beauty, although often so described, is seldom so
perceived, and all the greatest excellences of nature and art are so
far from being approved of by a rule that they themselves furnish
the standard and ideal by which critics measure inferior effects.

This age of science and of nomenclature has accordingly adopted a
more learned word, _Aesthetics,_ that is, the theory of perception
or of susceptibility. If criticism is too narrow a word, pointing
exclusively to our more artificial judgments, aesthetics seems to be
too broad and to include within its sphere all pleasures and pains, if
not all perceptions whatsoever. Kant used it, as we know, for his
theory of time and space as forms of all perception; and it has at
times been narrowed into an equivalent for the philosophy of art.

If we combine, however, the etymological meaning of criticism
with that of aesthetics, we shall unite two essential qualities of the
theory of beauty. Criticism implies judgment, and aesthetics
perception. To get the common ground, that of perceptions which
are critical, or judgments which are perceptions, we must widen
our notion of deliberate criticism so as to include those judgments
of value which are instinctive and immediate, that is, to include
pleasures and pains; and at the same time we must narrow our
notion of aesthetics so as to exclude all perceptions which are not
appreciations, which do not find a value in their objects. We thus
reach the sphere of critical or appreciative perception, which is,
roughly speaking, what we mean to deal with. And retaining the
word "aesthetics," which is now current, we may therefore say that
aesthetics is concerned with the perception of values. The meaning
and conditions of value is, then, what we must first consider.

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to
philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained
by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of
the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely
physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not
essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth
and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without
possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection
might have secured the survival of those automata which made
useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct of
self-preservation would have been developed, dangers would have been
shunned without being feared, and injuries revenged without being
felt.

In such a world there might have come to be the most perfect
organization. There would have been what we should call the
expression of the deepest interests and the apparent pursuit of
conceived goods. For there would have been spontaneous and
ingrained tendencies to avoid certain contingencies and to produce
others; all the dumb show and evidence of thinking would have
been patent to the observer. Yet there would surely have been no
thinking, no expectation, and no conscious achievement in the
whole process.

The onlooker might have feigned ends and objects of forethought,
as we do in the case of the water that seeks its own level, or in that
of the vacuum which nature abhors. But the particles of matter
would have remained unconscious of their collocation, and all
nature would have been insensible of their changing arrangement.
We only, the possible spectators of that process, by virtue of our
own interests and habits, could see any progress or culmination in
it. We should see culmination where the result attained satisfied
our practical or aesthetic demands, and progress wherever such a
satisfaction was approached. But apart from ourselves, and our
human bias, we can see in such a mechanical world no element of
value whatever. In removing consciousness, we have removed the
possibility of worth.

But it is not only in the absence of all consciousness that value
would be removed from the world; by a less violent abstraction
from the totality of human experience, we might conceive beings
of a purely intellectual cast, minds in which the transformations of
nature were mirrored without any emotion. Every event would then
be noted, its relations would be observed, its recurrence might even
be expected; but all this would happen without a shadow of desire,
of pleasure, or of regret. No event would be repulsive, no situation
terrible. We might, in a word, have a world of idea without a world
of will. In this case, as completely as if consciousness were absent
altogether, all value and excellence would be gone. So that for the
existence of good in any form it is not merely consciousness but
emotional consciousness that is needed. Observation will not do,
appreciation is required.

_Preference is ultimately irrational._

§ 2. We may therefore at once assert this axiom, important for all
moral philosophy and fatal to certain stubborn incoherences of
thought, that there is no value apart from some appreciation of it,
and no good apart from some preference of it before its absence or
its opposite. In appreciation, in preference, lies the root and
essence of all excellence. Or, as Spinoza clearly expresses it, we
desire nothing because it is good, but it is good only because we
desire it.

It is true that in the absence of an instinctive reaction we can still
apply these epithets by an appeal to usage. We may agree that an
action is bad, or a building good, because we recognize in them a
character which we have learned to designate by that adjective; but
unless there is in us some trace of passionate reprobation or of
sensible delight, there is no moral or aesthetic judgment. It is all a
question of propriety of speech, and of the empty titles of things.
The verbal and mechanical proposition, that passes for judgment of
worth, is the great cloak of ineptitude in these matters. Insensibility
is very quick in the conventional use of words. If we appealed
more often to actual feeling, our judgments would be more diverse,
but they would be more legitimate and instructive. Verbal
judgments are often useful instruments of thought, but it is not by
them that worth can ultimately be determined.

Values spring from the immediate and inexplicable reaction of
vital impulse, and from the irrational part of our nature. The
rational part is by its essence relative; it leads us from data to
conclusions, or from parts to wholes; it never furnishes the data
with which it works. If any preference or precept were declared to
be ultimate and primitive, it would thereby be declared to be
irrational, since mediation, inference, and synthesis are the essence
of rationality. The ideal of rationality is itself as arbitrary, as much
dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as any other ideal.
Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which the
philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands
rationality, what really demands rationality, what makes it a good
and indispensable thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own
nature, but our need of it both in safe and economical action and in
the pleasures of comprehension.

It is evident that beauty is a species of value, and what we have
said of value in general applies to this particular kind. A first
approach to a definition of beauty has therefore been made by the
exclusion of all intellectual judgments, all judgments of matter of
fact or of relation. To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of
value, is a sign of a pedantic and borrowed criticism. If we
approach a work of art or nature scientifically, for the sake of its
historical connexions or proper classification, we do not approach
it aesthetically. The discovery of its date or of its author may be
otherwise interesting; it only remotely affects our aesthetic
appreciation by adding to the direct effect certain associations. If
the direct effect were absent, and the object in itself uninteresting,
the circumstances would be immaterial. Molière's _Misanthrope_
says to the court poet who commends his sonnet as written in a
quarter of an hour,

     Voyons, monsieur, le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire,

and so we might say to the critic that sinks into the archaeologist,
show us the work, and let the date alone.

In an opposite direction the same substitution of facts for values
makes its appearance, whenever the reproduction of fact is made
the sole standard of artistic excellence. Many half-trained
observers condemn the work of some naïve or fanciful masters
with a sneer, because, as they truly say, it is out of drawing. The
implication is that to be correctly copied from a model is the
prerequisite of all beauty. Correctness is, indeed, an element of
effect and one which, in respect to familiar objects, is almost
indispensable, because its absence would cause a disappointment
and dissatisfaction incompatible with enjoyment. We learn to value
truth more and more as our love and knowledge of nature increase.
But fidelity is a merit only because it is in this way a factor in our
pleasure. It stands on a level with all other ingredients of effect.
When a man raises it to a solitary pre-eminence and becomes
incapable of appreciating anything else, he betrays the decay of
aesthetic capacity. The scientific habit in him inhibits the artistic.

That facts have a value of their own, at once complicates and
explains this question. We are naturally pleased by every
perception, and recognition and surprise are particularly acute
sensations. When we see a striking truth in any imitation, we are
therefore delighted, and this kind of pleasure is very legitimate,
and enters into the best effects of all the representative arts. Truth
and realism are therefore aesthetically good, but they are not
all-sufficient, since the representation of everything is not equally
pleasing and effective. The fact that resemblance is a source of
satisfaction justifies the critic in demanding it, while the aesthetic
insufficiency of such veracity shows the different value of truth in
science and in art. Science is the response to the demand for
information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but
the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for
the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into
it only as it subserves these ends.

Even the scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or
absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests.
As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts
by the painful process of selection, -- for intuition runs equally into
truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled
by experience, -- we gain vastly in our command over our
environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science, and
the fruit it is yielding in our day. We have no better vision of
nature and life than some of our predecessors, but we have greater
material resources. To know the truth about the composition and
history of things is good for this reason. It is also good because of
the enlarged horizon it gives us, because the spectacle of nature is
a marvellous and fascinating one, full of a serious sadness and
large peace, which gives us back our birthright as children of the
planet and naturalizes us upon the earth. This is the poetic value of
the scientific _Weltanschauung._ From these two benefits, the
practical and the imaginative, all the value of truth is derived.

Aesthetic and moral judgments are accordingly to be classed
together in contrast to judgments intellectual; they are both
judgments of value, while intellectual judgments are judgments of
fact. If the latter have any value, it is only derivative, and our
whole intellectual life has its only justification in its connexion
with our pleasures and pains.

_Contrast between moral and aesthetic values._

§ 3. The relation between aesthetic and moral judgments, between
the spheres of the beautiful and the good, is close, but the
distinction between them is important. One factor of this
distinction is that while aesthetic judgments are mainly positive,
that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and
fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil. Another factor of
the distinction is that whereas, in the perception of beauty, our
judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the
immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an
eventual utility in the object, judgments about moral worth, on the
contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the
consciousness of benefits probably involved. Both these
distinctions need some elucidation.

Hedonistic ethics have always had to struggle against the moral
sense of mankind. Earnest minds, that feel the weight and dignity
of life, rebel against the assertion that the aim of right conduct is
enjoyment. Pleasure usually appears to them as a temptation, and
they sometimes go so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The
truth is that morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment
of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more
authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering. There is
something artificial in the deliberate pursuit of pleasure; there is
something absurd in the obligation to enjoy oneself. We feel no
duty in that direction; we take to enjoyment naturally enough after
the work of life is done, and the freedom and spontaneity of our
pleasures is what is most essential to them.

The sad business of life is rather to escape certain dreadful evils to
which our nature exposes us, -- death, hunger, disease, weariness,
isolation, and contempt. By the awful authority of these things,
which stand like spectres behind every moral injunction,
conscience in reality speaks, and a mind which they have duly
impressed cannot but feel, by contrast, the hopeless triviality of the
search for pleasure. It cannot but feel that a life abandoned to
amusement and to changing impulses must run unawares into fatal
dangers. The moment, however, that society emerges from the
early pressure of the environment and is tolerably secure against
primary evils, morality grows lax. The forms that life will farther
assume are not to be imposed by moral authority, but are
determined by the genius of the race, the opportunities of the
moment, and the tastes and resources of individual minds. The
reign of duty gives place to the reign of freedom, and the law and
the covenant to the dispensation of grace.

The appreciation of beauty and its embodiment in the arts are
activities which belong to our holiday life, when we are redeemed
for the moment from the shadow of evil and the slavery to fear,
and are following the bent of our nature where it chooses to lead us.
The values, then, with which we here deal are positive; they were
negative in the sphere of morality. The ugly is hardly an exception,
because it is not the cause of any real pain. In itself it is rather a
source of amusement. If its suggestions are vitally repulsive, its
presence becomes a real evil towards which we assume a practical
and moral attitude. And, correspondingly, the pleasant is never, as
we hare seen, the object of a truly moral injunction.

_Work and play._

§ 4. We have here, then, an important element of the distinction
between aesthetic and moral values. It is the same that has been
pointed to in the famous contrast between work and play. These
terms may be used in different senses and their importance in
moral classification differs with the meaning attached to them. We
may call everything play which is useless activity, exercise that
springs from the physiological impulse to discharge the energy
which the exigencies of life have not called out. Work will then be
all action that is necessary or useful for life. Evidently if work and
play are thus objectively distinguished as useful and useless action,
work is a eulogistic term and play a disparaging one. It would be
better for us that all our energy should be turned to account, that
none of it should be wasted in aimless motion. Play, in this sense,
is a sign of imperfect adaptation. It is proper to childhood, when
the body and mind are not yet fit to cope with the environment, but
it is unseemly in manhood and pitiable in old age, because it marks
an atrophy of human nature, and a failure to take hold of the
opportunities of life.

Play is thus essentially frivolous. Some persons, understanding the
term in this sense, have felt an aversion, which every liberal mind
will share, to classing social pleasures, art, and religion under the
head of play, and by that epithet condemning them, as a certain
school seems to do, to gradual extinction as the race approaches
maturity. But if all the useless ornaments of our life are to be cut
off in the process of adaptation, evolution would impoverish
instead of enriching our nature. Perhaps that is the tendency of
evolution, and our barbarous ancestors amid their toils and wars,
with their flaming passions and mythologies, lived better lives than
are reserved to our well-adapted descendants.

We may be allowed to hope, however, that some imagination may
survive parasitically even in the most serviceable brain. Whatever
course history may take, -- and we are not here concerned with
prophecy, -- the question of what is desirable is not affected. To
condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are
useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life
irrespective of its content. For such a system the worthiest function
of the universe should be to establish perpetual motion.
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is
done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their
own sake are their own justification.

At the same time there is an undeniable propriety in calling all the
liberal and imaginative activities of man play, because they are
spontaneous, and not carried on under pressure of external
necessity or danger. Their utility for self-preservation may be very
indirect and accidental, but they are not worthless for that reason.
On the contrary, we may measure the degree of happiness and
civilization which any race has attained by the proportion of its
energy which is devoted to free and generous pursuits, to the
adornment of life and the culture of the imagination. For it is in the
spontaneous play of his faculties that man finds himself and his
happiness. Slavery is the most degrading condition of which he is
capable, and he is as often a slave to the niggardness of the earth
and the inclemency of heaven, as to a master or an institution. He
is a slave when all his energy is spent in avoiding suffering and
death, when all his action is imposed from without, and no breath
or strength is left him for free enjoyment.

Work and play here take on a different meaning, and become
equivalent to servitude and freedom. The change consists in the
subjective point of view from which the distinction is now made.
We no longer mean by work all that is done usefully, but only what
is done unwillingly and by the spur of necessity. By play we are
designating, no longer what is done fruitlessly, but whatever is
done spontaneously and for its own sake, whether it have or not an
ulterior utility. Play, in this sense, may be our most useful
occupation. So far would a gradual adaptation to the environment
be from making this play obsolete, that it would tend to abolish
work, and to make play universal. For with the elimination of all
the conflicts and errors of instinct, the race would do
spontaneously whatever conduced to its welfare and we should live
safely and prosperously without external stimulus or restraint.

_All values are in one sense aesthetic._

§ 5. In this second and subjective sense, then, work is the
disparaging term and play the eulogistic one. All who feel the
dignity and importance of the things of the imagination, need not
hesitate to adopt the classification which designates them as play.
We point out thereby, not that they have no value, but that their
value is intrinsic, that in them is one of the sources of all worth.
Evidently all values must be ultimately intrinsic. The useful is
good because of the excellence of its consequences; but these must
somewhere cease to be merely useful in their turn, or only
excellent as means; somewhere we must reach the good that is
good in itself and for its own sake, else the whole process is futile,
and the utility of our first object illusory. We here reach the second
factor in our distinction, between aesthetic and moral values,
which regards their immediacy.

If we attempt to remove from life all its evils, as the popular
imagination has done at times, we shall find little but aesthetic
pleasures remaining to constitute unalloyed happiness. The
satisfaction of the passions and the appetites, in which we chiefly
place earthly happiness, themselves take on an aesthetic tinge
when we remove ideally the possibility of loss or variation. What
could the Olympians honour in one another or the seraphim
worship in God except the embodiment of eternal attributes, of
essences which, like beauty, make us happy only in contemplation?
The glory of heaven could not be otherwise symbolized than by
light and music. Even the knowledge of truth, which the most
sober theologians made the essence of the beatific vision, is an
aesthetic delight; for when the truth has no further practical utility,
it becomes a landscape. The delight of it is imaginative and the
value of it aesthetic.

This reduction of all values to immediate appreciations, to
sensuous or vital activities, is so inevitable that it has struck even
the minds most courageously rationalistic. Only for them, instead
of leading to the liberation of aesthetic goods from practical
entanglements and their establishment as the only pure and
positive values in life, this analysis has led rather to the denial of
all pure and positive goods altogether. Such thinkers naturally
assume that moral values are intrinsic and supreme; and since these
moral values would not arise but for the existence or imminence of
physical evils, they embrace the paradox that without evil no good
whatever is conceivable.

The harsh requirements of apologetics have no doubt helped them
to this position, from which one breath of spring or the sight of one
well-begotten creature should be enough to dislodge them. Their
ethical temper and the fetters of their imagination forbid them to
reconsider their original assumption and to conceive that morality
is a means and not an end; that it is the price of human
non-adaptation, and the consequence of the original sin of unfitness. It
is the compression of human conduct within the narrow limits of
the safe and possible. Remove danger, remove pain, remove the
occasion of pity, and the need of morality is gone. To say "thou
shalt not" would then be an impertinence.

But this elimination of precept would not be a cessation of life.
The senses would still be open, the instincts would still operate,
and lead all creatures to the haunts and occupations that befitted
them. The variety of nature and the infinity of art, with the
companionship of our fellows, would fill the leisure of that ideal
existence. These are the elements of our positive happiness, the
things which, amid a thousand vexations and vanities, make the
clear profit of living.

_Aesthetic consecration of general principles._

§ 6. Not only are the various satisfactions which morals are meant
to secure aesthetic in the last analysis, but when the conscience is
formed, and right principles acquire an immediate authority, our
attitude to these principles becomes aesthetic also. Honour,
truthfulness, and cleanliness are obvious examples. When the
absence of these virtues causes an instinctive disgust, as it does in
well-bred people, the reaction is essentially aesthetic, because it is
not based on reflection and benevolence, but on constitutional
sensitiveness. This aesthetic sensitiveness is, however, properly
enough called moral, because it is the effect of conscientious
training and is more powerful for good in society than laborious
virtue, because it is much more constant and catching. It is
Kalokagathia, the aesthetic demand for the morally good, and
perhaps the finest flower of human nature.

But this tendency of representative principles to become
independent powers and acquire intrinsic value is sometimes
mischievous. It is the foundation of the conflicts between
sentiment and justice, between intuitive and utilitarian morals.
Every human reform is the reassertion of the primary interests of
man against the authority of general principles which have ceased
to represent those interests fairly, but which still obtain the
idolatrous veneration of mankind. Nor are chivalry and religion
alone liable to fall into this moral superstition. It arises wherever
an abstract good is substituted for its concrete equivalent. The
miser's fallacy is the typical case, and something very like it is the
ethical principle of half our respectable population. To the exercise
of certain useful habits men come to sacrifice the advantage which
was the original basis and justification of those habits. Minute
knowledge is pursued at the expense of largeness of mind, and
riches at the expense of comfort and freedom.

This error is all the more specious when the derived aim has in
itself some aesthetic charm, such as belongs to the Stoic idea of
playing one's part in a vast drama of things, irrespective of any
advantage thereby accruing to any one; somewhat as the miser's
passion is rendered a little normal when his eye is fascinated not
merely by the figures of a bank account, but by the glitter of the
yellow gold. And the vanity of playing a tragic part and the glory
of conscious self-sacrifice have the same immediate fascination.
Many irrational maxims thus acquire a kind of nobility. An object
is chosen as the highest good which has not only a certain
representative value, but also an intrinsic one, -- which is not
merely a method for the realization of other values, but a value in
its own realization.

Obedience to God is for the Christian, as conformity to the laws of
nature or reason is for the Stoic, an attitude which has a certain
emotional and passionate worth, apart from its original justification
by maxims of utility. This emotional and passionate force is the
essence of fanaticism, it makes imperatives categorical, and gives
them absolute sway over the conscience in spite of their
one-sidedness and their injustice to the manifold demands of human
nature.

Obedience to God or reason can originally recommend itself to a
man only as the surest and ultimately least painful way of
balancing his aims and synthesizing his desires. So necessary is
this sanction even to the most impetuous natures, that no martyr
would go to the stake if he did not believe that the powers of nature,
in the day of judgment, would be on his side. But the human mind
is a turbulent commonwealth, and the laws that make for the
greatest good cannot be established in it without some partial
sacrifice, without the suppression of many particular impulses.
Hence the voice of reason or the command of God, which makes
for the maximum ultimate satisfaction, finds itself opposed by
sundry scattered and refractory forces, which are henceforth
denominated bad. The unreflective conscience, forgetting the
vicarious source of its own excellence, then assumes a solemn and
incomprehensible immediacy, as if its decrees were absolute and
intrinsically authoritative, not of to-day or yesterday, and no one
could tell whence they had arisen. Instinct can all the more easily
produce this mystification when it calls forth an imaginative
activity full of interest and eager passion. This effect is
conspicuous in the absolutist conscience, both devotional and
rationalistic, as also in the passion of love. For in all these a certain
individuality, definiteness, and exclusiveness is given to the
pursued object which is very favourable to zeal, and the heat of
passion melts together the various processes of volition into the
consciousness of one adorable influence.

However deceptive these complications may prove to men of
action and eloquence, they ought not to impose on the critic of
human nature. Evidently what value general goods do not derive
from the particular satisfactions they stand for, they possess in
themselves as ideas pleasing and powerful over the imagination.
This intrinsic advantage of certain principles and methods is none
the less real for being in a sense aesthetic. Only a sordid
utilitarianism that subtracts the imagination from human nature, or
at least slurs over its immense contribution to our happiness, could
fail to give these principles the preference over others practically
as good.

If it could be shown, for instance, that monarchy was as apt, in a
given case, to secure the public well-being as some other
form of government, monarchy should be preferred, and would
undoubtedly be established, on account of its imaginative and
dramatic superiority. But if, blinded by this somewhat ethereal
advantage, a party sacrificed to it important public interests, the
injustice would be manifest. In a doubtful case, a nation decides,
not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its
sentimental needs. The important point is to remember that the
representative or practical value of a principle is one thing, and its
intrinsic or aesthetic value is another, and that the latter can be
justly counted only as an item in its favour to be weighed; against
possible external disadvantages. Whenever this comparison and
balancing of ultimate benefits of every kind is angrily dismissed in
favour of some absolute principle, laid down in contempt of human
misery and happiness, we have a personal and fantastic system of
ethics, without practical sanctions. It is an evidence that the
superstitious imagination has invaded the sober and practical
domain of morals.

_Aesthetic and physical pleasure._

§ 7. We have now separated with some care intellectual and moral
judgments from the sphere of our subject, and found that we are to
deal only with perceptions of value, and with these only when they
are positive and immediate. But even with these distinctions the
most remarkable characteristic of the sense of beauty remains
undefined. All pleasures are intrinsic and positive values, but all
pleasures are not perceptions of beauty. Pleasure is indeed the
essence of that perception, but there is evidently in this particular
pleasure a complication which is not present in others and which is
the basis of the distinction made by consciousness and language
between it and the rest. It will be instructive to notice the degrees
of this difference.

The bodily pleasures are those least resembling perceptions of
beauty. By bodily pleasures we mean, of course, more than
pleasures with a bodily seat; for that class would include them all,
as well as all forms and elements of consciousness. Aesthetic
pleasures have physical conditions, they depend on the activity of
the eye and the ear, of the memory and the other ideational
functions of the brain. But we do not connect those pleasures with
their seats except in physiological studies; the ideas with which
aesthetic pleasures are associated are not the ideas of their bodily
causes. The pleasures we call physical, and regard as low, on the
contrary, are those which call our attention to some part of our own
body, and which make no object so conspicuous to us as the organ
in which they arise.

There is here, then, a very marked distinction between physical and
aesthetic pleasure; the organs of the latter must be transparent, they
must not intercept our attention, but carry it directly to some
external object. The greater dignity and range of aesthetic pleasure
is thus made very intelligible. The soul is glad, as it were, to forget
its connexion with the body and to fancy that it can travel over the
world with the liberty with which it changes the objects of its
thought. The mind passes from China to Peru without any
conscious change in the local tensions of the body. This illusion of
disembodiment is very exhilarating, while immersion in the flesh
and confinement to some organ gives a tone of grossness
and selfishness to our consciousness. The generally meaner
associations of physical pleasures also help to explain their
comparative crudity.

_The differetia of aesthetic pleasure not its disinterestedness._

§ 8. The distinction between pleasure and the sense of beauty has
sometimes been said to consist in the unselfishness of aesthetic
satisfaction. In other pleasures, it is said, we gratify our senses and
passions; in the contemplation of beauty we are raised above
ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the
recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess. The painter
does not look at a spring of water with the eyes of a thirsty man,
nor at a beautiful woman with those of a satyr. The difference lies,
it is urged, in the impersonality of the enjoyment. But this
distinction is one of intensity and delicacy, not of nature, and it
seems satisfactory only to the least aesthetic minds.[1]

In the second place, the supposed disinterestedness of aesthetic
delights is not truly fundamental. Appreciation of a picture is not
identical with the desire to buy it, but it is, or ought to be, closely
related and preliminary to that desire. The beauties of nature and of
the plastic arts are not consumed by being enjoyed; they retain all
the efficacy to impress a second beholder. But this circumstance is
accidental, and those aesthetic objects which depend upon change
and are exhausted in time, as are all performances, are things the
enjoyment of which is an object of rivalry and is coveted as much
as any other pleasure. And even plastic beauties can often not be
enjoyed except by a few, on account of the necessity of travel or
other difficulties of access, and then this aesthetic enjoyment is as
selfishly pursued as the rest.

The truth which the theory is trying to state seems rather to be that
when we seek aesthetic pleasures we have no further pleasure in
mind; that we do not mix up the satisfactions of vanity and
proprietorship with the delight of contemplation. This is true, but it
is true at bottom of all pursuits and enjoyments. Every real
pleasure is in one sense disinterested. It is not sought with ulterior
motives, and what fills the mind is no calculation, but the image of
an object or event, suffused with emotion. A sophisticated
consciousness may often take the idea of self as the touchstone of
its inclinations; but this self, for the gratification and
aggrandizement of which a man may live, is itself only a complex
of aims and memories, which once had their direct objects, in
which he had taken a spontaneous and unselfish interest. The
gratifications which, merged together, make the selfishness are
each of them ingenuous, and no more selfish than the most
altruistic, impersonal emotion. The content of selfishness is a mass
of unselfishness. There is no reference to the nominal essence
called oneself either in one's appetites or in one's natural affections;
yet a man absorbed in his meat and drink, in his houses and lands,
in his children and dogs, is called selfish because these interests,
although natural and instinctive in him, are not shared by others.
The unselfish man is he whose nature has a more universal
direction, whose interests are more widely diffused.

But as impersonal thoughts are such only in their object, not in
their subject or agents, since, all thoughts are the thoughts of
somebody: so also unselfish interests have to be somebody's
interests. If we were not interested in beauty, if it were of no
concern to our happiness whether things were beautiful or ugly, we
should manifest not the maximum, but the total absence of
aesthetic faculty. The disinterestedness of this pleasure is, therefore,
that of all primitive and intuitive satisfactions, which are in no way
conditioned by a reference to an artificial general concept, like that
of the self, all the potency of which must itself be derived from the
independent energy of its component elements. I care about myself
because "myself" is a name for the things I have at heart. To set up
the verbal figment of personality and make it an object of concern
apart from the interests which were its content and substance, turns
the moralist into a pedant, and ethics into a superstition. The self
which is the object of _amour propre_ is an idol of the tribe, and
needs to be disintegrated into the primitive objective interests that
underlie it before the cultus of it can be justified by reason.

_The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its universality._

§ 9. The supposed disinterestedness of our love of beauty passes
into another characteristic of it often regarded as essential, -- its
universality. The pleasures of the senses have, it is said, no
dogmatism in them; that anything gives me pleasure involves no
assertion about its capacity to give pleasure to another. But when I
judge a thing to be beautiful, my judgment means that the thing is
beautiful in itself, or (what is the same thing more critically
expressed) that it should seem so to everybody.  The claim to
universality is, according to this doctrine, the essence of the
aesthetic; what makes the perception of beauty a judgment rather
than a sensation. All aesthetic precepts would be impossible, and
all criticism arbitrary and subjective, unless we admit a paradoxical
universality in our judgment, the philosophical implications of
which we may then go on to develope. But we are fortunately not
required to enter the labyrinth into which this method leads; there
is a much simpler and clearer way of studying such questions,
which is to challenge and analyze the assertion before us and seek
its basis in human nature. Before this is done, we should run the
risk of expanding a natural misconception or inaccuracy of thought
into an inveterate and pernicious prejudice by making it the centre
of an elaborate construction.

That the claim of universality is such a natural inaccuracy will not
be hard to show. There is notoriously no great agreement upon
aesthetic matters; and such agreement as there is, is based upon
similarity of origin, nature, and circumstance among men, a
similarity which, where it exists, tends to bring about identity in all
judgments and feelings. It is unmeaning to say that what is
beautiful to one man _ought_ to be beautiful to another. If their
senses are the same, their associations and dispositions similar,
then the same thing will certainly be beautiful to both. If their
natures are different, the form which to one will be entrancing will
be to another even invisible, because his classifications and
discriminations in perception will be different, and he may see a
hideous detached fragment or a shapeless aggregate of things, in
what to another is a perfect whole -- so entirely are the unities of
function and use. It is absurd to say that what is invisible to a given
being _ought_ to seem beautiful to him. Evidently this obligation
of recognizing the same qualities is conditioned by the possession
of the same faculties. But no two men have exactly the same
faculties, nor can things have for any two exactly the same values.

What is loosely expressed by saying that any one ought to see this
or that beauty is that he would see it if his disposition, training, or
attention were what our ideal demands for him; and our ideal of
what any one should be has complex but discoverable sources. We
take, for instance, a certain pleasure in having our own judgments
supported by those of others; we are intolerant, if not of the
existence of a nature different from our own, at least of
its expression in words and judgments. We are confirmed or
made happy in our doubtful opinions by seeing them accepted
universally. We are unable to find the basis of our taste in our own
experience and therefore refuse to look for it there. If we were sure
of our ground, we should be willing to acquiesce in the naturally
different feelings and ways of others, as a man who is conscious of
speaking his language with the accent of the capital confesses its
arbitrariness with gayety, and is pleased and interested in the
variations of it he observes in provincials; but the provincial is
always zealous to show that he has reason and ancient authority to
justify his oddities. So people who have no sensations, and do not
know why they judge, are always trying to show that they judge by
universal reason.

Thus the frailty and superficiality of our own judgments cannot
brook contradiction. We abhor another man's doubt when we
cannot tell him why we ourselves believe. Our ideal of other men
tends therefore to include the agreement of their judgments with
our own; and although we might acknowledge the fatuity of this
demand in regard to natures very different from the human, we
may be unreasonable enough to require that all races should admire
the same style of architecture, and all ages the same poets.

The great actual unity of human taste within the range of
conventional history helps the pretension. But in principle it is
untenable. Nothing has less to do with the real merit of a work of
imagination than the capacity of all men to appreciate it; the true
test is the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who
appreciates it most. The symphony would lose nothing if half
mankind had always been deaf, as nine-tenths of them actually are
to the intricacies of its harmonies; but it would have lost much if
no Beethoven had existed. And more: incapacity to appreciate
certain types of beauty may be the condition _sine qua non_ for the
appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for
enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and
hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant.

The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are
philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they
indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of
them that has grown into a jealous passion. The architects that have
pieced out the imperfections of ancient buildings with their own
thoughts, like Charles V. when he raised his massive palace beside
the Alhambra, may be condemned from a certain point of view.
They marred much by their interference; but they showed a
splendid confidence in their own intuitions, a proud assertion of
their own taste, which is the greatest evidence of aesthetic sincerity.
On the contrary, our own gropings, eclecticism, and archaeology
are the symptoms of impotence. If we were less learned and less
just, we might be more efficient. If our appreciation were less
general, it might be more real, and if we trained our imagination
into exclusiveness, it might attain to character.

_The differentia of aesthetic pleasure: its objectification._

§ 10. There is, however, something more in the claim to
universality in aesthetic judgments than the desire to generalize our
own opinions. There is the expression of a curious but well-known
psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element
of sensation into the quality of a thing. If we say that other men
should see the beauties we see, it is because _we_ think those
beauties _are in the object,_ like its colour, proportion, or size. Our
judgment appears to us merely the perception and discovery of an
external existence, of the real excellence that is without. But this
notion is radically absurd and contradictory. Beauty, as we have
seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence
which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It
exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beautynot
perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction. But modern
philosophy has taught us to say the same thing of every element of
the perceived world; all are sensations; and their grouping into
objects imagined to be permanent and external is the work of
certain habits of our intelligence. We should be incapable of
surveying or retaining the diffused experiences of life, unless we
organized and classified them, and out of the chaos of impressions
framed the world of conventional and recognizable objects.

How this is done is explained by the current theories of perception.
External objects usually affect various senses at once, the
impressions of which are thereby associated. Repeated experiences
of one object are also associated on account of their similarity;
hence a double tendency to merge and unify into a single percept,
to which a name is attached, the group of those memories and
reactions which in fact had one external thing for their cause. But
this percept, once formed, is clearly different from those particular
experiences out of which it grew. It is permanent, they are variable.
They are but partial views and glimpses of it. The constituted
notion therefore comes to be the reality, and the materials of it
merely the appearance. The distinction between substance and
quality, reality and appearance, matter and mind, has no other
origin.

The objects thus conceived and distinguished from our ideas of
them, are at first compacted of all the impressions, feelings, and
memories, which offer themselves for association and fall within
the vortex of the amalgamating imagination. Every sensation we
get from a thing is originally treated as one of its qualities.
Experiment, however, and the practical need of a simpler
conception of the structure of objects lead us gradually to reduce
the qualities of the object to a minimum, and to regard most
perceptions as an effect of those few qualities upon us. These few
primary qualities, like extension which we persist in treating as
independently real and as the quality of a substance, are those
which suffice to explain the order of our experiences. All the rest,
like colour, are relegated to the subjective sphere, as merely effects
upon our minds, and apparent or secondary qualities of the object.

But this distinction has only a practical justification. Convenience
and economy of thought alone determine what combination of our
sensations we shall continue to objectify and treat as the cause of
the rest. The right and tendency to be objective is equal in all, since
they are all prior to the artifice of thought by which we separate the
concept from its materials, the thing from our experiences.

The qualities which we now conceive to belong to real objects are
for the moat part images of sight and touch. One of the first classes
of effects to be treated as secondary were naturally pleasures and
pains, since it could commonly conduce very little to intelligent
and successful action to conceive our pleasures and pains as
resident in objects. But emotions are essentially capable of
objectification, as well as impressions of sense; and one may well
believe that a primitive and inexperienced consciousness would
rather people the world with ghosts of its own terrors and passions
than with projections of those luminous and mathematical concepts
which as yet it could hardly have formed.

This animistic and mythological habit of thought still holds its own
at the confines of knowledge, where mechanical explanations are
not found. In ourselves, where nearness makes observation
difficult, in the intricate chaos of animal and human life, we still
appeal to the efficacy of will and ideas, as also in the remote night
of cosmic and religious problems. But in all the intermediate realm
of vulgar day, where mechanical science has made progress, the
inclusion of emotional or passionate elements in the concept of the
reality would be now an extravagance. Here our idea of things is
composed exclusively of perceptual elements, of the ideas of form
and of motion.

The beauty of objects, however, forms an exception to this rule.
Beauty is an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which
nevertheless we regard as a quality of things. But we are now
prepared to understand the nature of this exception. It is the
survival of a tendency originally universal to make every effect of
a thing upon us a constituent of its conceived nature. The scientific
idea of a thing is a great abstraction from the mass of perceptions
and reactions which that thing produces the aesthetic idea is less
abstract, since it retains the emotional reaction, the pleasure of the
perception, as an integral part of the conceived thing.

Nor is it hard to find the ground of this survival in the sense of
beauty of an objectification of feeling elsewhere extinct. Most of
the pleasures which objects cause are easily distinguished and
separated from the perception of the object: the object has to be
applied to a particular organ, like the palate, or swallowed like
wine, or used and operated upon in some way before the pleasure
arises. The cohesion is therefore slight between the pleasure and
the other associated elements of sense; the pleasure is separated in
time from the perception, or it is localized in a different organ, and
consequently is at once recognized as an effect and not as a quality
of the object. But when the process of perception itself is pleasant,
as it may easily be, when the intellectual operation, by which the
elements of sense are associated and projected, and the concept of
the form and substance of the thing produced, is naturally
delightful, then we have a pleasure intimately bound up in the
thing, inseparable from its character and constitution, the seat of
which in us is the same as the seat of the perception. We naturally
fail, under these circumstances, to separate the pleasure from the
other objectified feelings. It becomes, like them, a quality of the
object, which we distinguish from pleasures not so incorporated in
the perception of things, by giving it the name of beauty.

_The definition of beauty._

§ 11. We have now reached our definition of beauty, which, in the
terms of our successive analysis and narrowing of the conception,
is value positive, intrinsic, and objectified. Or, in less technical
language, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.

This definition is intended to sum up a variety of distinctions and
identifications which should perhaps be here more explicitly set
down. Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of
fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection of our volitional
and appreciative nature. An object cannot be beautiful if it can give
pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever
indifferent is a contradiction in terms.

In the second place this value is positive, it is the sense of the
presence of something good, or (in the case of ugliness) of its
absence. It is never the perception of a positive evil, it is never a
negative value. That we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a
pure gain which brings no evil with it. When the ugly ceases to be
amusing or merely uninteresting and becomes disgusting, it
becomes indeed a positive evil: but a moral and practical, not an
aesthetic one. In aesthetics that saying is true -- often so
disingenuous in ethics -- that evil is nothing but the absence of
good: for even the tedium and vulgarity of an existence without
beauty is not itself ugly so much as lamentable and degrading. The
absence of aesthetic goods is a moral evil: the aesthetic evil is
merely relative, and means less of aesthetic good than was
expected at the place and time. No form in itself gives pain,
although some forms give pain by causing a shock of surprise even
when they are really beautiful: as if a mother found a fine bull pup
in her child's cradle, when her pain would not be aesthetic in its
nature.

Further, this pleasure must not be in the consequence of the utility
of the object or event, but in its immediate perception; in other
words, beauty is an ultimate good, something that gives
satisfaction to a natural function, to some fundamental need or
capacity of our minds. Beauty is therefore a positive value that is
intrinsic; it is a pleasure. These two circumstances sufficiently
separate the sphere of aesthetics from that of ethics. Moral values
are generally negative, and always remote. Morality has to do with
the avoidance of evil and the pursuit of good: aesthetics only with
enjoyment.

Finally, the pleasures of sense are distinguished from the
perception of beauty, as sensation in general is distinguished from
perception; by the objectification of the elements and their
appearance as qualities rather of things than of consciousness. The
passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may
be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of
sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends
upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the
moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am
self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use, one phrase; if I am
impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven,
and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear;
and the union of two pleasures often makes one beauty. In
Shakespeare's LIVth sonnet are these words:

     O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
     By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
     The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
     For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
     The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
     As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
     Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
     When summer's breath their masked buds discloses.
     But, for their beauty only is their show,
     They live unwooed and unrespected fade;
     Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so:
     Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.

One added ornament, we see, turns the deep dye, which was but
show and mere sensation before, into an element of beauty and
reality, and as truth is here the co-operation of perceptions, so
beauty is the co-operation of pleasures. If colour, form, and motion
are hardly beautiful without the sweetness of the odour, how much
more necessary would they be for the sweetness itself to become a
beauty! If we had the perfume in a flask, no one would think of
calling it beautiful: it would give us too detached and controllable
a sensation. There would be no object in which it could be easily
incorporated. But let it float from the garden, and it will add
another sensuous charm to objects simultaneously recognized, and
help to make them beautiful. Thus beauty is constituted by the
objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified.


PART II

THE MATERIALS OF BEAUTY

_All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty._

§ 12. Our task will now be to pass in review the various elements
of our consciousness, and see what each contributes to the beauty
of the world. We shall find that they do so whenever they are
inextricably associated with the objectifying activity of the
understanding. Whenever the golden thread of pleasure enters that
web of things which our intelligence is always busily spinning, it
lends to the visible world that mysterious and subtle charm which
we call beauty.

There is no function of our nature which cannot contribute
something to this effect, but one function differs very much from
another in the amount and directness of its contribution. The
pleasures of the eye and ear, of the imagination and memory, are
the most easily objectified and merged in ideas; but it would betray
inexcusable haste and slight appreciation of the principle involved,
if we called them the only materials of beauty. Our effort will
rather be to discover its other sources, which have been more
generally ignored, and point out their importance. For the five
senses and the three powers of the soul, which play so large a part
in traditional psychology, are by no means the only sources or
factors of consciousness; they are more or less external divisions of
its content, and not even exhaustive of that. The nature and
changes of our life have deeper roots, and are controlled by less
obvious processes.

The human body is a machine that holds together by virtue of
certain vital functions, on the cessation of which it is dissolved.
Some of these, like the circulation of the blood, the growth and
decay of the tissues, are at first sight unconscious. Yet any
important disturbance of these fundamental processes at once
produces great and painful changes in consciousness. Slight
alterations are not without their conscious echo: and the whole
temper and tone of our mind, the strength of our passions, the grip
and concatenation of our habits, our power of attention, and the
liveliness of our fancy and affections are due to the influence of
these vital forces. They do not, perhaps, constitute the whole basis
of any one idea or emotion: but they are the conditions of the
existence and character of all.

Particularly important are they for the _value_ of our experience.
They constitute health, without which no pleasure can be pure.
They determine our impulses in leisure, and furnish that surplus
energy which we spend in play, in art, and in speculation. The
attraction of these pursuits, and the very existence of an aesthetic
sphere, is due to the efficiency and perfection of our vital processes.
The pleasures which they involve are not exclusively bound to any
particular object, and therefore do not account for the relative
beauty of things. They are loose and unlocalized, having no special
organ, or one which is internal and hidden within the body. They
therefore remain undiscriminated in consciousness, and can serve
to add interest to any object, or to cast a general glamour over the
world, very favourable to its interest and beauty.

The aesthetic value of vital functions differs according to their
physiological concomitants: those that are favourable to ideation
are of course more apt to extend something of their intimate
warmth to the pleasures of contemplation, and thus to intensify the
sense of beauty and the interest of thought. Those, on the other
hand, that for physiological reasons tend to inhibit ideation, and to
drown the attention in dumb and unrepresentable feelings, are less
favourable to aesthetic activity. The double effect of drowsiness
and reverie will illustrate this difference. The heaviness of sleep
seems to fall first on the outer senses, and of course makes them
incapable of acute impressions; but if it goes no further, it leaves
the imagination all the freer, and by heightening the colours of the
fancy, often suggests and reveals beautiful images. There is a kind
of poetry and invention that comes only in such moments. In them
many lovely melodies must first have been heard, and centaurs and
angels originally imagined.

If, however, the lethargy is more complete, or if the cause of it is
such that the imagination is retarded while the senses remain
awake, -- as is the case with an over-fed or over-exercised body, --
we have a state of aesthetic insensibility. The exhilaration which
comes with pure and refreshing air has a marked influence on our
appreciations. To it is largely due the beauty of the morning, and
the entirely different charm it has from the evening. The opposite
state of all the functions here adds an opposite emotion to
externally similar scenes, making both infinitely but differently
beautiful.

It would be curious and probably surprising to discover how much
the pleasure of breathing has to do with our highest and most
transcendental ideals. It is not merely a metaphor that makes us
couple airiness with exquisiteness and breathlessness with awe; it
is the actual recurrence of a sensation in the throat and lungs that
gives those impressions an immediate power, prior to all reflection
upon their significance. It is, therefore, to this vital sensation of
deep or arrested respiration that the impressiveness of those objects
is immediately due.

_The influence of the passion of love._

§ 13. Half-way between vital and social functions, lies the sexual
instinct. If nature had solved the problem of reproduction without
the differentiation of sex, our emotional life would have been
radically different. So profound and, especially in woman, so
pervasive an influence does this function exert, that we should
betray an entirely unreal view of human nature if we did not
inquire into the relations of sex with our aesthetic susceptibility.
We must not expect, however, any great difference between man
and woman in the scope or objects of aesthetic interest: what is
important in emotional life is not which sex an animal has, but that
it has sex at all. For if we consider the difficult problem which
nature had to solve in sexual reproduction, and the nice adjustment
of instinct which it demands, we shall see that the reactions and
susceptibilities which must be implanted in the individual are for
the most part identical in both sexes, as the sexual organization is
itself fundamentally similar in both. Indeed, individuals of various
species and the whole animal kingdom have the same sexual
disposition, although, of course, the particular object destined to
call forth the complete sexual reaction, differs with every species,
and with each sex.

If we were dealing with the philosophy of love, and not with that
of beauty, our problem would be to find out by what machinery
this fundamental susceptibility, common to all animals of both
sexes, is gradually directed to more and more definite objects: first,
to one species and one sex, and ultimately to one individual. It is
not enough that sexual organs should be differentiated: the
connexion must be established between them and the outer senses,
so that the animal may recognize and pursue the proper object.

The case of lifelong fidelity to one mate -- perhaps even to an
unsatisfied and hopeless love -- is the maximum of differentiation,
which even overleaps the utility which gave it a foothold in nature,
and defeats its own object. For the differentiation of the instinct in
respect to sex, age, and species is obviously necessary to its
success as a device for reproduction. While this differentiation is
not complete, -- and it often is not, -- there is a great deal of
groping and waste; and the force and constancy of the instinct must
make up for its lack of precision. A great deal of vital energy is
thus absorbed by this ill-adjusted function. The most economical
arrangement which can be conceived, would be one by which only
the one female best fitted to bear offspring to a male should arouse
his desire, and only so many times as it was well she should grow
pregnant, thus leaving his energy and attention free at all other
times to exercise the other faculties of his nature.

If this ideal had been reached, the instinct, like all those perfectly
adjusted, would tend to become unconscious; and we should miss
those secondary effects with which we are exclusively concerned
in aesthetics. For it is precisely from the waste, from the radiation
of the sexual passion, that I beauty borrows warmth. As a harp,
made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to every wind, so
the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes
simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of
tenderness toward every object. The capacity to love gives our
contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to
manifest beauty; and the whole sentimental side of our aesthetic
sensibility -- without which it would be perceptive and
mathematical rather than aesthetic -- is due to our sexual
organization remotely stirred.

The attraction of sex could not become efficient unless the senses
were first attracted. The eye must be fascinated and the ear
charmed by the object which nature intends should be pursued.
Both sexes for this reason develope secondary sexual characteristics;
and the sexual emotions are simultaneously extended to various
secondary objects. The colour, the grace, the form, which
become the stimuli of sexual passion, and the guides of
sexual selection, acquire, before they can fulfil that office, a
certain intrinsic charm. This charm is not only present for reasons
which, in an admissible sense, we may call teleological, on account,
that is, of its past utility in reproduction, but its intensity and power
are due to the simultaneous stirring of profound sexual impulses.
Not, of course, that any specifically sexual ideas are connected
with these feelings: such ideas are absent in a modest and
inexperienced mind even in the obviously sexual passions of love
and jealousy.

These secondary objects of interest, which are some of the most
conspicuous elements of beauty, are to be called sexual for these
two reasons: because the contingencies of the sexual function hare
helped to establish them in our race, and because they owe their
fascination in a great measure to the participation of our sexual life
in the reaction which they cause.

If any one were desirous to produce a being with a great
susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better
designed for that object than sex. Individuals that need not unite
for the birth and rearing of each generation, might retain a savage
independence. For them it would not be necessary that any vision
should fascinate, or that any languor should soften, the prying
cruelty of the eye. But sex endows the individual with a dumb and
powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually
towards another; makes it one of the dearest employments of his
life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the
keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solitude an
eternal melancholy.

What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest
meaning and beauty? The attention is fixed upon a well-defined
object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily
regarded as powers or qualities of that object. But these effects are
here powerful and profound. The soul is stirred to its depths. Its
hidden treasures are brought to the surface of consciousness. The
imagination and the heart awake for the first time. All these new
values crystallize about the objects then offered to the mind. If the
fancy is occupied by the image of a single person, whose qualities
have had the power of precipitating this revolution, all the values
gather about that one image. The object becomes perfect, and we
are said to be in love.[2] If the stimulus does not appear as a
definite image, the values evoked are dispersed over the world, and
we are said to have become lovers of nature, and to have
discovered the beauty and meaning of things.

To a certain extent this kind of interest will centre in the proper
object of sexual passion, and in the special characteristics of the
opposite sex; and we find accordingly that woman is the most
lovely object to man, and man, if female modesty would confess it,
the most interesting to woman. But the effects of so fundamental
and primitive a reaction are much more general. Sex is not the only
object of sexual passion. When love lacks its specific object, when
it does not yet understand itself, or has been sacrificed to some
other interest, we see the stifled fire bursting out in various
directions. One is religious devotion, another is zealous
philanthropy, a third is the fondling of pet animals, but not the least
fortunate is the love of nature, and of art; for nature also is often a
second mistress that consoles us for the loss of a first. Passion then
overflows and visibly floods those neighbouring regions which it
had always secretly watered. For the same nervous organization
which sex involves, with its necessarily wide branchings and
associations in the brain, must be partially stimulated by other
objects than its specific or ultimate one especially in man, who,
unlike some of the lower animals, has not his instincts clearly
distinct and intermittent, but always partially active, and never
active in isolation. We may say, then, that for man all nature is a
secondary object of sexual passion, and that to this fact the beauty
of nature is largely due.

_Social instincts and their aesthetic influence._

§ 14. The function of reproduction carries with it not only direct
modifications of the body and mind, but a whole set of social
institutions, for the existence of which social instincts and habits
are necessary in man. These social feelings, the parental, the
patriotic, or the merely gregarious, are not of much direct value for
aesthetics, although, as is seen in the case of fashions, they are
important in determining the duration and prevalence of a taste
once formed.  Indirectly they are of vast importance and play a
great rôle in arts like poetry, where the effect depends on what is
signified more than on what is offered to sense. Any appeal to a
human interest rebounds in favour of a work of art in which it is
successfully made. That interest, unaesthetic in itself, helps to fix
the attention and to furnish subject-matter and momentum to arts
and modes of appreciation which are aesthetic. Thus comprehension
of the passion of love is necessary to the appreciation of
numberless songs, plays, and novels, and not a few works of
musical and plastic art.

The treatment of these matters must be postponed until we are
prepared to deal with expression -- the most complex element of
effect. It will suffice here to point out why social and gregarious
impulses, in the satisfaction of which happiness mainly resides, are
those in which beauty finds least support. This may help us to
understand better the relations between aesthetics and _hedonics,_
and the nature of that objectification in which we have placed the
difference between beauty and pleasure.

So long as happiness is conceived as a poet might conceive it,
namely, in its immediately sensuous and emotional factors, so long
as we live in the moment and make our happiness consist in the
simplest things, -- in breathing, seeing, hearing, loving, and
sleeping, -- our happiness has the same substance, the same
elements, as our aesthetic delight, for it is aesthetic delight that
makes our happiness. Yet poets and artists, with their immediate
and aesthetic joys, are not thought to be happy men; they
themselves are apt to be loud in their lamentations, and to regard
themselves as eminently and tragically unhappy. This arises from
the intensity and inconstancy of their emotions, from their
improvidence, and from the eccentricity of their social habits.
While among them the sensuous and vital functions have the upper
hand, the gregarious and social instincts are subordinated and often
deranged; and their unhappiness consists in the sense of their
unfitness to live in the world into which they are born.

But man is pre-eminently a political animal, and social needs are
almost as fundamental in him as vital functions, and often more
conscious. Friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence,
when added to family life, constitute surely the main elements of
happiness. Now these are only very partially composed of definite
images of objects. The desire for them, the consciousness of their
absence or possession, comes upon us only when we reflect, when
we are planning, considering the future, gathering the words of
others, rehearsing their scorn or admiration for ourselves,
conceiving possible situations in which our virtue, our fame or
power would become conspicuous, comparing our lot with that of
others, and going through other discursive processes of thought.
Apprehension, doubt, isolation, are things which come upon us
keenly when we reflect upon our lives; they cannot easily become
qualities of any object. If by chance they can, they acquire a great
aesthetic value. For instance, "home," which in its social sense is a
concept of happiness, when it becomes materialized in a cottage
and a garden becomes an aesthetic concept, becomes a beautiful
thing. The happiness is objectified, and the object beautified.

Social objects, however, are seldom thus aesthetic, because they
are not thus definitely imaginable. They are diffuse and abstract,
and verbal rather than sensuous in their materials. Therefore the
great emotions that go with them are not immediately transmutable
into beauty. If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because
happiness does not interest them. They cannot seriously pursue it,
because its components are not components of beauty, and being in
love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unaesthetic social
virtues in the operation of which happiness is found. On the other
hand those who pursue happiness conceived merely in the abstract
and conventional terms, as money, success, or respectability, often
miss that real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from
the senses and imagination. This element is what aesthetics
supplies to life; for beauty also can be a cause and a factor of
happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too
sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be
accounted happiness by the worldly mind.

_The lower senses._

§ 15. The senses of touch, taste, and smell, although capable no
doubt of a great development, have not served in man for the
purposes of intelligence so much as those of sight and hearing. It is
natural that as they remain normally in the background of
consciousness, and furnish the least part of our objectified ideas,
the pleasures connected with them should remain also detached,
and unused for the purpose of appreciation of nature. They have
been called the unaesthetic, as well as the lower, senses; but the
propriety of these epithets, which is undeniable, is due not to any
intrinsic sensuality or baseness of these senses, but to the function
which they happen to have in our experience. Smell and taste, like
hearing, have the great disadvantage of not being intrinsically
spatial: they are therefore not fitted to serve for the representation
of nature, which allows herself to be accurately conceived only in
spatial terms.[3] They have not reached, moreover, the same
organization as sounds, and therefore cannot furnish any play of
subjective sensation comparable to music in interest.

The objectification of musical forms is due to their fixity and
complexity: like words, they are thought of as existing in a social
medium, and can be beautiful without being spatial. But tastes
have never been so accurately or universally classified and
distinguished; the instrument of sensation does not allow such nice
and stable discriminations as does the ear. The art of combining
dishes and wines, although one which everybody practises with
more or less skill and attention, deals with a material far too
unrepresentable to be called beautiful. The art remains in the
sphere of the pleasant, and is consequently regarded as servile,
rather than fine.

Artists in life, if that expression may be used for those who have
beautified social and domestic existence, have appealed
continually to these lower senses. A fragrant garden, and savoury
meats, incense, and perfumes, soft stuffs, and delicious colours,
form our ideal of oriental luxuries, an ideal which appeals too
much to human nature ever to lose its charm. Yet our northern
poets have seldom attempted to arouse these images in their
sensuous intensity, without relieving them by some imaginative
touch. In Keats, for example, we find the following lines: --

     And still she slept in azure-lidded sleep,
     In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
     While he from forth the closet brought a heap
     Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd,
     With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
     And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;
     Manna and dates in argosy transferred
     From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one
     From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.

Even the most sensuous of English poets, in whom the love of
beauty is supreme, cannot keep long to the primal elements of
beauty; the higher flight is inevitable for him. And how much does
not the appeal to things in argosy transferred from Fez, reinforced
with the reference to Samarcand and especially to the authorized
beauties of the cedars of Lebanon, which even the Puritan may
sing without a blush, add to our wavering satisfaction and
reconcile our conscience to this unchristian indulgence of sense!

But the time may be near when such scruples will be less common,
and our poetry, with our other arts, will dwell nearer to the
fountain-head of all inspiration. For if nothing not once in sense is
to be found in the intellect, much less is such a thing to be found in
the imagination. If the cedars of Lebanon did not spread a grateful
shade, or the winds rustle through the maze of their branches, if
Lebanon had never been beautiful to sense, it would not now be a
fit or poetic subject of allusion. And the word "Fez" would be
without imaginative value if no traveller had ever felt the
intoxication of the torrid sun, the languors of oriental luxury, or,
like the British soldier, cried amid the dreary moralities of his
native land: --

     Take me somewhere east of Suez
          Where the best is like the worst,
     Where there ain't no ten commandments
          And a man may raise a thirst.

Nor would Samarcand be anything but for the mystery of the
desert and the picturesqueness of caravans, nor would an argosy be
poetic if the sea had no voices and no foam, the winds and oars no
resistance, and the rudder and taut sheets no pull. From these real
sensations imagination draws its life, and suggestion its power.
The sweep of the fancy is itself also agreeable; but the superiority
of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety
of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty
of those that can at any time be felt.

_Sound._

§ 16. Sound shares with the lower senses the disadvantage of
having no intrinsic spatial character; it, therefore, forms no part of
the properly abstracted external world, and the pleasures of the ear
cannot become, in the literal sense, qualities of _things._ But there
is in sounds such an exquisite and continuous gradation in pitch,
and such a measurable relation in length, that an object almost as
complex and describable as the visible one can be built out of
them. What gives spatial forms their value in description of
the environment is the ease with which discriminations and
comparisons can be made in spatial objects: they are measurable,
while unspatial sensations commonly are not. But sounds are also
measurable in their own category: they have comparable pitches
and durations, and definite and recognizable combinations of those
sensuous elements are as truly _objects_ as chairs and tables. Not
that a musical composition exists in any mystical way, as a portion
of the music of the spheres, which no one is hearing; but that, for a
critical philosophy, visible objects are also nothing but possibilities
of sensation. The real world is merely the shadow of that assurance
of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. This objectivity
can accrue to any mental figment that has enough cohesion,
content, and individuality to be describable and recognizable, and
these qualities belong no less to audible than to spatial ideas.

There is, accordingly, some justification in Schopenhauer's
speculative assertion that music repeats the entire world of sense,
and is a parallel method of expression of the underlying substance,
or will. The world of sound is certainly capable of infinite variety
and, were our sense developed, of infinite extensions; and it has as
much as the world of matter the power to interest us and to stir our
emotions. It was therefore potentially as full of meaning. But it has
proved the less serviceable and constant apparition; and, therefore,
music, which builds with its materials, while the purest and most
impressive of the arts, is the least human and instructive of them.

The pleasantness of sounds has a simple physical basis. All
sensations are pleasant only between certain limits of intensity; but
the ear can discriminate easily between noises, that in themselves
are uninteresting, if not annoying, and notes, which have an
unmistakable charm. A sound is a note if the pulsations of the air
by which it is produced recur at regular intervals. If there is no
regular recurrence of waves, it is a noise. The rapidity of these
regular beats determines the pitch of tones. That quality or
_timbre_ by which one sound is distinguished from another of the
same pitch and intensity is due to the different complications of
waves in the air; the ability to discriminate the various waves in the
vibrating air is, therefore, the condition of our finding music in it;
for every wave has its period, and what we call a noise is a
complication of notes too complex for our organs or our attention
to decipher.

We find here, at the very threshold of our subject, a clear instance
of a conflict of principles which appears everywhere in aesthetics,
and is the source and explanation of many conflicts of taste. Since
a note is heard when a set of regular vibrations can be
discriminated in the chaos of sound, it appears that the perception
and value of this artistic element depends on abstraction, on the
omission from the field of attention, of all the elements which do
not conform to a simple law. This may be called the principle of
purity. But if it were, the only principle at work, there would be no
music more beautiful than the tone of a tuning-fork. Such sounds,
although delightful perhaps to a child, are soon tedious. The
principle of purity must make some compromise with another
principle, which we may call that of interest. The object must have
enough variety and expression to hold our attention for a while,
and to stir our nature widely.

As we are more acutely sensitive to results or to processes, we find
the most agreeable effect nearer to one or to the other of these
extremes of a tedious beauty or of an unbeautiful expressiveness.
But these principles, as is clear, are not coordinate. The child who
enjoys his rattle or his trumpet has aesthetic enjoyment, of
however rude a kind; but the master of technique who should give
a performance wholly without sensuous charm would be a gymnast
and not a musician, and the author whose novels and poems should
be merely expressive, and interesting only by their meaning and
moral, would be a writer of history or philosophy, but not an artist.
The principle of purity is therefore essential to aesthetic effect, but
the principle of interest is subsidiary, and if appealed to alone
would fail to produce beauty.

The distinction, however, is not absolute: for the simple sensation
is itself interesting, and the complication, if it is appreciable by
sense and does not require discursive thought to grasp it, is itself
beautiful. There may be a work of art in which the sensuous
materials are not pleasing, as a discourse without euphony, if the
structure and expression give delight; and there may be an
interesting object without perceived structure, like musical notes,
or the blue sky. Perfection would, of course, lie in the union of
elements all intrinsically beautiful, in forms also intrinsically so;
but where this is impossible, different natures prefer to sacrifice
one or the other advantage.

_Colour._

§ 17. In the eye we have an organ so differentiated that it is
sensitive to a much more subtle influence than even that of air
waves. There seems to be, in the interstellar spaces, some
pervasive fluid, for the light of the remotest star is rapidly
conveyed to us, and we can hardly understand how this radiation of
light, which takes place beyond our atmosphere, could be realized
without some medium. This hypothetical medium we call the ether.
It is capable of very rapid vibrations, which are propagated in all
directions, like the waves of sound, only much more quickly.
Many common observations, such as the apparent interval between
lightning and thunder, make us aware of the quicker motion of
light. Now, since nature was filled with this responsive fluid,
which propagated to all distances vibrations originating at any
point, and moreover as these vibrations, when intercepted by a
solid body, were reflected wholly or in part, it obviously became
very advantageous to every animal to develope an organ sensitive
to these vibrations -- sensitive, that is, to light. For this would give
the mind instantaneous impressions dependent upon the presence
and nature of distant objects.

To this circumstance we must attribute the primacy of sight in our
perception, a primacy that makes light the natural symbol of
knowledge. When the time came for our intelligence to take the
great metaphysical leap, and conceive its content as permanent and
independent, or, in other words, to imagine _things,_ the idea of
these _things_ had to be constructed out of the materials already
present to the mind. But the fittest material for such construction
was that furnished by the eye, since it is the eye that brings us into
widest relations with our actual environment, and gives us the
quickest warning of approaching impressions. Sight has a
prophetic function. We are less interested in it for itself than for the
suggestion it brings of what may follow after. Sight is a method of
presenting psychically what is practically absent; and as the
essence of the _thing_ is its existence in our absence, the _thing_ is
spontaneously conceived in terms of sight.

Sight is, therefore, perception _par excellence,_ since we become
most easily aware of objects through visual agency and in visual
terms. Now, as the values of perception are those we call aesthetic,
and there could be no beauty if there was no conception of
independent objects, we may expect to find beauty derived mainly
from the pleasures of sight. And, in fact, form, which is almost a
synonym of beauty, is for us usually something visible: it is a
synthesis of the seen. But prior to the effect of form, which arises
in the constructive imagination, comes the effect of colour; this is
purely sensuous, and no better intrinsically than the effects of any
other sense: but being more involved in the perception of objects
than are the rest, it becomes more readily an element of beauty.

The values of colours differ appreciably and have analogy to the
differing values of other sensations. As sweet or pungent smells, as
high and low notes, or major and minor chords, differ from each
other by virtue of their different stimulation of the senses, so also
red differs from green, and green from violet. There is a nervous
process for each, and consequently a specific value. This emotional
quality has affinity to the emotional quality of other sensations; we
need not be surprised that the high rate of vibration which yields a
sharp note to the ear should involve somewhat the same feeling
that is produced by the high rate of vibration which, to the eye,
yields a violet colour. These affinities escape many minds; but it is
conceivable that the sense of them should be improved by accident
or training. There are certain effects of colour which give all men
pleasure, and others which jar, almost like a musical discord. A
more general development of this sensibility would make possible
a new abstract art, an art that should deal with colours as music
does with sound.

We have not studied these effects, however, with enough attention,
we have not allowed them to penetrate enough into the soul, to
think them very significant. The stimulation of fireworks, or of
kaleidoscopic effects, seems to us trivial. But everything which has
a varied content has a potentiality of form and also of meaning.
The form will be enjoyed as soon as attention accustoms us to
discriminate and recognize its variations; and meaning will accrue
to it, when the various emotional values of these forms ally the
new object to all other experiences which involve similar emotions,
and thus give it a sympathetic environment in the mind. The
colours of the sunset have a brilliancy that attracts attention, and a
softness and illusiveness that enchant the eye; while the many
associations of the evening and of heaven gather about this kindred
charm and deepen it. Thus the most sensuous of beauties can be
full of sentimental suggestion. In stained glass, also, we have an
example of masses of colour made to exert their powerful direct
influence, to intensify an emotion eventually to be attached to very
ideal objects; what is in itself a gorgeous and unmeaning ornament,
by its absolute impressiveness becomes a vivid symbol of those
other ultimates which have a similar power over the soul.

_Materials surveyed._

§ 18. We have now gone over those organs of perception that give
us the materials out of which we construct objects, and mentioned
the most conspicuous pleasures which, as they arise from those
organs, are easily merged in the ideas furnished by the same. We
have also noticed that these ideas, conspicuous as they are in our
developed and operating consciousness, are not so much factors in
our thought, independent contributors to it, as they are
discriminations and excisions in its content, which, after they are
all made, leave still a background of vital feeling. For the outer
senses are but a portion of our sensorium, and the ideas of each, or
of all together, but a portion of our consciousness.

The pleasures which accompany ideation we have also found to be
unitary and vital; only just as for practical purposes it is necessary
to abstract and discriminate the contribution of one sense from that
of another, and thus to become aware of particular and definable
impressions, so it is natural that the diffused emotional tone of the
body should also be divided, and a certain modicum of pleasure or
pain should be attributed to each idea. Our pleasures are thus
described as the pleasures of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight,
and may become elements of beauty at the same time as the ideas
to, which they are attached become elements of objects. There is,
however, a remainder of emotion as there is a remainder of
sensation; and the importance of this remainder -- of the continuum
in which lie all particular pleasures and pains -- was insisted upon
in the beginning.

The beauty of the world, indeed, cannot be attributed wholly or
mainly to pleasures thus attached to abstracted sensations. It is
only the beauty of the materials of things which is drawn from the
pleasures of sensation. By far the most important effects are not
attributable to these materials, but to their arrangement and their
ideal relations. We have yet to study those processes of our mind
by which this arrangement and these relations are conceived; and
the pleasures which we can attach to these processes may then be
added to the pleasures attached to sense as further and more subtle
elements of beauty.

But before passing to the consideration of this more intricate
subject, we may note that however subordinate the beauty may be
which a garment, a building, or a poem derives from its sensuous
material, yet the presence of this sensuous material is indispensable.
Form cannot be the form of nothing. If, then, in finding or creating
beauty, we ignore the materials of things, and attend only to their
form, we miss an ever-present opportunity to heighten our effects.
For whatever delight the form may bring, the material might have
given delight already, and so much would have been gained
towards the value of the total result.

Sensuous beauty is not the greatest or most important element of
effect, but it is the most primitive and fundamental, and the most
universal. There is no effect of form which an effect of material
could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of
form, raises the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the
object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity which it
otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the
king's crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble
and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has
upon the senses, stimulates us here, where the form is also sublime,
and lifts and intensifies our emotions. We need this stimulus if our
perceptions are to reach the highest pitch of strength and acuteness.
Nothing can be ravishing that is not beautiful pervasively.

And another point. The wider diffusion of sensuous beauty makes
it as it were the poor man's good. Fewer factors are needed to
produce it and less training to appreciate it. The senses are
indispensable instruments of labour, developed by the necessities
of life; but their perfect development produces a harmony between
the inward structure and instinct of the organ and the outward
opportunities for its use; and this harmony is the source of
continual pleasures. In the sphere of sense, therefore, a certain
cultivation is inevitable in man; often greater, indeed, among
rude peoples, perhaps among animals, than among those whose
attention takes a wider sweep and whose ideas are more abstract.
Without requiring, therefore, that a man should rise above his
station, or develope capacities which his opportunities will seldom
employ, we may yet endow his life with aesthetic interest, if we
allow him the enjoyment of sensuous beauty. This enriches him
without adding to his labour, and flatters him without alienating
him from his world.

Taste, when it is spontaneous, always begins with the senses.
Children and savages, as we are so often told, delight in bright and
variegated colours; the simplest people appreciate the neatness of
muslin curtains, shining varnish, and burnished pots. A rustic
garden is a shallow patchwork of the liveliest flowers, without that
reserve and repose which is given by spaces and masses. Noise and
vivacity is all that childish music contains, and primitive songs add
little more of form than what is required to compose a few
monotonous cadences.  These limitations are not to be regretted;
they are a proof of sincerity.  Such simplicity is not the absence of
taste, but the beginning of it.

A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions creates traditional
forms and expresses the simple pathos of its life, in unchanging but
significant themes, repeated by generation after generation. When
sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition is substituted bad taste
comes in. The essence of it is a substitution of non-aesthetic for
aesthetic values. To love glass beads because they are beautiful is
barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar; to love jewels only because
they are dear is vulgar, and to betray the motive by placing them
ineffectively is an offence against taste. The test is always the same:
Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real; it
may be different from that of others, but is equally justified and
grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is
spurious, and you are guilty, not of heresy, which in aesthetics is
orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self-excommunication
from its sphere.

Now, a great sign of this hypocrisy is insensibility to sensuous
beauty. When people show themselves indifferent to primary and
fundamental effects, when they are incapable of finding pictures
except in frames or beauties except in the great masters, we may
justly suspect that they are parrots, and that their verbal and
historical knowledge covers a natural lack of aesthetic sense.
Where, on the contrary, insensibility to higher forms of beauty
does not exclude a natural love of the lower, we have every reason
to be encouraged; there is a true and healthy taste, which only
needs experience to refine it. If a man demands light, sound, and
splendour, he proves that he has the aesthetic equilibrium; that
appearances as such interest him, and that he can pause in
perception to enjoy. We have but to vary his observation, to
enlarge his thought, to multiply his discriminations -- all of which
education can do -- and the same aesthetic habit will reveal to him
every shade of the fit and fair. Or if it should not, and the man,
although sensuously gifted, proved to be imaginatively dull, at
least he would not have failed to catch an intimate and wide-spread
element of effect. The beauty of material is thus the groundwork of
all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have
to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where
sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can
arouse delight.


PART III

FORM

_There is a beauty of form._

§ 19. The most remarkable and characteristic problem of aesthetics
is that of beauty of form. Where there is a sensuous delight, like
that of colour, and the impression of the object is in its elements
agreeable, we have to look no farther for an explanation of the
charm we feel. Where there is expression, and an object indifferent
to the senses is associated with other ideas which are interesting,
the problem, although complex and varied, is in principle
comparatively plain. But there is an intermediate effect which is
more mysterious, and more specifically an effect of beauty. It is
found where sensible elements, by themselves indifferent, are so
united as to please in combination. There is something unexpected
in this phenomenon, so much so that those who cannot conceive its
explanation often reassure themselves by denying its existence. To
reduce beauty of form, however, to beauty of elements would not
be easy, because the creation and variation of effect, by changing
the relation of the simplest lines, offers too easy an experiment in
refutation. And it would, moreover, follow to the comfort of the
vulgar that all marble houses are equally beautiful.

To attribute beauty of form to expression is more plausible. If I
take the meaningless short lines in the figure and arrange them in
the given ways, intended to represent the human face, there appear
at once notably different aesthetic values.

[Illustration of long and short lines]

[Illustration of lines arranged into three facial profiles]

Two of the forms are differently grotesque and one approximately
beautiful. Now these effects are due to the expression of the lines;
not only because they make one think of fair or ugly faces, but
because, it may be said, these faces would in reality be fair or ugly
according to their expression, according to the vital and moral
associations of the different types.

Nevertheless, beauty of form cannot be reduced to expression
without denying the existence of immediate aesthetic values
altogether, and reducing them all to suggestions of moral good. For
if the object expressed by the form, and from which the form
derives its value, had itself beauty of form, we should not advance;
we must come somewhere to the point where the expression is of
something else than beauty; and this something else would of
course be some practical or moral good. Moralists are fond of such
an interpretation, and it is a very interesting one. It puts beauty in
the same relation to morals in which morals stand to pleasure and
pain; both would be intuitions, qualitatively new, but with the same
materials; they would be new perspectives of the same object.

But this theory is actually inadmissible. Innumerable aesthetic
effects, indeed all specific and unmixed ones, are direct
transmutations of pleasures and pains; they express nothing
extrinsic to themselves, much less moral excellences. The detached
lines of our figure signify nothing, but they are not absolutely
uninteresting; the straight line is the simplest and not the least
beautiful of forms. To say that it owes its interest to the thought of
the economy of travelling over the shortest road, or of other
practical advantages, would betray a feeble hold on psychological
reality. The impression of a straight line differs in a certain almost
emotional way from that of a curve, as those of various curves do
from one another. The quality of the sensation is different, like that
of various colours or sounds. To attribute the character of these
forms to association would be like explaining sea-sickness as the
fear of shipwreck. There is a distinct quality and value, often a
singular beauty, in these simple lines that is intrinsic in the
perception of their form.

It would be pedantic, perhaps, anywhere but in a treatise on
aesthetics, to deny to this quality the name of expression; we might
commonly say that the circle has one expression and the oval
another. But what does the circle express except circularity, or the
oval except the nature of the ellipse? Such expression _expresses_
nothing; it is really impression. There may be analogy between it
and other impressions; we may admit that odours, colours, and
sounds correspond, and may mutually suggest one another; but this
analogy is a superadded charm felt by very sensitive natures, and
does not constitute the original value of the sensations. The
common emotional tinge is rather what enables them to suggest
one another, and what makes them comparable. Their expression,
such as it is, is therefore due to the accident that both feelings have
a kindred quality; and this quality has its effectiveness for sense
independently of the perception of its recurrence in a different
sphere. We shall accordingly take care to reserve the term
"expression" for the suggestion of some other and assignable
object, from which the expressive thing borrows an interest; and
we shall speak of the intrinsic quality of forms as their emotional
tinge or specific value.

_Physiology of the perception of form._

§ 20. The charm of a line evidently consists in the relation of its
parts; in order to understand this interest in spatial relations, we
must inquire how they are perceived.[4] If the eye had its sensitive
surface, the retina, exposed directly to the light, we could never
have a perception of form any more than in the nose or ear, which
also perceive the object through media. When the perception is not
through a medium, but direct, as in the case of the skin, we might
get a notion of form, because each point of the object would excite
a single point in the skin, and as the sensations in different parts of
the skin differ in quality, a manifold of sense, in which
discrimination of parts would be involved, could be presented to
the mind. But when the perception is through a medium, a
difficulty arises.

Any point, a, in the object will send a ray to every point, _a', b',
c',_ of the sensitive surface; every point of the retina will therefore
be similarly affected, since each will receive rays from every part
of the object.

[Illustration of light rays]

If all the rays from one point of the object, a, are to be concentrated
on a corresponding point of the retina, a which would then
become the exclusive representative of a, we must have one or
more refracting surfaces interposed, to gather the rays together.
The presence of the lens, with its various coatings, has made
representation of point by point possible for the eye. The absence
of such an instrument makes the same sort of representation
impossible to other senses, such as the nose, which does not smell
in one place the effluvia of one part of the environment and in
another place the effluvia of another, but smells indiscriminately
the combination of all. Eyes without lenses like those possessed by
some animals, undoubtedly give only a consciousness of diffused
light, without the possibility of boundaries or divisions in the field
of view. The abstraction of colour from form is therefore by no
means an artificial one, since, by a simplification of the organ of
sense, one may be perceived without the other.

But even if the lens enables the eye to receive a distributed image
of the object, the manifold which consciousness would perceive
would not be necessarily a manifold of parts juxtaposed in space.
Bach point of the retina might send to the brain a detached
impression; these might be comparable, but not necessarily in their
spatial position. The ear sends to the brain such a manifold of
impressions (since the ear also has an apparatus by which various
external differences in rapidity of vibrations are distributed into
different parts of the organ). But this discriminated manifold is a
manifold of pitches, not of positions. How does it happen that the
manifold conveyed by the optic nerve appears in consciousness as
spatial, and that the relation between its elements is seen as a
relation of position?

An answer to this question has been suggested by various
psychologists. The eye, by an instinctive movement, turns so as to
bring every impression upon that point of the retina, near its centre,
which has the acutest sensibility. A series of muscular sensations
therefore always follows upon the conspicuous excitement of any
outlying point. The object, as the eye brings it to the centre of
vision, excites a series of points upon the retina; and the local sign,
or peculiar quality of sensation, proper to each of these spots, is
associated with that series of muscular feelings involved in turning
the eyes. These feelings henceforth revive together; it is enough
that a point in the periphery of the retina should receive a ray, for
the mind to feel, together with that impression, the suggestion of a
motion, and of the line of points that lies between the excited point
and the centre of vision. A network of associations is thus formed,
whereby the sensation of each retinal point is connected with all
the others in a manner which is that of points in a plane. Every
visible point becomes thus a point in a field, and has a felt
radiation of lines of possible motion about it. Our notion of visual
space has this origin, since the manifold of retinal impressions is
distributed in a manner which serves as the type and exemplar of
what we mean by a surface.

_Values of geometrical figures._

§ 21. The reader will perhaps pardon these details and the strain
they put on his attention, when he perceives how much they help
us to understand the value of forms. The sense, then, of the
position of any point consists in the tensions in the eye, that not
only tends to bring that point to the centre of vision, but feels the
suggestion of all the other points which are related to the given one
in the web of visual experience. The definition of space as the
possibility of motion is therefore an accurate and significant one,
since the most direct and native perception of space we can have is
the awakening of many tendencies to move our organs.

For example, if a circle is presented, the eye will fall upon its
centre, as to the centre of gravity, as it were, of the balanced
attractions of all the points; and there will be, in that position, an
indifference and sameness of sensation, in whatever direction some
accident moves the eye, that accounts very well for the emotional
quality of the circle. It is a form which, although beautiful in its
purity and simplicity, and wonderful in its continuity, lacks any
stimulating quality, and is often ugly in the arts, especially when
found in vertical surfaces where it is not always seen in perspective.
For horizontal surfaces it is better because it is there always an
ellipse to vision, and the ellipse has a less dull and stupefying
effect. The eye can move easily, organize and subordinate its parts,
and its relations to the environment are not similar in all directions.
Small circles, like buttons, are not in the same danger of becoming
ugly, because the eye considers them as points, and they diversify
and help to divide surfaces, without appearing as surfaces
themselves.

The straight line offers a curious object for analysis. It is not for
the eye a very easy form to grasp. We bend it or we leave it.
Unless it passes through the centre of vision, it is obviously a
tangent to the points which have analogous relations to that centre.
The local signs or tensions of the points in such a tangent vary in
an unseizable progression; there is violence in keeping to it, and
the effect is forced. This makes the dry and stiff quality of any long
straight line, which the skilful Greeks avoided by the curves of
their columns and entablatures, and the less economical barbarians
by a profusion of interruptions and ornaments.

The straight line, when made the direct object of attention, is, of
course, followed by the eye and not seen by the outlying parts of
the retina in one eccentric position. The same explanation is good
for this more common case, since the consciousness that the eye
travels in a straight line consists in the surviving sense of the
previous position, and in the manner in which the tensions of these
various positions overlap. If the tensions change from moment to
moment entirely, we have a broken, a fragmentary effect, as that of
zigzag, where all is dropping and picking up again of associated
motions; in the straight line, much prolonged, we have a gradual
and inexorable rending of these tendencies to associated
movements.

In the curves we call flowing and graceful, we have, on the
contrary, a more natural and rhythmical set of movements in the
optic muscles; and certain points in the various gyrations make
rhymes and assonances, as it were, to the eye that reaches them.
We find ourselves at every turn reawakening, with a variation, the
sense of the previous position. It is easy to understand by analogy
with the superficially observed conditions of pleasure, that such
rhythms and harmonies should be delightful. The deeper question
of the physical basis of pleasure we have not intended to discuss.
Suffice it that measure, in quantity, in intensity, and in time, must
involve that physiological process, whatever it may be, the
consciousness of which is pleasure.

_Symmetry._

§ 22. An important exemplification of these physiological
principles is found in the charm of symmetry. When for any reason
the eye is to be habitually directed to a single point, as to the
opening of a gate or window, to an altar, a throne, a stage, or a
fireplace, there will be violence and distraction caused by the
tendency to look aside in the recurring necessity of looking
forward, if the object is not so arranged that the tensions of eye are
balanced, and the centre of gravity of vision lies in the point which
one is obliged to keep in sight. In all such objects we therefore
require bilateral symmetry. The necessity of vertical symmetry is
not felt because the eyes and head do not so readily survey objects
from top to bottom as from side to side. The inequality of the upper
and lower parts does not generate the same tendency to motion, the
same restlessness, as does the inequality of the right and left sides
of an object in front of us. The comfort and economy that comes
from muscular balance in the eye, is therefore in some cases the
source of the value of symmetry.[5]

In other cases symmetry appeals to us through the charm of
recognition and rhythm. When the eye runs over a facade, and
finds the objects that attract it at equal intervals, an expectation,
like the anticipation of an inevitable note or requisite word, arises
in the mind, and its non-satisfaction involves a shock. This shock,
if caused by the emphatic emergence of an interesting object, gives
the effect of the picturesque; but when it comes with no
compensation, it gives us the feeling of ugliness and imperfection
-- the defect which symmetry avoids. This kind of symmetry is
accordingly in itself a negative merit, but often the condition of the
greatest of all merits, -- the permanent power to please. It
contributes to that completeness which delights without
stimulating, and to which our jaded senses return gladly, after all
sorts of extravagances, as to a kind of domestic peace. The
inwardness and solidity of this quiet beauty comes from the
intrinsic character of the pleasure which makes it up. It is no
adventitious charm; but the eye in its continual passage over the
object finds always the same response, the same adequacy; and the
very process of perception is made delightful by the object's fitness
to be perceived. The parts, thus coalescing, form a single object,
the unity and simplicity of which are based upon the rhythm and
correspondence of its elements.

Symmetry is here what metaphysicians call a principle of
individuation. By the emphasis which it lays upon the recurring
elements, it cuts up the field into determinate units; all that lies
between the beats is one interval, one individual. If there were no
recurrent impressions, no corresponding points, the field of
perception would remain a fluid continuum, without defined and
recognizable divisions. The outlines of most things are
symmetrical because we choose what symmetrical lines we find to
be the boundaries of objects. Their symmetry is the condition of
their unity, and their unity of their individuality and separate
existence.

Experience, to be sure, can teach us to regard unsymmetrical
objects as wholes, because their elements move and change
together in nature; but this is a principle of individuation, _a
posteriori,_ founded on the association of recognized elements.
These elements, to be recognized and seen to go together and form
one thing, must first be somehow discriminated; and the symmetry,
either of their parts, or of their position as wholes, may enable us
to fix their boundaries and to observe their number. The category
of unity, which we are so constantly imposing upon nature and its
parts, has symmetry, then, for one of its instruments, for one of its
bases of application.

If symmetry, then, is a principle of individuation and helps us to
distinguish objects, we cannot wonder that it helps us to enjoy the
perception. For our intelligence loves to perceive; water is
not more grateful to a parched throat than a principle of
comprehension to a confused understanding. Symmetry clarifies,
and we all know that light is sweet. At the same time, we can see
why there are limits to the value of symmetry. In objects, for
instance, that are too small or too diffused for composition,
symmetry has no value. In an avenue symmetry is stately and
impressive, but in a large park, or in the plan of a city, or the side
wall of a gallery it produces monotony in the various views rather
than unity in any one of them. Greek temples, never being very
large, were symmetrical on all their facades; Gothic churches were
generally designed to be symmetrical only in the west front, and in
the transepts, while the side elevation as a whole was eccentric.
This was probably an accident, due to the demands of the interior
arrangement; but it was a fortunate one, as we may see by
contrasting its effect with that of our stations, exhibition buildings,
and other vast structures, where symmetry is generally introduced
even in the most extensive facades which, being too much
prolonged for their height, cannot be treated as units. The eye is
not able to take them in at a glance, and does not get the effect of
repose from the balance of the extremes, while the mechanical
sameness of the sections, surveyed in succession, makes the
impression of an unmeaning poverty of resource.

Symmetry thus loses its value when it cannot, on account of the
size of the object, contribute to the unity of our perception. The
synthesis which it facilitates must be instantaneous. If the
comprehension by which we unify our object is discursive, as, for
instance, in conceiving the arrangement and numbering of the
streets of New York, or the plan of the Escurial, the advantage of
symmetry is an intellectual one; we can better imagine the relations
of the parts, and draw a map of the whole in the fancy; but there is
no advantage to direct perception, and therefore no added beauty.
Symmetry is superfluous in those objects. Similarly animal and
vegetable forms gain nothing by being symmetrically displayed, if
the sense of their life and motion is to be given. When, however,
these forms are used for mere decoration, not for the expression of
their own vitality, then symmetry is again required to accentuate
their unity and organization. This justifies the habit of
conventionalizing natural forms, and the tendency of some kinds of
hieratic art, like the Byzantine or Egyptian, to affect a rigid
symmetry of posture. We can thereby increase the unity and force
of the image without suggesting that individual life and mobility,
which would interfere with the religious function of the object, as
the symbol and embodiment of an impersonal faith.

_Form the unity of a manifold._

§ 23. Symmetry is evidently a kind of unity in variety, where a
whole is determined by the rhythmic repetition of similars. We
have seen that it has a value where it is an aid to unification. Unity
would thus appear to be the virtue of forms; but a moment's
reflection will show us that unity cannot be absolute and be a form;
a form is an aggregation, it must have elements, and the manner in
which the elements are combined constitutes the character of the
form. A perfectly simple perception, in which there was no
consciousness of the distinction and relation of parts, would not be
a perception of form; it would be a sensation. Physiologically these
sensations may be aggregates and their values, as in the case of
musical tones, may differ according to the manner in which certain
elements, beats, vibrations, nervous processes, or what not, are
combined; but for consciousness the result is simple, and the value
is the pleasantness of a datum and not of a process. Form, therefore,
does not appeal to the unattentive; they get from objects only a
vague sensation which may in them awaken extrinsic associations;
they do not stop to survey the parts or to appreciate their relation,
and consequently are insensible to the various charms of various
unifications; they can find in objects only the value of material or
of function, not that of form.

Beauty of form, however, is what specifically appeals to an
aesthetic nature; it is equally removed from the crudity of formless
stimulation and from the emotional looseness of reverie and
discursive thought. The indulgence in sentiment and suggestion, of
which our time is fond, to the sacrifice of formal beauty, marks an
absence of cultivation as real, if not as confessed, as that of the
barbarian who revels in gorgeous confusion.

The synthesis, then, which constitutes form is an activity of the
mind; the unity arises consciously, and is an insight into the
relation of sensible elements separately perceived. It differs from
sensation in the consciousness of the synthesis, and from
expression in the homogeneity of the elements, and in their
common presence to sense.

The variety of forms depends upon the character of the elements
and on the variety of possible methods of unification. The elements
may be all alike, and their only diversity be numerical. Their unity
will then be merely the sense of their uniformity.[6] Or they may
differ in kind, but so as to compel the mind to no particular order
in their unification. Or they may finally be so constituted that they
suggest inevitably the scheme of their unity; in this case there is
organization in the object, and the synthesis of its parts is one and
pre-determinate. We shall discuss these various forms in
succession, pointing out the effects proper to each.

_Multiplicity in uniformity._

§ 24. The radical and typical case of the first kind of unity in
variety is found in the perception of extension itself. This
perception, if we look to its origin, may turn out to be primitive; no
doubt the feeling of "crude extensity" is an original sensation;
every inference, association, and distinction is a thing that looms
up suddenly before the mind, and the nature and actuality of which
is a datum of what -- to indicate its irresistible immediacy and
indescribability -- we may well call sense. Forms are seen, and if
we think of the origin of the perception, we may well call this
vision a sensation. The distinction between a sensation of form,
however, and one which is formless, regards the content and
character, not the genesis of the perception. A distinction and
association, or an inference, is a direct experience, a sensible fact;
but it is the experience of a process, of a motion between two terms,
and a consciousness of their coexistence and distinction; it is a
feeling of relation. Now the sense of space is a feeling of this kind;
the essence of it is the realization of a variety of directions and of
possible motions, by which the relation of point to point is vaguely
but inevitably given. The perception of extension is therefore a
perception of form, although of the most rudimentary kind. It is
merely _Auseinandersein,_ and we might call it the _materia
prima_ of form, were it not capable of existing without further
determination. For we can have the sense of space without the
sense of boundaries; indeed, this intuition is what tempts us to
declare space infinite. Space would have to consist of a finite
number of juxtaposed blocks, if our experience of extension
carried with it essentially the realization of limits.

The aesthetic effect of extensiveness is also entirely different from
that of particular shapes. Some things appeal to us by their surfaces,
others by the lines that limit those surfaces. And this effect of
surface is not necessarily an effect of material or colour; the
evenness, monotony, and vastness of a great curtain of colour
produce an effect which is that of the extreme of uniformity in the
extreme of multiplicity; the eye wanders over a fluid infinity of
unrecognizable positions, and the sense of their numberlessness
and continuity is precisely the source of the emotion of extent. The
emotion is primary and has undoubtedly a physiological ground,
while the idea of size is secondary and involves associations and
inferences. A small photograph of St. Peter's gives the idea of size;
as does a distant view of the same object. But this is of course
dependent on our realization of the distance, or of the scale of the
representation. The value of size becomes immediate only when
we are at close quarters with the object; then the surfaces really
subtend a large angle in the field of vision, and the sense of
vastness establishes its standard, which can afterwards be applied
to other objects by analogy and contrast. There is also, to be sure, a
moral and practical import in the known size of objects, which, by
association, determines their dignity; but the pure sense of
extension, based upon the attack of the object upon the
apperceptive resources of the eye, is the truly aesthetic value which
it concerns us to point out here, as the most rudimentary example
of form.

Although the effect of extension is not that of material, the two are
best seen in conjunction. Material must appear in some form; but
when its beauty is to be made prominent, it is well that this form
should attract attention as little as possible to itself. Now, of all
forms, absolute uniformity in extension is the simplest and most
allied to the material; it gives the latter only just enough form to
make it real and perceptible. Very rich and beautiful materials
therefore do well to assume this form. You will spoil the beauty
you have by superimposing another; as if you make a statue of
gold, or flute a jasper column, or bedeck a velvet cloak. The beauty
of stuffs appears when they are plain. Even stone gives its specific
quality best in great unbroken spaces of wall; the simplicity of the
form emphasizes the substance. And again, the effect of extensity
is never long satisfactory unless it is superinduced upon some
material beauty; the dignity of great hangings would suffer if they
were not of damask, but of cotton, and the vast smoothness of the
sky would grow oppressive if it were not of so tender a blue.

_Example of the stars._

§ 25. Another beauty of the sky -- the stars -- offers so striking and
fascinating an illustration of the effect of multiplicity in uniformity,
that I am tempted to analyze it at some length. To most people, I
fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be
at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about
astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation
of those orbs. The vague and illusive ideas thus aroused fall in so
well with the dumb emotion we were already feeling, that we
attribute this emotion to those ideas, and persuade ourselves that
the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of
astronomical facts.

The idea of the insignificance of our earth and of the
incomprehensible multiplicity of worlds is indeed immensely
impressive; it may even be intensely disagreeable. There is
something baffling about infinity; in its presence the sense of finite
humility can never wholly banish the rebellious suspicion that we
are being deluded. Our mathematical imagination is put on the rack
by an attempted conception that has all the anguish of a nightmare
and probably, could we but awake, all its laughable absurdity. But
the obsession of this dream is an intellectual puzzle, not an
aesthetic delight. It is not essential to our admiration. Before the
days of Kepler the heavens declared the glory of God; and we
needed no calculation of stellar distances, no fancies about a
plurality of worlds, no image of infinite spaces, to make the stars
sublime.

Had we been taught to believe that the stars governed our fortunes,
and were we reminded of fate whenever we looked at them, we
should similarly tend to imagine that this belief was the source of
their sublimity; and, if the superstition were dispelled, we should
think the interest gone from the apparition. But experience would
soon undeceive us, and prove to us that the sensuous character of
the object was sublime in itself. Indeed, on account of that intrinsic
sublimity the sky can be fitly chosen as a symbol for a sublime
conception; the common quality in both makes each suggest the
other. For that reason, too, the parable of the natal stars governing
our lives is such a natural one to express our subjection to
circumstances, and can be transformed by the stupidity of disciples
into a literal tenet. In the same way, the kinship of the emotion
produced by the stars with the emotion proper to certain religious
moments makes the stars seem a religious object. They become,
like impressive music, a stimulus to worship. But fortunately there
are experiences which remain untouched by theory, and which
maintain the mutual intelligence of men through the estrangements
wrought by intellectual and religious systems. When the
superstructures crumble, the common foundation of human
sentience and imagination is exposed beneath.

The intellectual suggestion of the infinity of nature can, moreover,
be awakened by other experiences which are by no means sublime.
A heap of sand will involve infinity as surely as a universe of suns
and planets. Any object is infinitely divisible and, when we press
the thought, can contain as many worlds with as many winged
monsters and ideal republics as can the satellites of Sirius. But the
infinitesimal does not move us aesthetically; it can only awaken an
amused curiosity. The difference cannot lie in the import of the
idea, which is objectively the same in both cases. It lies in the
different immediate effect of the crude images which give us the
type and meaning of each; the crude image that underlies the idea
of the infinitesimal is the dot, the poorest and most uninteresting of
impressions; while the crude image that underlies the idea of
infinity is space, multiplicity in uniformity, and this, as we have
seen, has a powerful effect on account of the breadth, volume, and
omnipresence of the stimulation. Every point in the retina is evenly
excited, and the local signs of all are simultaneously felt. This
equable tension, this balance and elasticity in the very absence of
fixity, give the vague but powerful feeling that we wish to describe.
Did not the infinite, by this initial assault upon our senses, awe us
and overwhelm us, as solemn music might, the idea of it would be
abstract and moral like that of the infinitesimal, and nothing but an
amusing curiosity.

Nothing is objectively impressive; things are impressive only when
they succeed in touching the sensibility of the observer, by finding
the avenues to his brain and heart. The idea that the universe is a
multitude of minute spheres circling, like specks of dust, in a dark
and boundless void, might leave us cold and indifferent, if not
bored and depressed, were it not that we identify this hypothetical
scheme with the visible splendour, the poignant intensity, and the
baffling number of the stars. So far is the object from giving value
to the impression, that it is here, as it must always ultimately be,
the impression that gives value to the object. For all worth leads us
back to actual feeling somewhere, or else evaporates into nothing
-- into a word and a superstition.

Now, the starry heavens are very happily designed to intensify the
sensations on which their beauties must rest. In the first place, the
continuum of space is broken into points, numerous enough to give
the utmost idea of multiplicity and yet so distinct and vivid that it
is impossible not to remain aware of their individuality. The
variety of local signs, without becoming organized into forms,
remains prominent and irreducible. This makes the object infinitely
more exciting than a plane surface would be. In the second place,
the sensuous contrast of the dark background, -- blacker the clearer
the night and the more stars we can see, -- with the palpitating fire
of the stars themselves, could not be exceeded by any possible
device. This material beauty adds incalculably, as we have already
pointed out, to the inwardness and sublimity of the effect. To
realize the great importance of these two elements, we need but to
conceive their absence, and observe the change in the dignity of
the result.

Fancy a map of the heavens and every star plotted upon it, even
those invisible to the naked eye: why would this object, as full of
scientific suggestion surely as the reality, leave us so
comparatively cold? Quite indifferent it might not leave us, for I
have myself watched stellar photographs with almost inexhaustible
wonder. The sense of multiplicity is naturally in no way
diminished by the representation; but the poignancy of the
sensation, the life of the light, are gone; and with the dulled
impression the keenness of the emotion disappears. Or imagine the
stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their
astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in
geometrical patterns; say in a Latin cross, with the words _In hoc
signo vinces_ in a scroll around them. The beauty of the
illumination would be perhaps increased, and its import, practical,
religious, and cosmic, would surely be a little plainer; but where
would be the sublimity of the spectacle? Irretrievably lost: and lost
because the form of the object would no longer tantalize us with its
sheer multiplicity, and with the consequent overpowering sense of
suspense and awe.

In a word, the infinity which moves us is the sense of multiplicity
in uniformity. Accordingly things which have enough multiplicity,
as the lights of a city seen across water, have an effect similar to
that of the stars, if less intense; whereas a star, if alone, because the
multiplicity is lacking, makes a wholly different impression. The
single star is tender, beautiful, and mild; we can compare it to the
humblest and sweetest of things:

     A violet by a mossy stone
     Half hidden from the eye,
     Fair as _a star when only one
     Is shining in the sky._

It is, not only in fact but in nature, an attendant on the moon,
associated with the moon, if we may be so prosaic here, not only
by contiguity but also by similarity.

     Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-regioned star
     Or vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky.

The same poet can say elsewhere of a passionate lover:

          He arose
     Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star,
     Amid the sapphire heaven's deep repose.

How opposite is all this from the cold glitter, the cruel and
mysterious sublimity of the stars when they are many! With these
we have no Sapphic associations; they make us think rather of
Kant who could hit on nothing else to compare with his categorical
imperative, perhaps because he found in both the same baffling
incomprehensibility and the same fierce actuality. Such ultimate
feelings are sensations of physical tension.

_Defects of pure multiplicity._

§ 26. This long analysis will be a sufficient illustration of the
power of multiplicity in uniformity; we may now proceed to point
out the limitations inherent in this form. The most obvious one is
that of monotony; a file of soldiers or an iron railing is impressive
in its way, but cannot long entertain us, nor hold us with that depth
of developing interest, with which we might study a crowd or a
forest of trees.

The tendency of monotony is double, and in two directions
deadens our pleasure. When the repeated impressions are acute,
and cannot be forgotten in their endless repetition, their monotony
becomes painful. The constant appeal to the same sense, the
constant requirement of the same reaction, tires the system, and we
long for change as for a relief. If the repeated stimulations are not
very acute, we soon become unconscious of them; like the ticking
of the clock, they become merely a factor in our bodily one, a
cause, as the case may be, of a diffused pleasure or unrest; but they
cease to present a distinguishable object.

The pleasures, therefore, which a kindly but monotonous
environment produces, often fail to make it beautiful, for the
simple reason that the environment is not perceived. Likewise the
hideousness of things to which we are accustomed -- the blemishes
of the landscape, the ugliness of our clothes or of our walls -- do
not oppress us, not so much because we do not see the ugliness as
because we overlook the things. The beauties or defects of
monotonous objects are easily lost, because the objects are
themselves intermittent in consciousness. But it is of some
practical importance to remark that this indifference of
monotonous values is more apparent than real. The particular
object ceases to be of consequence; but the congruity of its
structure and quality with our faculties of perception remains, and
its presence in our environment is still a constant source of vague
irritation and friction, or of subtle and pervasive delight. And this
value, although not associated with the image of the monotonous
object, lies there in our mind, like all the vital and systemic
feelings, ready to enhance the beauty of any object that arouses our
attention, and meantime adding to the health and freedom of our
life -- making whatever we do a little easier and pleasanter for us.
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken
us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or the consciousness
of a right life, can quicken us from within. To humanize our
surroundings is, therefore, a task which should interest the
physicians both of soul and body.

But the monotony of multiplicity is not merely intrinsic in the form;
what is perhaps even of greater consequence in the arts is the fact
that its capacity for association is restricted. What is in itself
uniform cannot have a great diversity of relations. Hence the
dryness, the crisp definiteness and hardness, of those products of
art which contain an endless repetition of the same elements. Their
affinities are necessarily few; they are not fit for many uses, nor
capable of expressing many ideas. The heroic couplet, now too
much derided, is a form of this kind. Its compactness and
inevitableness make it excellent for an epigram and adequate it for
a satire, but its perpetual snap and unvarying rhythm are thin for an
epic, and impossible for a song. The Greek colonnade, a form in
many ways analogous, has similar limitations. Beautiful with a
finished and restrained beauty, which our taste is hardly refined
enough to appreciate, it is incapable of development. The
experiments of Roman architecture sufficiently show it; the glory
of which is their Roman frame rather than their Hellenic ornament.

When the Greeks themselves had to face the problem of larger and
more complex buildings, in the service of a supernatural and
hierarchical system, they transformed their architecture into what
we call Byzantine, and St. Sophia took the place of the Parthenon.
Here a vast vault was introduced, the colonnade disappeared, the
architrave was rounded into an arch from column to column, the
capitals of these were changed from concave to convex, and a
thousand other changes in structure and ornament introduced
flexibility and variety. Architecture could in this way, precisely
because more vague and barbarous, better adapt itself to the
conditions of the new epoch. Perfect taste is itself a limitation, not
because it intentionally excludes any excellence, but because it
impedes the wandering of the arts into those bypaths of caprice and
grotesqueness in which, although at the sacrifice of formal beauty,
interesting partial effects might still be discovered. And this
objection applies with double force to the first crystallizations of
taste, when tradition has carried us but a little way in the right
direction. The authorized effects are then very simple, and if we
allow no others, our art becomes wholly inadequate to the
functions ultimately imposed upon it. Primitive arts might furnish
examples, but the state of English poetry at the time of Queen
Anne is a sufficient illustration of this possibility. The French
classicism, of which, the English school was an echo, was more
vital and human, because it embodied a more native taste and a
wider training.

_Aesthetics of democracy._

§ 27. It would be an error to suppose that aesthetic principles apply
only to our judgments of works of art or of those natural objects
which we attend to chiefly on account of their beauty. Every idea
which is formed in the human mind, every activity and emotion,
has some relation, direct or indirect, to pain and pleasure. If, as is
the case in all the more important instances, these fluid activities
and emotions precipitate, as it were, in their evanescence certain
psychical solids called ideas of things, then the concomitant
pleasures are incorporated more or less in those concrete ideas and
the things acquire an aesthetic colouring. And although this
aesthetic colouring may be the last quality we notice in objects of
practical interest, its influence upon us is none the less real, and
often accounts for a great deal in our moral and practical attitude.

In the leading political and moral idea of our time, in the idea of
democracy, I think there is a strong aesthetic ingredient, and the
power of the idea of democracy over the imagination is an
illustration of that effect of multiplicity in uniformity which we
have been studying. Of course, nothing could be more absurd than
to suggest that the French Revolution, with its immense
implications, had an aesthetic preference for its basis; it sprang, as
we know, from the hatred of oppression, the rivalry of classes, and
the aspiration after a freer social and strictly moral organization.
But when these moral forces were suggesting and partly realizing
the democratic idea, this idea was necessarily vividly present to
men's thoughts; the picture of human life which it presented was
becoming familiar, and was being made the sanction and goal of
constant endeavour. Nothing so much enhances a good as to make
sacrifices for it. The consequence was that democracy, prized at
first as a means to happiness and as an instrument of good
government, was acquiring an intrinsic value; it was beginning to
seem good in itself, in fact, the only intrinsically right and perfect
arrangement. A utilitarian scheme was receiving an aesthetic
consecration. That which was happening to democracy had
happened before to the feudal and royalist systems; they too had
come to be prized in themselves, for the pleasure men took in
thinking of society organized in such an ancient, and thereby to
their fancy, appropriate and beautiful manner. The practical value
of the arrangement, on which, of course, it is entirely dependent for
its origin and authority, was forgotten, and men were ready to
sacrifice their welfare to their sense of propriety; that is, they
allowed an aesthetic good to outweigh a practical one. That seems
now a superstition, although, indeed, a very natural and even noble
one. Equally natural and noble, but no less superstitious, is our
own belief in the divine right of democracy. Its essential right is
something purely aesthetic.

Such aesthetic love of uniformity, however, is usually disguised
under some moral label: we call it the lore of justice, perhaps
because we have not considered that the value of justice also, in so
far as it is not derivative and utilitarian, must be intrinsic, or, what
is practically the same thing, aesthetic. But occasionally the
beauties of democracy are presented to us undisguised. The
writings of Walt Whitman are a notable example. Never, perhaps,
has the charm of uniformity in multiplicity been felt so completely
and so exclusively. Everywhere it greets us with a passionate
preference; not flowers but leaves of grass, not music but
drum-taps, not composition but aggregation, not the hero but the average
man, not the crisis but the vulgarest moment; and by this resolute
marshalling of nullities, by this effort to show us everything as a
momentary pulsation of a liquid and structureless whole, he
profoundly stirs the imagination. We may wish to dislike this
power, but, I think, we must inwardly admire it. For whatever
practical dangers we may see in this terrible levelling, our aesthetic
faculty can condemn no actual effect; its privilege is to be pleased
by opposites, and to be capable of finding chaos sublime without
ceasing to make nature beautiful.

_Values of types and values of examples._

§ 28. It is time we should return to the consideration of abstract
forms. Nearest in nature to the example of uniformity in
multiplicity, we found those objects, like a reversible pattern, that
having some variety of parts invite us to survey them in different
orders, and so bring into play in a marked manner the faculty of
apperception.

There is in the senses, as we have seen, a certain form of
stimulation, a certain measure and rhythm of waves with which the
aesthetic value of the sensation is connected. So when, in the
perception of the object, a notable contribution is made by memory
and mental habit, the value of the perception will be due, not only
to the pleasantness of the external stimulus, but also to the
pleasantness of the apperceptive reaction; and the latter source of
value will be more important in proportion as the object perceived
is more dependent, for the form and meaning it presents, upon our
past experience and imaginative trend, and less on the structure of
the external object.

Our apperception of form varies not only with our constitution, age,
and health, as does the appreciation of sensuous values, but also
with our education and genius. The more indeterminate the object,
the greater share must subjective forces have in determining our
perception; for, of course, every perception is in itself perfectly
specific, and can be called indefinite only in reference to an
abstract ideal which it is expected to approach. Every cloud has
just the outline it has, although we may call it vague, because we
cannot classify its form under any geometrical or animal species; it
would be first definitely a whale, and then would become
indefinite until we saw our way to calling it a camel. But while in
the intermediate stage, the cloud would be a form in the perception
of which there would be little apperceptive activity little reaction
from the store of our experience, little sense of form; its value
would be in its colour and transparency, and in the suggestion of
lightness and of complex but gentle movement.

But the moment we said "Yes, very like a whale," a new kind of
value would appear; the cloud could now be beautiful or ugly, not
as a cloud merely, but as a whale. We do not speak now of the
associations of the idea, as with the sea, or fishermen's yarns; that
is an extrinsic matter of expression. We speak simply of the
intrinsic value of the form of the whale, of its lines, its movement,
its proportion. This is a more or less individual set of images which
are revived in the act of recognition; this revival constitutes the
recognition, and the beauty of the form is the pleasure of that
revival. A certain musical phrase, as it were, is played in the brain;
the awakening of that echo is the act of apperception and the
harmony of the present stimulation with the form of that phrase;
the power of this particular object to develope and intensify that
generic phrase in the direction of pleasure, is the test of the formal
beauty of this example. For these cerebral phrases have a certain
rhythm; this rhythm can, by the influence of the stimulus that now
reawakens it, be marred or enriched, be made more or less marked
and delicate; and as this conflict or reinforcement comes, the
object is ugly or beautiful in form.

Such an aesthetic value is thus dependent on two things. The first
is the acquired character of the apperceptive form evoked; it may
be a cadenza or a trill, a major or a minor chord, a rose or a violet,
a goddess or a dairy-maid; and as one or another of these is
recognized, an aesthetic dignity and tone is given to the object. But
it will be noticed that in such mere recognition very little pleasure
is found, or, what is the same thing, different aesthetic types in the
abstract have little difference in intrinsic beauty. The great
difference lies in their affinities. What will decide us to like or not
to like the type of our apperception will be not so much what this
type is, as its fitness to the context of our mind. It is like a word in
a poem, more effective by its fitness than by its intrinsic beauty,
although that is requisite too. We can be shocked at an incongruity
of natures more than we can be pleased by the intrinsic beauty of
each nature apart, so long, that is, as they remain abstract natures,
objects recognized without being studied. The aesthetic dignity of
the form, then, tells us the kind of beauty we are to expect, affects
us by its welcome or unwelcome promise, but hardly gives us a
positive pleasure in the beauty itself.

Now this is the first thing in the value of a form, the value of the
type as such; the second and more important element is the relation
of the particular impression to the form under which it is
apperceived. This determines the value of the object as an example
of its class. After our mind is pitched to the key and rhythm of a
certain idea, say of a queen, it remains for the impression to fulfil,
aggrandize, or enrich this form by a sympathetic embodiment of it.
Then we have a queen that is truly royal. But if instead there is
disappointment, if this particular queen is an ugly one, although
perhaps she might have pleased as a witch, this is because the
apperceptive form and the impression give a cerebral discord. The
object is unideal, that is, the novel, external element is
inharmonious with the revived and internal element by suggesting
which the object has been apperceived.

_Origin of types._

§ 29. A most important thing, therefore, in the perception of form
is the formation of types in our mind, with reference to which
examples are to be judged. I say the formation of them, for we can
hardly consider the theory that they are eternal as a possible one in
psychology. The Platonic doctrine on that point is a striking
illustration of an equivocation we mentioned in the beginning;[7]
namely, that the import of an experience is regarded as a
manifestation of its cause -- the product of a faculty substituted for
the description of its function. Eternal types are the instrument of
aesthetic life, not its foundation. Take the aesthetic attitude, and
you have for the moment an eternal idea; an idea, I mean, that you
treat as an absolute standard, just as when you take the perceptive
attitude you have an external object which you treat as an absolute
existence. But the aesthetic, like the perceptive faculty, can be
made an object of study in turn, and its theory can be sought; and
then the eternal idea, like the external object, is seen to be a
product of human nature, a symbol of experience, and an
instrument of thought.

The question whether there are not, in external nature or in the
mind of God, objects and eternal types, is indeed not settled, it is
not even touched by this inquiry; but it is indirectly shown to be
futile, because such transcendent realities, if they exist, can have
nothing to do with our ideas of them. The Platonic idea of a tree
may exist; how should I deny it? How should I deny that I might
some day find myself outside the sky gazing at it, and feeling that I,
with my mental vision, am beholding the plenitude of arboreal
beauty, perceived in this world only as a vague essence haunting
the multiplicity of finite trees? But what can that have to do with
my actual sense of what a tree should be? Shall we take the
Platonic myth literally, and say the idea is a memory of the tree I
have already seen in heaven? How else establish any relation
between that eternal object and the type in my mind? But why, in
that case, this infinite variability of ideal trees? Was the Tree
Beautiful an oak, or a cedar, an English or an American elm? My
actual types are finite and mutually exclusive; that heavenly type
must be one and infinite. The problem is hopeless.

Very simple, on the other hand, is the explanation of the existence
of that type as a residuum of experience. Our idea of an individual
thing is a compound and residuum of our several experiences of it;
and in the same manner our idea of a class is a compound and
residuum of our ideas of the particulars that compose it. Particular
impressions have, by virtue of their intrinsic similarity or of the
identity of their relations, a tendency to be merged and identified,
so that many individual perceptions leave but a single blurred
memory that stands for them all, because it combines their several
associations. Similarly, when various objects have many common
characteristics, the mind is incapable of keeping them apart. It
cannot hold clearly so great a multitude of distinctions and
relations as would be involved in naming and conceiving
separately each grain of sand, or drop of water, each fly or horse or
man that we have ever seen. The mass of our experience has
therefore to be classified, if it is to be available at all. Instead of a
distinct image to represent each of our original impressions, we
have a general resultant -- a composite photograph -- of those
impressions.

This resultant image is the idea of the class. It often has very few,
if any, of the sensible properties of the particulars that underlie it,
often an artificial symbol -- the sound of a word -- is the only
element, present to all the instances, which the generic image
clearly contains. For, of course, the reason why a name can
represent a class of objects is that the name is the most
conspicuous element of identity in the various experiences of
objects in that class. We have seen many horses, but if we are not
lovers of the animal, nor particularly keen observers, very likely
we retain no clear image of all that mass of impressions except the
reverberation of the sound "horse," which really or mentally has
accompanied all those impressions. This sound, therefore, is the
content of our general idea, and to it cling all the associations
which constitute our sense of what the word means. But a person
with a memory predominantly visual would probably add to this
remembered sound a more or less detailed image of the animal;
some particular horse in some particular attitude might possibly be
recalled, but more probably some imaginative construction,
some dream image, would accompany the sound. An image which
reproduced no particular horse exactly, but which was a
spontaneous fiction of the fancy, would serve, by virtue of its felt
relations, the same purpose as the sound itself. Such a spontaneous
image would be, of course, variable. In fact, no image can, strictly
speaking, ever recur. But these percepts, as they are called,
springing up in the mind like flowers from the buried seeds of past
experience, would inherit all the powers of suggestion which are
required by any instrument of classification.

These powers of suggestion have probably a cerebral basis. The
new percept -- the generic idea -- repeats to a great extent, both in
nature and localization, the excitement constituting the various
original impressions; as the percept reproduces more or less of
these it will be a more or less full and impartial representative of
them. Not all the suggestions of a word or image are equally ripe.
A generic idea or type usually presents to us a very inadequate and
biassed view of the field it means to cover. As we reflect and seek
to correct this inadequacy, the percept changes on our hands. The
very consciousness that other individuals and other qualities fall
under our concept, changes this concept, as a psychological
presence, and alters its distinctness and extent. When I remember,
to use a classical example, that the triangle is not isosceles, nor
scalene, nor rectangular, but each and all of those, I reduce my
percept to the word and its definition, with perhaps a sense of the
general motion of the hand and eye by which we trace a three-cornered
figure.

Since the production of a general idea is thus a matter of subjective
bias, we cannot expect that a type should be the exact average of
the examples from which it is drawn. In a rough way, it is the
average; a fact that in itself is the strongest of arguments against
the independence or priority of the general idea. The beautiful
horse, the beautiful speech, the beautiful face, is always a medium
between the extremes which our experience has offered. It is
enough that a given characteristic should be generally present in
our experience, for it to become an indispensable element of the
ideal. There is nothing in itself beautiful or necessary in the shape
of the human ear, or in the presence of nails on the fingers and toes;
but the ideal of man, which the preposterous conceit of our
judgment makes us set up as divine and eternal, requires these
precise details; without them the human form would be repulsively
ugly.

It often happens that the accidents of experience make us in this
way introduce into the ideal, elements which, if they could be
excluded without disgusting us, would make possible satisfactions
greater than those we can now enjoy. Thus the taste formed by one
school of art may condemn the greater beauties created by another.
In morals we have the same phenomenon. A barbarous ideal of life
requires tasks and dangers incompatible with happiness; a rude and
oppressed conscience is incapable of regarding as good a state
which excludes its own acrid satisfactions. So, too, a fanatical
imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as
infinitely cruel. The purpose of education is, of course, to free us
from these prejudices, and to develope our ideals in the direction of
the greatest possible good. Evidently the ideal has been formed by
the habit of perception; it is, in a rough way, that average form
which we expect and most readily apperceive. The propriety and
necessity of it is entirely relative to our experience and faculty of
apperception. The shock of surprise, the incongruity with the
formed percept, is the essence and measure of ugliness.

_The average modified in the direction of pleasure._

§ 30. Nevertheless we do not form aesthetic ideals any more than
other general types, entirely without bias. We have already
observed that a percept seldom gives an impartial compound of the
objects of which it is the generic image. This partiality is due to a
variety of circumstances. One is the unequal accuracy of our
observation. If some interest directs our attention to a particular
quality of objects, that quality will be prominent in our percept; it
may even be the only content clearly given in our general idea; and
any object, however similar in other respects to those of the given
class, will at once be distinguished as belonging to a different
species if it lacks that characteristic on which our attention is
particularly fixed. Our percepts are thus habitually biassed in the
direction of practical interest, if practical interest does not indeed
entirely govern their formation. In the same manner, our aesthetic
ideals are biassed in the direction of aesthetic interest. Not all parts
of an object are equally congruous with our perceptive faculty; not
all elements are noted with the same pleasure. Those, therefore,
which are agreeable are chiefly dwelt upon by the lover of beauty,
and his percept will give an average of things with a great
emphasis laid on that part of them which is beautiful. The ideal
will thus deviate from the average in the direction of the observer's
pleasure.

For this reason the world is so much more beautiful to a poet or an
artist than to an ordinary man. Each object, as his aesthetic sense is
developed, is perhaps less beautiful than to the uncritical eye; his
taste becomes difficult, and only the very best gives him unalloyed
satisfaction. But while each work of nature and art is thus
apparently blighted by his greater demands and keener susceptibility,
the world itself, and the various natures it contains, are
to him unspeakably beautiful. The more blemishes he can see
in men, the more excellence he sees in man, and the more bitterly
he laments the fate of each particular soul, the more reverence and
love he has for the soul in its ideal essence. Criticism and
idealization involve each other. The habit of looking for beauty in
everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things; our sense,
hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
But this demand for perfection becomes at the same time the
nucleus of our observation; from every side a quick affinity draws
what is beautiful together and stores it in the mind, giving body
there to the blind yearnings of our nature. Many imperfect things
crystallize into a single perfection. The mind is thus peopled by
general ideas in which beauty is the chief quality; and these ideas
are at the same time the types of things. The type is still a natural
resultant of particular impressions; but the formation of it has been
guided by a deep subjective bias in favour of what has delighted
the eye.

This theory can be easily tested by asking whether, in the case
where the ideal differs from the average form of objects, this
variation is not due to the intrinsic pleasantness or impressiveness
of the quality exaggerated. For instance, in the human form, the
ideal differs immensely from the average. In many respects the
extreme or something near it is the most beautiful. Xenophon
describes the women of Armenia as kalai kai megalai, and we
should still speak of one as fair and tall and of another as fair but
little. Size is therefore, even where least requisite, a thing in which
the ideal exceeds the average. And the reason -- apart from
associations of strength -- is that unusual size makes things
conspicuous. The first prerequisite of effect is impression, and size
helps that; therefore in the aesthetic ideal the average will be
modified by being enlarged, because that is a change in the
direction of our pleasure, and size will be an element of beauty.[8]

Similarly the eyes, in themselves beautiful, will be enlarged also;
and generally whatever makes by its sensuous quality, by its
abstract form, or by its expression, a particular appeal to our
attention and contribution to our delight, will count for more in the
ideal type than its frequency would warrant. The generic image has
been constructed under the influence of a selective attention, bent
upon aesthetic worth.

To praise any object for approaching the ideal of its kind is
therefore only a roundabout way of specifying its intrinsic merit
and expressing its direct effect on our sensibility. If in referring to
the ideal we were not thus analyzing the real, the ideal would be an
irrelevant and unmeaning thing. We know what the ideal is
because we observe what pleases us in the reality. If we allow the
general notion to tyrannize at all over the particular impression and
to blind us to new and unclassified beauties which the latter may
contain, we are simply substituting words for feelings, and making
a verbal classification pass for an aesthetic judgment. Then the
sense of beauty is gone to seed. Ideals have their uses, but their
authority is wholly representative. They stand for specific
satisfactions, or else they stand for nothing at all.

In fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas
and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods,
are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for
experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and
surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder
hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and
direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to
bear our ignorance of fact.

The same thing happens, in a way, in other fields. Our armies
are devices necessitated by our weakness; our property an
encumbrance required by our need. If our situation were not
precarious, these great engines of death and life would not be
invented. And our intelligence is such another weapon against fate.
We need not lament the fact, since, after all, to build these various
structures is, up to a certain point, the natural function of human
nature. The trouble is not that the products are always subjective,
but that they are sometimes unfit and torment the spirit which they
exercise. The pathetic part of our situation appears only when we
so attach ourselves to those necessary but imperfect fictions, as to
reject the facts from which they spring and of which they seek to
be prophetic. We are then guilty of that substitution of means for
ends, which is called idolatry in religion, absurdity in logic, and
folly in morals. In aesthetics the thing has no name, but is
nevertheless very common; for it is found whenever we speak of
what ought to please, rather than of what actually pleases.

_Are all things beautiful?_

§ 31. These principles lead to an intelligible answer to a question
which is not uninteresting in itself and crucial in a system of
aesthetics. Are all things beautiful? Are all types equally beautiful
when we abstract from our practical prejudices? If the reader has
given his assent to the foregoing propositions, he will easily see
that, in one sense, we must declare that no object is essentially ugly.
If impressions are painful, they are objectified with difficulty; the
perception of a thing is therefore, under normal circumstances,
when the senses are not fatigued, rather agreeable than
disagreeable. And when the frequent perception of a class of
objects has given rise to an apperceptive norm, and we have an
ideal of the species, the recognition and exemplification of that
norm will give pleasure, in proportion to the degree of interest
and accuracy with which we have made our observations. The
naturalist accordingly sees beauties to which the academic artist is
blind, and each new environment must open to us, if we allow it to
educate our perception, a new wealth of beautiful forms.

But we are not for this reason obliged to assert that all gradations
of beauty and dignity are a matter of personal and accidental bias.
The mystics who declare that to God there is no distinction in the
value of things, and that only our human prejudice makes us prefer
a rose to an oyster, or a lion to a monkey, have, of course, a reason
for what they say. If we could strip ourselves of our human nature,
we should undoubtedly find ourselves incapable of making these
distinctions, as well as of thinking, perceiving, or willing in any
way which is now possible to us. But how things would appear to
us if we were not human is, to a man, a question of no importance.
Even, the mystic to whom the definite constitution of his own mind
is so hateful, can only paralyze without transcending his faculties.
A passionate negation, the motive of which, although morbid, is in
spite of itself perfectly human, absorbs all his energies, and his
ultimate triumph is to attain the absoluteness of indifference.

What is true of mysticism in general, is true also of its
manifestation in aesthetics. If we could so transform our taste as to
find beauty everywhere, because, perhaps, the ultimate nature of
things is as truly exemplified in one thing as in another, we should,
in fact, have abolished taste altogether. For the ascending series of
aesthetic satisfactions we should have substituted a monotonous
judgment of identity. If things are beautiful not by virtue of their
differences but by virtue of an identical something which they
equally contain, then there could be no discrimination in beauty.
Like substance, beauty would be everywhere one and the same,
and any tendency to prefer one thing to another would be a proof
of finitude and illusion. When we try to make our judgments
absolute, what we do is to surrender our natural standards and
categories, and slip into another genus, until we lose ourselves in
the satisfying vagueness of mere being.

Relativity to our partial nature is therefore essential to all our
definite thoughts, judgments, and feelings. And when once the
human bias is admitted as a legitimate, because for us a necessary,
basis of preference, the whole wealth of nature is at once organized
by that standard into a hierarchy of values. Everything is beautiful
because everything is capable in some degree of interesting and
charming our attention; but things differ immensely in this
capacity to please us in the contemplation of them, and therefore
they differ immensely in beauty. Could our nature be fixed and
determined once for all in every particular, the scale of aesthetic
values would become certain. We should not dispute about tastes,
no longer because a common principle of preference could not be
discovered, but rather because any disagreement would then be
impossible.

As a matter of fact, however, human nature is a vague abstraction;
that which is common to all men is the least part of their natural
endowment. Aesthetic capacity is accordingly very unevenly
distributed; and the world of beauty is much vaster and more
complex to one man than to another. So long, indeed, as the
distinction is merely one of development, so that we recognize in
the greatest connoisseur only the refinement of the judgments of
the rudest peasant, our aesthetic principle has not changed; we
might say that, in so far, we had a common standard more or less
widely applied. We might say so, because that standard would be
an implication of a common nature more or less fully developed.

But men do not differ only in the degree of their susceptibility,
they differ also in its direction. Human nature branches into
opposed and incompatible characters. And taste follows this
bifurcation. We cannot, except whimsically, say that a taste for
music is higher or lower than a taste for sculpture. A man might be
a musician and a sculptor by turns; that would only involve a
perfectly conceivable enlargement in human genius. But the union
thus effected would be an accumulation of gifts in the observer, not
a combination of beauties in the object. The excellence of
sculpture and that of music would remain entirely independent and
heterogeneous. Such divergences are like those of the outer senses
to which these arts appeal. Sound and colour have analogies only
in their lowest depth, as vibrations and excitement; as they grow
specific and objective, they diverge; and although the same
consciousness perceives them, it perceives them as unrelated and
uncombinable objects.

The ideal enlargement of human capacity, therefore, has no
tendency to constitute a single standard of beauty. These standards
remain the expression of diverse habits of sense and imagination.
The man who combines the greatest range with the greatest
endowment in each particular, will, of course, be the critic most
generally respected. He will express the feelings of the greater
number of men. The advantage of scope in criticism lies not in the
improvement of our sense in each particular field; here the artist
will detect the amateur's shortcomings. But no man is a specialist
with his whole soul. Some latent capacity he has for other
perceptions; and it is for the awakening of these, and their
marshalling before him, that the student of each kind of beauty
turns to the lover of them all.

The temptation, therefore, to say that all things are really equally
beautiful arises from an imperfect analysis, by which the
operations of the aesthetic consciousness are only partially
disintegrated. The dependence of the _degrees_ of beauty upon
our nature is perceived, while the dependence of its _essence_
upon our nature is still ignored. All things are not equally beautiful
because the subjective bias that discriminates between them is the
cause of their being beautiful at all. The principle of personal
preference is the same as that of human taste; real and objective
beauty, in contrast to a vagary of individuals, means only an
affinity to a more prevalent and lasting susceptibility, a
response toa more general and fundamental demand. And the keener
discrimination, by which the distance between beautiful and ugly
things is increased, far from being a loss of aesthetic insight, is a
development of that faculty by the exercise of which beauty comes
into the world.

_Effects of indeterminate organization._

§ 32. It is the free exercise of the activity of apperception that gives
so peculiar an interest to indeterminate objects, to the vague, the
incoherent, the suggestive, the variously interpretable. The more
this effect is appealed to, the greater wealth of thought is presumed
in the observer, and the less mastery is displayed by the artist. A
poor and literal mind cannot enjoy the opportunity for reverie and
construction given by the stimulus of indeterminate objects; it
lacks the requisite resources. It is nonplussed and annoyed, and
turns away to simpler and more transparent things with a feeling of
helplessness often turning into contempt. And, on the other hand,
the artist who is not artist enough, who has too many irrepressible
talents and too little technical skill, is sure to float in the region of
the indeterminate. He sketches and never paints; he hints and never
expresses; he stimulates and never informs. This is the method of
the individuals and of the nations that have more genius than art.

The consciousness that accompanies this characteristic is the sense
of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not
necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials -- be they
words, colours, or plastic matter -- imposes a limit and bias upon
our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite
rendered through these media. The greatest mastery of technique
will therefore come short of perfect adequacy and exhaustiveness;
there must always remain a penumbra and fringe of suggestion if
the most explicit representation is to communicate a truth. When
there is real profundity, -- when the living core of things is most
firmly grasped, -- there will accordingly be a felt inadequacy of
expression, and an appeal to the observer to piece out our
imperfections with his thoughts. But this should come only after
the resources of a patient and well-learned art have been exhausted;
else what is felt as depth is really confusion and incompetence. The
simplest thing becomes unutterable, if we have forgotten how to
speak. And a habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign
of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has
not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and
the impression that has not learned to express itself -- all of which
are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible
soul.

Our age is given to this sort of self-indulgence, and on both the
grounds mentioned. Our public, without being really trained, -- for
we appeal to too large a public to require training in it, -- is well
informed and eagerly responsive to everything; it is ready to work
pretty hard, and do its share towards its own profit and
entertainment. It becomes a point of pride with it to understand and
appreciate everything. And our art, in its turn, does not overlook
this opportunity. It becomes disorganized, sporadic, whimsical,
and experimental. The crudity we are too distracted to refine, we
accept as originality, and the vagueness we are too pretentious to
make accurate, we pass off as sublimity. This is the secret of
making great works on novel principles, and of writing hard books
easily.

_Example of landscape._

§ 33. An extraordinary taste for landscape compensates us for this
ignorance of what is best and most finished in the arts. The natural
landscape is an indeterminate object; it almost always contains
enough diversity to allow the eye a great liberty in selecting,
emphasizing, and grouping its elements, and it is furthermore rich
in suggestion and in vague emotional stimulus. A landscape to be
seen has to be composed, and to be loved has to be moralized. That
is the reason why rude or vulgar people are indifferent to their
natural surroundings. It does not occur to them that the work-a-day
world is capable of aesthetic contemplation. Only on holidays,
when they add to themselves and their belongings some unusual
ornament, do they stop to watch the effect. The far more beautiful
daily aspects of their environment escape them altogether. When,
however, we learn to apperceive; when we grow fond of tracing
lines and developing vistas; when, above all, the subtler influences
of places on our mental tone are transmuted into an expressiveness
in those places, and they are furthermore poetized by our
day-dreams, and turned by our instant fancy into so many hints of a
fairyland of happy living and vague adventure, -- then we feel that
the landscape is beautiful. The forest, the fields, all wild or rural
scenes, are then full of companionship and entertainment.

This is a beauty dependent on reverie, fancy, and objectified
emotion. The promiscuous natural landscape cannot be enjoyed in
any other way. It has no real unity, and therefore requires to have
some form or other supplied by the fancy; which can be the more
readily done, in that the possible forms are many, and the constant
changes in the object offer varying suggestions to the eye. In fact,
psychologically speaking, there is no such thing as a landscape;
what we call such is an infinity of different scraps and glimpses
given in succession. Even a painted landscape, although it tends to
select and emphasize some parts of the field, is composed by
adding together a multitude of views. When this painting is
observed in its turn, it is surveyed as a real landscape would be,
and apperceived partially and piecemeal; although, of course, it
offers much less wealth of material than its living original, and is
therefore vastly inferior.

Only the extreme of what is called impressionism tries to give
upon canvas one absolute momentary view; the result is that when
the beholder has himself actually been struck by that aspect, the
picture has an extraordinary force and emotional value -- like the
vivid power of recalling the past possessed by smells. But, on the
other hand, such a work is empty and trivial in the extreme; it is
the photograph of a detached impression, not followed, as it would
be in nature, by many variations of itself. An object so unusual is
often unrecognizable, if the vision thus unnaturally isolated has
never happened to come vividly into our own experience. The
opposite school -- what might be called _discursive_ landscape
painting -- collects so many glimpses and gives so fully the sum of
our positive observations of a particular scene, that its work is sure
to be perfectly intelligible and plain. If it seems unreal and
uninteresting, that is because it is formless, like the collective
object it represents, while it lacks that sensuous intensity and
movement which might have made the reality stimulating.

The landscape contains, of course, innumerable things which have
determinate forms; but if the attention is directed specifically to
them, we have no longer what, by a curious limitation of the word,
is called the love of nature. Not very long ago it was usual for
painters of landscapes to introduce figures, buildings, or ruins to
add some human association to the beauty of the place. Or, if
wildness and desolation were to be pictured, at least one weary
wayfarer must be seen sitting upon a broken column. He might
wear a toga and then be Marius among the ruins of Carthage. The
landscape without figures would have seemed meaningless; the
spectator would have sat in suspense awaiting something, as at
the theatre when the curtain rises on an empty stage. The
indeterminateness of the suggestions of an unhumanized scene was
then felt as a defect; now we feel it rather as an exaltation. We
need to be free; our emotion suffices us; we do not ask for a
description of the object which interests us as a part of ourselves.
We should blush to say so simple and obvious a thing as that to us
"the mountains are a feeling"; nor should we think of apologizing
for our romanticism as Byron did:

     I love not man the less but nature more
     From these our interviews, in which I steal,
     From all I may be, or have been before,
     To mingle with the universe, and feel
     What I can ne'er express.

This ability to rest in nature unadorned and to find entertainment in
her aspects, is, of course, a great gain. Aesthetic education consists
in training ourselves to see the maximum of beauty. To see it in the
physical world, which must continually be about us, is a great
progress toward that marriage of the imagination with the reality
which is the goal of contemplation.

While we gain this mastery of the formless, however, we should
not lose the more necessary capacity of seeing form in those things
which happen to have it. In respect to most of those things which
are determinate as well as natural, we are usually in that state of
aesthetic unconsciousness which the peasant is in in respect to the
landscape. We treat human life and its environment with the same
utilitarian eye with which he regards the field and mountain. That
is beautiful which is expressive of convenience and wealth; the rest
is indifferent. If we mean by love of nature aesthetic delight in the
world in which we casually live (and what can be more _natural_
than man and all his arts?), we may say that the absolute love of
_nature_ hardly exists among us. What we love is the stimulation
of our own personal emotions and dreams; and landscape appeals
to us, as music does to those who have no sense for musical form.

There would seem to be no truth in the saying that the ancients
loved nature less than we. They loved landscape less -- less, at
least, in proportion to their love of the definite things it contained.
The vague and changing effects of the atmosphere, the masses of
mountains, the infinite and living complexity of forests, did not
fascinate them. They had not that preponderant taste for the
indeterminate that makes the landscape a favourite subject of
contemplation. But love of nature, and comprehension of her, they
had in a most eminent degree; in fact, they actually made explicit
that objectification of our own soul in her, which for the romantic
poet remains a mere vague and shifting suggestion. What are the
celestial gods, the nymphs, the fauns, the dryads, but the definite
apperceptions of that haunting spirit which we think we see in the
sky, the mountains, and the woods? We may think that our vague
intuition grasps the truth of what their childish imagination turned
into a fable. But our belief, if it is one, is just as fabulous, just as
much a projection of human nature into material things; and if we
renounce all positive conception of quasi-mental principles in
nature, and reduce our moralizing of her to a poetic expression of
our own sensations, then can we say that our verbal and illusive
images are comparable as representations of the life of nature to
the precision, variety, humour, and beauty of the Greek mythology?

_Extensions to objects usually not regarded authentically._

§ 34. It may not be superfluous to mention here certain analogous
fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to
objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy,
natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All
theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The
material is experience; and although each part of experience is, of
course, perfectly definite in itself, and just that experience which it
is, yet the recollection and relating together of the successive
experiences is a function of the theoretical faculty. The systematic
relations of things in time and space, and their dependence upon
one another, are the work of our imagination. Theory can therefore
never have the kind of truth which belongs to experience; as
Hobbes has it, no discourse whatsoever can end in absolute
knowledge of fact.

It is conceivable that two different theories should be equally true
in respect to the same facts. All that is required is that they should
be equally complete schemes for the relation and prediction of the
realities they deal with. The choice between them would be an
arbitrary one, determined by personal bias, for the object being
indeterminate, its elements can be apperceived as forming all kinds
of unities. A theory is a form of apperception, and in applying it to
the facts, although our first concern is naturally the adequacy of
our instrument of comprehension, we are also influenced, more
than we think, by the ease and pleasure with which we think in its
terms, that is, by its beauty.

The case of two alternative theories of nature, both exhaustive and
adequate, may seem somewhat imaginary. The human mind is,
indeed, not rich and indeterminate enough to drive, as the saying is,
many horses abreast; it wishes to have one general scheme of
conception only, under which it strives to bring everything. Yet the
philosophers, who are the scouts of common sense, have come in
sight of this possibility of a variety of methods of dealing with the
same facts. As at the basis of evolution generally there are many
variations, only some of which remain fixed, so at the origin of
conception there are many schemes; these are simultaneously
developed, and at most stages of thought divide the intelligence
among themselves. So much is thought of on one principle -- say
mechanically -- and so much on another -- say teleologically. In
those minds only that have a speculative turn, that is, in whom the
desire for unity of comprehension outruns practical exigencies,
does the conflict become intolerable. In them one or another of
these theories tends to swallow all experience, but is commonly
incapable of doing so.

The final victory of a single philosophy is not yet won, because
none as yet has proved adequate to all experience. If ever unity
should be attained, our unanimity would not indicate that, as the
popular fancy conceives it, the truth had been discovered; it would
only indicate that the human mind had found a definitive way of
classifying its experience. Very likely, if man still retained his
inveterate habit of hypostatizing his ideas, that definitive scheme
would be regarded as a representation of the objective relations of
things; but no proof that it was so would ever be found, nor even
any hint that there were external objects, not to speak of relations
between them. As the objects are hypostatized percepts, so the
relations are hypostatized processes of the human understanding.

To have reached a final philosophy would be only to have
formulated the typical and satisfying form of human apperception;
the view would remain a theory, an instrument of comprehension
and survey fitted to the human eye; it would be for ever utterly
heterogeneous from fact, utterly unrepresentative of any of those
experiences which it would artificially connect and weave into a
pattern. Mythology and theology are the most striking illustrations
of this human method of incorporating much diffuse experience
into graphic and picturesque ideas; but steady reflection will hardly
allow us to see anything else in the theories of science and
philosophy. These, too, are creatures of our intelligence, and have
their only being in the movement of our thought, as they have their
only justification in their fitness to our experience.

Long before we can attain, however, the ideal unification of
experience under one theory, the various fields of thought demand
provisional surveys; we are obliged to reflect on life in a variety of
detached and unrelated acts, since neither can the whole material
of life be ever given while we still live, nor can that which is given
be impartially retained in the human memory. When omniscience
was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness
of human thought may console us for its imperfection.

History, for instance, which passes for the account of facts, is in
reality a collection of apperceptions of an indeterminate material;
for even the material of history is not fact, but consists of
memories and words subject to ever-varying interpretation. No
historian can be without bias, because the bias defines the history.
The memory in the first place is selective; official and other
records are selective, and often intentionally partial. Monuments
and ruins remain by chance. And when the historian has set
himself to study these few relics of the past, the work of his own
intelligence begins. He must have some guiding interest. A history
is not an indiscriminate register of every known event; a file of
newspapers is not an inspiration of Clio. A history is a view of the
fortunes of some institution or person; it traces the development of
some interest. This interest furnishes the standard by which the
facts are selected, and their importance gauged. Then, after the
facts are thus chosen, marshalled, and emphasized, comes the
indication of causes and relations; and in this part of his work the
historian plunges avowedly into speculation, and becomes a
philosophical poet. Everything will then depend on his genius, on
his principles, on his passions, -- in a word, on his apperceptive
forms. And the value of history is similar to that of poetry, and
varies with the beauty, power, and adequacy of the form in which
the indeterminate material of human life is presented.

_Further dangers of indeterminateness._

§ 35. The fondness of a race or epoch for any kind of effect is a
natural expression of temperament and circumstances, and cannot
be blamed or easily corrected. At the same time we may stop to
consider some of the disadvantages of a taste for the indeterminate.
We shall be registering a truth and at the same time, perhaps,
giving some encouragement to that rebellion which we may
inwardly feel against this too prevalent manner. The indeterminate
is by its nature ambiguous; it is therefore obscure and uncertain in
its effect, and if used, as in many arts it often is, to convey a
meaning, must fail to do so unequivocally. Where a meaning is not
to be conveyed, as in landscape, architecture, or music, the
illusiveness of the form is not so objectionable: although in all
these objects the tendency to observe forms and to demand them is
a sign of increasing appreciation. The ignorant fail to see the forms
of music, architecture, and landscape, and therefore are insensible
to relative rank and technical values in these spheres; they regard
the objects only as so many stimuli to emotion, as soothing or
enlivening influences. But the sensuous and associative values of
these things -- especially of music -- are so great, that even without
an appreciation of form considerable beauty may be found in them.

In literature, however, where the sensuous value of the words is
comparatively small, indeterminateness of form is fatal to beauty,
and, if extreme, even to expressiveness. For meaning is conveyed
by the _form_ and order of words, not by the words themselves,
and no precision of meaning can be reached without precision of
style. Therefore no respectable writer is voluntarily obscure in the
structure of his phrases -- that is an abuse reserved for the clowns
of literary fashion. But a book is a larger sentence, and if it is
formless it fails to mean anything, for the same reason that an
unformed collection of words means nothing. The chapters and
verses may have said something, as loose words may have a
known sense and a tone; but the book will have brought no
message.

In fact, the absence of form in composition has two stages: that in
which, as in the works of Emerson, significant fragments are
collected, and no system, no total thought, constructed out of them;
and secondly, that in which, as in the writings of the Symbolists of
our time, all the significance is kept back in the individual words,
or even in the syllables that compose them. This mosaic of
word-values has, indeed, a possibility of effect, for the absence of form
does not destroy materials, but, as we have observed, rather allows
the attention to remain fixed upon them; and for this reason
absence of sense is a means of accentuating beauty of sound and
verbal suggestion. But this example shows how the tendency to
neglect structure in literature is a tendency to surrender the use of
language as an instrument of thought The descent is easy from
ambiguity to meaninglessness.

The indeterminate in form is also indeterminate in value. It needs
completion by the mind of the observer and as this completion
differs, the value of the result must vary. An indeterminate object
is therefore beautiful to him who can make it so, and ugly to him
who cannot. It appeals to a few and to them diversely. In fact, the
observer's own mind is the storehouse from which the beautiful
form has to be drawn. If the form is not there, it cannot be applied
to the half-finished object; it is like asking a man without skill to
complete another man's composition. The indeterminate object
therefore requires an active and well-equipped mind, and is
otherwise without value.

It is furthermore unprofitable even to the mind which takes it up; it
stimulates that mind to action, but it presents it with no new object.
We can respond only with those forms of apperception which we
already are accustomed to. A formless object cannot _inform_ the
mind, cannot mould it to a new habit. That happens only when the
data, by their clear determination, compel the eye and imagination
to follow new paths and see new relations. Then we are introduced
to a new beauty, and enriched to that extent. But the indeterminate,
like music to the sentimental, is a vague stimulus. It calls forth at
random such ideas and memories as may lie to hand, stirring the
mind, but leaving it undisciplined and unacquainted with any new
object. This stirring, like that of the pool of Bethesda, may indeed
have its virtue. A creative mind, already rich in experience and
observation, may, under the influence of such a stimulus, dart into
a new thought, and give birth to that with which it is already
pregnant; but the fertilizing seed came from elsewhere, from study
and admiration of those definite forms which nature contains, or
which art, in imitation of nature, has conceived and brought to
perfection.

_Illusion of infinite perfection._

§ 36. The great advantage, then, of indeterminate organization is
that it cultivates that spontaneity, intelligence, and imagination
without which many important objects would remain unintelligible,
and because unintelligible, uninteresting. The beauty of landscape,
the forms of religion and science, the types of human nature itself,
are due to this apperceptive gift. Without it we should have a chaos;
but its patient and ever-fresh activity carves out of the fluid
material a great variety of forms. An object which stimulates us to
this activity, therefore, seems often to be more sublime and
beautiful than one which presents to us a single unchanging form,
however perfect. There seems to be a life and infinity in
the incomplete, which the determinate excludes by its own
completeness and petrifaction. And yet the effort in this very
activity is to reach determination; we can only see beauty in so far
as we introduce form. The instability of the form can be no
advantage to a work of art; the determinate keeps constantly what
the indeterminate reaches only in those moments in which the
observer's imagination is especially propitious. If we feel a certain
disappointment in the monotonous limits of a definite form and its
eternal, unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more
the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude
us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of
this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably
involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a
constant object? May we not prefer the unchangeable to the
irrecoverable?

We may; and the preference is one which we should all more
clearly feel, were it not for an illusion, proper to the romantic
temperament, which lends a mysterious charm to things which are
indefinite and indefinable. It is the suggestion of infinite perfection.
In reality, perfection is a synonym of finitude. Neither in nature
nor in the fancy can anything be perfect except by realizing a
definite type, which excludes all variation, and contrasts sharply
with every other possibility of being. There is no perfection apart
from a form of apperception or type; and there are as many kinds
of perfection as there are types or forms of apperception latent in
the mind.

Now these various perfections are mutually exclusive. Only in a
kind of aesthetic orgy -- in the madness of an intoxicated
imagination -- can we confuse them. As the Roman emperor
wished that the Roman people had but a single neck, to murder
them at one blow, so we may sometimes wish that all beauties had
but one form, that we might behold them together. But in the
nature of things beauties are incompatible. The spring cannot
coexist with the autumn, nor day with night; what is beautiful in a
child is hideous in a man, and _vice versa;_ every age,
every country, each sex, has a peculiar beauty, finite and
incommunicable; the better it is attained the more completely it
excludes every other. The same is evidently true of schools of art,
of styles and languages, and of every effect whatsoever. It exists
by its finitude and is great in proportion to its determination.

But there is a loose and somewhat helpless state of mind in which
while we are incapable of realizing any particular thought or vision
in its perfect clearness and absolute beauty, we nevertheless feel its
haunting presence in the background of consciousness. And one
reason why the idea cannot emerge from that obscurity is that it is
not alone in the brain; a thousand other ideals, a thousand other
plastic tendencies of thought, simmer there in confusion; and if any
definite image is presented in response to that vague agitation of
our soul, we feel its inadequacy to our need in spite of, or perhaps
on account of, its own particular perfection. We then say that the
classic does not satisfy us, and that the "Grecian cloys us with his
perfectness." We are not capable of that concentrated and serious
attention to one thing at a time which would enable us to sink into
its being, and enjoy the intrinsic harmonies of its form, and the
bliss of its immanent particular heaven; we flounder in the vague,
but at the same time we are full of yearnings, of half-thoughts and
semi-visions, and the upward tendency and exaltation of our mood
is emphatic and overpowering in proportion to our incapacity to
think, speak, or imagine.

The sum of our incoherences has, however, an imposing volume
and even, perhaps, a vague, general direction. We feel ourselves
laden with an infinite burden; and what delights us most and seems
to us to come nearest to the ideal is not what embodies any one
possible form, but that which, by embodying none, suggests many,
and stirs the mass of our inarticulate imagination with a pervasive
thrill. Each thing, without being a beauty in itself, by stimulating
our indeterminate emotion, seems to be a hint and expression of
infinite beauty. That infinite perfection which cannot be realized,
because it is self-contradictory, may be thus suggested, and on
account of this suggestion an indeterminate effect may be regarded
as higher, more significant, and more beautiful than any
determinate one.

The illusion, however, is obvious. The infinite perfection
suggested is an absurdity. What exists is a vague emotion, the
objects of which, if they could emerge from the chaos of a
confused imagination, would turn out to be a multitude of
differently beautiful determinate things. This emotion of infinite
perfection is the _materia prima -- rudis indigestaque moles --_ out
of which attention, inspiration, and art can bring forth an infinity of
particular perfections. Every aesthetic success, whether in
contemplation or production, is the birth of one of these
possibilities with which the sense of infinite perfection is pregnant.
A work of art or an act of observation which remains indeterminate
is, therefore, a failure, however much it may stir our emotion. It is
a failure for two reasons. In the first place this emotion is seldom
wholly pleasant; it is disquieting and perplexing; it brings a desire
rather than a satisfaction. And in the second place, the emotion, not
being embodied, fails to constitute the beauty of anything; and
what we have is merely a sentiment, a consciousness that values
are or might be there, but a failure to extricate those values, or to
make them explicit and recognizable in an appropriate object.

These gropings after beauty have their worth as signs of aesthetic
vitality and intimations of future possible accomplishment; but in
themselves they are abortive, and mark the impotence of the
imagination. Sentimentalism in the observer and romanticism in
the artist are examples of this aesthetic incapacity. Whenever
beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the
eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection.
The kind of perfection may indeed be new; and if the discovery of
new perfections is to be called romanticism, then romanticism is
the beginning of all aesthetic life. But if by romanticism we mean
indulgence in confused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid
force, then there is evidently need of education, of attentive labour,
to disentangle the beauties so vaguely felt, and give each its
adequate embodiment. The breadth of our inspiration need not be
lost in this process of clarification, for there is no limit to the
number and variety of forms which the world may be made to wear;
only, if it is to be appreciated as beautiful and not merely felt as
unutterable, it must be seen as a kingdom of forms. Thus the works
of Shakespeare give us a great variety, with a frequent marvellous
precision of characterization, and the forms of his art are definite
although its scope is great.

But by a curious anomaly, we are often expected to see the greatest
expressiveness in what remains indeterminate, and in reality
expresses nothing. As we have already observed, the sense of
profundity and significance is a very detachable emotion; it can
accompany a confused jumble of promptings quite as easily as it
can a thorough comprehension of reality. The illusion of infinite
perfection is peculiarly apt to produce this sensation. That illusion
arises by the simultaneous awakening of many incipient thoughts
and dim ideas; it stirs the depths of the mind as a wind stirs the
thickets of a forest; and the unusual consciousness of the life and
longing of the soul, brought by that gust of feeling, makes us
recognize in the object a singular power, a mysterious meaning.

But the feeling of significance signifies little. All we have in this
case is a potentiality of imagination; and only when this
potentiality begins to be realized in definite ideas, does a real
meaning, or any object which that meaning can mean, arise in the
mind. The highest aesthetic good is not that vague potentiality, nor
that contradictory, infinite perfection so strongly desired; it is the
greatest number and variety of finite perfections. To learn to see in
nature and to enshrine in the arts the typical forms of things; to
study and recognize their variations; to domesticate the
imagination in the world, so that everywhere beauty can be seen,
and a hint found for artistic creation, -- that is the goal of
contemplation. Progress lies in the direction of discrimination and
precision, not in that of formless emotion and reverie.

_Organized nature the source of apperceptive forms; example of
sculpture._

§ 37. The form of the material world is in one sense always
perfectly definite, since the particles that compose it are at each
moment in a given relative position; but a world that had no other
form than that of such a constellation of atoms would remain
chaotic to our perception, because we should not be able to survey
it as a whole, or to keep our attention suspended evenly over its
innumerable parts. According to evolutionary theory, mechanical
necessity has, however, brought about a distribution and
aggregation of elements such as, for our purposes, constitutes
individual things. Certain systems of atoms move together as units;
and these organisms reproduce themselves and recur so often in
our environment, that our senses become accustomed to view their
parts together. Their form becomes a natural and recognizable one.
An order and sequence is established in our imagination by virtue
of the order and sequence in which the corresponding impressions
have come to our senses. We can remember, reproduce, and in
reproducing vary, by kaleidoscopic tricks of the fancy, the forms in
which our perceptions have come.

The mechanical organization of external nature is thus the source
of apperceptive forms in the mind. Did not sensation, by a constant
repetition of certain sequences, and a recurring exactitude of
mathematical relations, keep our fancy clear and fresh, we should
fall into an imaginative lethargy. Idealization would degenerate
into indistinctness, and, by the dulling of our memory, we should
dream a world daily more poor and vague.

This process is periodically observable in the history of the arts.
The way in which the human figure, for instance, is depicted, is an
indication of the way in which it is apperceived. The arts give back
only so much of nature as the human eye has been able to master.
The most primitive stage of drawing and sculpture presents man
with his arms and legs, his ten fingers and ten toes, branching out
into mid-air; the apperception of the body has been evidently
practical and successive, and the artist sets down what he knows
rather than any of the particular perceptions that conveyed that
knowledge. Those perceptions are merged and lost in the haste to
reach the practically useful concept of the object. By a naïve
expression of the same principle, we find in some Assyrian
drawings the eye seen from the front introduced into a face seen in
profile, each element being represented in that form in which it
was most easily observed and remembered. The development of
Greek sculpture furnishes a good example of the gradual
penetration of nature into the mind, of the slowly enriched
apperception of the object. The quasi-Egyptian stiffness melts
away, first from the bodies of the minor figures, afterwards of
those of the gods, and finally the face is varied, and the hieratic
smile almost disappears.[10]

But this progress has a near limit; once the most beautiful and
inclusive apperception reached, once the best form caught at its
best moment, the artist seems to have nothing more to do. To
reproduce the imperfections of individuals seems wrong, when
beauty, after all, is the thing desired. And the ideal, as caught by
the master's inspiration, is more beautiful than anything his pupils
can find for themselves in nature. From its summit, the art
therefore declines in one of two directions. It either becomes
academic, forsakes the study of nature, and degenerates into empty
convention, or else it becomes ignoble, forsakes beauty, and sinks
into a tasteless and unimaginative technique. The latter was the
course of sculpture in ancient times, the former, with moments of
reawakening, has been its dreadful fate among the moderns.

This reawakening has come whenever there has been a return to
nature, for a new form of apperception and a new ideal. Of this
return there is continual need in all the arts; without it our
apperceptions grow thin and worn, and subject to the sway of
tradition and fashion. We continue to judge about beauty, but we
give up looking for it. The remedy is to go back to the reality, to
study it patiently, to allow new aspects of it to work upon the mind,
sink into it, and beget there an imaginative offspring after their
own kind. Then a new art can appear, which, having the same
origin in admiration for nature which the old art had, may hope to
attain the same excellence in a new direction.

In fact, one of the dangers to which a modern artist is exposed is
the seduction of his predecessors. The gropings of our muse, the
distracted experiments of our architecture, often arise from the
attraction of some historical school; we cannot work out our own
style because we are hampered by the beauties of so many others.
The result is an eclecticism, which, in spite of its great historical
and psychological interest, is without aesthetic unity or permanent
power to please. Thus the study of many schools of art may
become an obstacle to proficiency in any.

_Utility the principle of organization in nature._

§ 38. Utility (or, as it is now called, adaptation, and natural
selection) organizes the material world into definite species and
individuals. Only certain aggregations of matter are in equilibrium
with the prevailing forces of the environment. Gravity, for instance,
is in itself a chaotic force; it pulls all particles indiscriminately
together without reference to the wholes into which the human eye
may have grouped them. But the result is not chaos, because matter
arranged in some ways is welded together by the very tendency
which disintegrates it when arranged in other forms. These forms,
selected by their congruity with gravity, are therefore fixed in
nature, and become types. Thus the weight of the stones keeps the
pyramid standing: here a certain shape has become a guarantee of
permanence in the presence of a force in itself mechanical and
undiscriminating. It is the utility of the pyramidal form -- its fitness
to stand -- that has made it a type in building. The Egyptians
merely repeated a process that they might have observed going on
of itself in nature, who builds a pyramid in every hill, not indeed
because she wishes to, or because pyramids are in any way an
object of her action, but because she has no force which can easily
dislodge matter that finds itself in that shape.

Such an accidental stability of structure is, in this moving world, a
sufficient principle of permanence and individuality. The same
mechanical principles, in more complex applications, insure the
persistence of animal forms and prevent any permanent deviation
from them. What is called the principle of self-preservation, and
the final causes and substantial forms of the Aristotelian
philosophy, are descriptions of the result of this operation. The
tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is
simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are
not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their
equilibrium; while the incidence of a too great disturbance causes
that disruption we call death, or that variation of type, which, on
account of its incapacity to establish itself permanently, we call
abnormal.

Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable species; and the
aesthetic eye, studying her forms, tends, as we have already shown,
to bring the type within even narrower limits than do the external
exigencies of life.

_The relation of utility to beauty._

§ 39. This natural harmony between utility and beauty, when its
origin is not understood, is of course the subject of much perplexed
and perplexing theory. Sometimes we are told that utility is itself
the essence of beauty, that is, that our consciousness of the
practical advantages of certain forms is the ground of our aesthetic
admiration of them. The horse's legs are said to be beautiful
because they are fit to run, the eye because it is made to see, the
house because it is convenient to live in. An amusing application --
which might pass for a _reductio ad absurdum,_ -- of this dense
theory is put by Xenophon into the mouth of Socrates. Comparing
himself with a youth present at the same banquet, who was about
to receive the prize of beauty, Socrates declares himself more
beautiful and more worthy of the crown. For utility makes beauty,
and eyes bulging out from the head like his are the most
advantageous for seeing; nostrils wide and open to the air, like his,
most appropriate for smell; and a mouth large and voluminous, like
his, best fitted for both eating and kissing.[11]

Now since these things are, in fact, hideous, the theory that shows
they _ought to be_ beautiful, is vain and ridiculous. But that
theory contains this truth: that had the utility of Socratic features
been so great that men of all other type must have perished,
Socrates would have been beautiful. He would have represented
the human type. The eye would have been then accustomed to that
form, the imagination would have taken it as the basis of its
refinements, and accentuated its naturally effective points. The
beautiful does not depend on the useful; it is constituted by the
imagination in ignorance and contempt of practical advantage; but
it is not independent of the necessary, for the necessary must also
be the habitual and consequently the basis of the type, and of all its
imaginative variations.

There are, moreover, at a late and derivative stage in our aesthetic
judgment, certain cases in which the knowledge of fitness and
utility enters into our sense of beauty. But it does so very indirectly,
rather by convincing us that we should tolerate what practical
conditions have imposed on an artist, by arousing admiration of his
ingenuity, or by suggesting the interesting things themselves with
which the object is known to be connected. Thus a cottage-chimney,
stout and tall, with the smoke floating from it, pleases because
we fancy it to mean a hearth, a rustic meal, and a comfortable
family. But that is all extraneous association. The most
ordinary way in which utility affects us is negatively; if we
know a thing to be useless and fictitious, the uncomfortable
haunting sense of waste and trickery prevents all enjoyment, and
therefore banishes beauty. But this is also an adventitious
complication. The intrinsic value of a form is in no way affected by it.

Opposed to this utilitarian theory stands the metaphysical one that
would make the beauty or intrinsic rightness of things the source of
their efficiency and of their power to survive. Taken literally, as it
is generally meant, this idea must, from our point of view, appear
preposterous. Beauty and rightness are relative to our judgment
and emotion; they in no sense exist in nature or preside over her.
She everywhere appears to move by mechanical law. The types of
things exist by what, in relation to our approbation, is mere chance,
and it is our faculties that must adapt themselves to our
environment and not our environment to our faculties. Such is the
naturalistic point of view which we have adopted.

To say, however, that beauty is in some sense the ground of
practical fitness, need not seem to us wholly unmeaning. The fault
of the Platonists who say things of this sort is seldom that of
emptiness. They have an intuition; they have sometimes a strong
sense of the facts of consciousness. But they turn their discoveries
into so many revelations, and the veil of the infinite and absolute
soon covers their little light of specific truth. Sometimes, after
patient digging, the student comes upon the treasure of some
simple fact, some common experience, beneath all their mystery
and unction. And so it may be in this case. If we make allowances
for the tendency to express experience in allegory and myth, we
shall see that the idea of beauty and rationality presiding over
nature and guiding her, as it were, for their own greater glory, is a
projection and a writing large of a psychological principle.

The mind that perceives nature is the same that understands and
enjoys her; indeed, these three functions are really elements of one
process. There is therefore in the mere perceptibility of a thing a
certain prophecy of its beauty; if it were not on the road to beauty,
if it had no approach to fitness to our faculties of perception, the
object would remain eternally unperceived. The sense, therefore,
that the whole world is made to be food for the soul; that beauty is
not only its own, but all things' excuse for being; that universal
aspiration towards perfection is the key and secret of the world, --
that sense is the poetical reverberation of a psychological fact -- of
the fact that our mind is an organism tending to unity, to
unconsciousness of what is refractory to its action, and to
assimilation and sympathetic transformation of what is kept within
its sphere. The idea that nature could be governed by an aspiration
towards beauty is, therefore, to be rejected as a confusion, but at
the same time we must confess that this confusion is founded on a
consciousness of the subjective relation between the perceptibility,
rationality, and beauty of things.

_Utility the principle of organization in the arts._

§ 40. This subjective relation is, however, exceedingly loose. Most
things that are perceivable are not perceived so distinctly as to be
intelligible, nor so delightfully as to be beautiful. If our eye had
infinite penetration, or our imagination infinite elasticity, this
would not be the case; to see would then be to understand and to
enjoy. As it is, the degree of determination needed for perception is
much less than that needed for comprehension or ideality. Hence
there is room for hypothesis and for art. As hypothesis organizes
experiences imaginatively in ways in which observation has not
been able to do, so art organizes objects in ways to which nature,
perhaps, has never condescended.

The chief thing which the imitative arts add to nature is
permanence, the lack of which is the saddest defect of many
natural beauties. The forces which determine natural forms,
therefore, determine also the forms of the imitative arts. But the
non-imitative arts supply organisms different in kind from those
which nature affords. If we seek the principle by which these
objects are organized, we shall generally find that it is likewise
utility. Architecture, for instance, has all its forms suggested by
practical demands. Use requires our buildings to assume certain
determinate forms; the mechanical properties of our materials, the
exigency of shelter, light, accessibility, economy, and convenience,
dictate the arrangements of our buildings.

Houses and temples have an evolution like that of animals and
plants. Various forms arise by mechanical necessity, like the cave,
or the shelter of overhanging boughs. These are perpetuated by a
selection in which the needs and pleasures of man are the
environment to which the structure must be adapted. Determinate
forms thus establish themselves, and the eye becomes accustomed
to them. The line of use, by habit of apperception, becomes the line
of beauty. A striking example may be found in the pediment of the
Greek temple and the gable of the northern house. The exigencies
of climate determine these forms differently, but the eye in each
case accepts what utility imposes. We admire height in one and
breadth in the other, and we soon find the steep pediment heavy
and the low gable awkward and mean.

It would be an error, however, to conclude that habit alone
establishes the right proportion in these various types of building.
We have the same intrinsic elements to consider as in natural
forms. That is, besides the unity of type and correspondence of
parts which custom establishes, there are certain appeals to more
fundamental susceptibilities of the human eye and imagination.
There is, for instance, the value of abstract form, determined by the
pleasantness and harmony of implicated retinal or muscular
tensions. Different structures contain or suggest more or less of
this kind of beauty, and in that proportion may be called
intrinsically better or worse. Thus artificial forms may be arranged
in a hierarchy like natural ones, by reference to the absolute values
of their contours and masses. Herein lies the superiority of a Greek
to a Chinese vase, or of Gothic to Saracenic construction. Thus
although every useful form is capable of proportion and beauty,
when once its type is established, we cannot say that this beauty is
always potentially equal; and an iron bridge, for instance, although
it certainly possesses and daily acquires aesthetic interest, will
probably never, on the average, equal a bridge of stone.

_Form and adventitious ornament._

§ 41. Beauty of form is the last to be found or admired in artificial
as in natural objects. Time is needed to establish it, and training
and nicety of perception to enjoy it. Motion or colour is what first
interests a child in toys, as in animals; and the barbarian artist
decorates long before he designs. The cave and wigwam are
daubed with paint, or hung with trophies, before any pleasure is
taken in their shape; and the appeal to the detached senses, and to
associations of wealth and luxury, precedes by far the appeal to the
perceptive harmonies of form. In music we observe the same
gradation; first, we appreciate its sensuous and sentimental value;
only with education can we enjoy its form. The plastic arts begin,
therefore, with adventitious ornament and with symbolism. The
aesthetic pleasure is in the richness of the material, the profusion of
the ornament, the significance of the shape -- in everything, rather
than in the shape itself.

We have accordingly, in works of art two independent sources of
effect. The first is the useful form, which generates the type, and
ultimately the beauty of form, when the type has been idealized by
emphasizing its intrinsically pleasing traits. The second is the
beauty of ornament, which comes from the excitement of the
senses, or of the imagination, by colour, or by profusion or
delicacy of detail. Historically, the latter is first developed, and
applied to a form as yet merely useful. But the very presence of
ornament attracts contemplation; the attention lavished on the
object helps to fix its form in the mind, and to make us
discriminate the less from the more graceful. The two kinds of
beauty are then felt, and, yielding to that tendency to unity which
the mind always betrays, we begin to subordinate and organize
these two excellences. The ornament is distributed so as to
emphasize the aesthetic essence of the form; to idealize it even
more, by adding adventitious interests harmoniously to the
intrinsic interest of the lines of structure.

There is here a great field, of course, for variety of combination
and compromise. Some artists are fascinated by the decoration, and
think of the structure merely as the background on which it can be
most advantageously displayed. Others, of more austere taste,
allow ornament only to emphasize the main lines of the design, or
to conceal such inharmonious elements as nature or utility may
prevent them from eliminating.[12] We may thus oscillate between
decorative and structural motives, and only in one point, for each
style, can we find the ideal equilibrium, in which the greatest
strength and lucidity is combined with the greatest splendour.

A less subtle, but still very effective, combination is that hit upon
by many oriental and Gothic architects, and found, also, by
accident perhaps, in many buildings of the plateresque style; the
ornament and structure are both presented with extreme emphasis,
but locally divided; a vast rough wall, for instance, represents the
one, and a profusion of mad ornament huddled around a central
door or window represents the other.

Gothic architecture offers us in the pinnacle and flying buttress a
striking example of the adoption of a mechanical feature, and its
transformation into an element of beauty. Nothing could at first
sight be more hopeless than the external half-arch propping the
side of a pier, or the chimney-like weight of stones pressing it
down from above; but a courageous acceptance of these necessities,
and a submissive study of their form, revealed a new and strange
effect: the bewildering and stimulating intricacy of masses
suspended in mid-air; the profusion of line, variety of surface, and
picturesqueness of light and shade. It needed but a little applied
ornament judiciously distributed; a moulding in the arches; a florid
canopy and statue amid the buttresses; a few grinning monsters
leaning out of unexpected nooks; a leafy budding of the topmost
pinnacles; a piercing here and there of some little gallery, parapet,
or turret into lacework against the sky -- and the building became a
poem, an inexhaustible emotion. Add some passing cloud casting
its moving shadow over the pile, add the circling of birds about the
towers, and you have an unforgettable type of beauty; not perhaps
the noblest, sanest, or most enduring, but one for the existence of
which the imagination is richer, and the world more interesting.

In this manner we accept the forms imposed upon us by utility, and
train ourselves to apperceive their potential beauty. Familiarity
breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. When the mind is
absorbed and dominated by its perceptions, it incorporates into
them more and more of its own functional values, and makes them
ultimately beautiful and expressive. Thus no language can be ugly
to those who speak it well, no religion unmeaning to those who
have learned to pour their life into its moulds.

Of course these forms vary in intrinsic excellence; they are by their
specific character more or less fit and facile for the average mind.
But the man and the age are rare who can choose their own path;
we have generally only a choice between going ahead in the
direction already chosen, or halting and blocking the path for
others. The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from
within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the
traditional forms. Disaster follows rebellion against tradition or
against utility, which are the basis and root of our taste and
progress. But, within the given school, and as exponents of its
spirit, we can adapt and perfect our works, if haply we are better
inspired than our predecessors. For the better we know a given
thing, and the more we perceive its strong and weak points, the
more capable we are of idealizing it.

_Form in words._

§ 42. The main effect of language consists in its meaning, in the
ideas which it expresses. But no expression is possible without a
presentation, and this presentation must have a form. This form of
the instrument of expression is itself an element of effect, although
in practical life we may overlook it in our haste to attend to the
meaning it conveys. It is, moreover, a condition of the kind of
expression possible, and often determines the manner in which the
object suggested shall be apperceived. No word has the exact value
of any other in the same or in another language.[13] But the
intrinsic effect of language does not stop there. The single word is
but a stage in the series of formations which constitute language,
and which preserve for men the fruit of their experience, distilled
and concentrated into a symbol.

This formation begins with the elementary sounds themselves,
which have to be discriminated and combined to make recognizable
symbols. The evolution of these symbols goes on spontaneously,
suggested by our tendency to utter all manner of sounds,
and preserved by the ease with which the ear discriminates
these sounds when made. Speech would be an absolute and
unrelated art, like music, were it not controlled by utility. The
sounds have indeed no resemblance to the objects they symbolize;
but before the system of sounds can represent the system of objects,
there has to be a correspondence in the groupings of both. The
structure of language, unlike that of music, thus becomes a mirror
of the structure of the world as presented to the intelligence.

Grammar, philosophically studied, is akin to the deepest
metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of speech, it
reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those
categories by which we conceive the world. It is by virtue of this
parallel development that language has its function of expressing
experience with exactness, and the poet -- to whom language is an
instrument of art -- has to employ it also with a constant reference
to meaning and veracity; that is, he must be a master of experience
before he can become a true master of words. Nevertheless,
language is primarily a sort of music, and the beautiful effects
which it produces are due to its own structure, giving, as it
crystallizes in a new fashion, an unforeseen form to experience.

Poets may be divided into two classes: the musicians and the
psychologists. The first are masters of significant language
as harmony; they know what notes to sound together and in
succession; they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and
images, by the fugue of passion and the snap of wit, a thousand
brilliant effects out of old materials. The Ciceronian orator, the
epigrammatic, lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art.
The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their effect not by the
intrinsic mastery of language, but by the closer adaptation of it to
things. The dramatic poets naturally furnish an illustration.

But however transparent we may wish to make our language,
however little we may call for its intrinsic effects, and direct our
attention exclusively to its expressiveness, we cannot avoid the
limitations of our particular medium. The character of the tongue a
man speaks, and the degree of his skill in speaking it, must always
count enormously in the aesthetic value of his compositions; no
skill in observation, no depth of thought or feeling, but is spoiled
by a bad style and enhanced by a good one. The diversities of
tongues and their irreducible aesthetic values, begins with the very
sound of the letters, with the mode of utterance, and the
characteristic inflections of the voice; notice, for instance, the
effect of the French of these lines of Alfred de Musset,

     Jamais deux yeux plus doux n'ont du ciel le plus pur
     Sondé la profondeur et réfléchi l'azur.

and compare with its flute-like and treble quality the breadth, depth,
and volume of the German in this inimitable stanza of Goethe's:

     Ueber alien Gipfeln
     Ist Ruh,
     In allen Wipfeln
     Spürest du
     Kaum einen Hauch;
     Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
     Warte nur, balde
     Ruhest du auch.

Even if the same tune could be played on both these vocal
instruments, the difference in their _timbre_ would make the value
of the melody entirely distinct in each case.

_Syntactical form._

§ 43. The known impossibility of adequate translation appears here
at the basis of language. The other diversities are superadded upon
this diversity of sound. The syntax is the next source of effect.
What could be better than Homer, or what worse than almost any
translation of him? And this holds even of languages so closely
allied as the Indo-European, which, after all, have certain
correspondences of syntax and inflection. If there could be a
language with other parts of speech than ours, -- a language
without nouns, for instance, -- how would that grasp of experience,
that picture of the world, which all our literature contains, be
reproduced in it? Whatever beauties that language might be
susceptible of, none of the effects produced on us, I will not say by
poets, but even by nature itself, could be expressed in it.

Nor is such a language inconceivable. Instead of summarizing all
our experiences of a thing by one word, its name, we should have
to recall by appropriate adjectives the various sensations we had
received from it; the objects we think of would be disintegrated, or,
rather, would never have been unified. For "sun," they would say
"high, yellow, dazzling, round, slowly moving," and the
enumeration of these qualities (as we call them), without any
suggestion of a unity at their source, might give a more vivid, and
profound, if more cumbrous, representation of the facts. But how
could the machinery of such an imagination be capable of
repeating the effects of ours, when the objects to us most obvious
and real would be to those minds utterly indescribable?

The same diversity appears in the languages we ordinarily know,
only in a lesser degree. The presence or absence of case-endings in
nouns and adjectives, their difference of gender, the richness of
inflections in the verbs, the frequency of particles and conjunctions,
-- all these characteristics make one language differ from another
entirely in genius and capacity of expression. Greek is probably the
best of all languages in melody, richness, elasticity, and simplicity;
so much so, that in spite of its complex inflections, when once a
vocabulary is acquired, it is more easy and natural for a modern
than his ancestral Latin itself. Latin is the stiffer tongue; it is by
nature at once laconic and grandiloquent, and the exceptional
condensation and transposition of which it is capable make its
effects entirely foreign to a modern, scarcely inflected, tongue.
Take, for instance, these lines of Horace:

          me tabula sacer
     votiva paries indicat uvida
     suspendisse potenti
     vestimenta maris deo,

or these of Lucretius:

     Jauaque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
     Crebrius incassum magnum cecidisse laborem.

What conglomerate plebeian speech of our time could utter the
stately grandeur of these Lucretian words, every one of which is
noble, and wears the toga?

As a substitute for the inimitable interpenetration of the words in
the Horatian strophe, we might have the external links of rhyme;
and it seems, in fact, to be a justification of rhyme, that besides
contributing something to melody and to the distribution of parts, it
gives an artificial relationship to the phrases between which it
obtains, which, but for it, would run away from one another in a
rapid and irrevocable flux. In such a form as the sonnet, for
instance, we have, by dint of assonance, a real unity forced upon
the thought; for a sonnet in which the thought is not distributed
appropriately to the structure of the verse, has no excuse for being
a sonnet. By virtue of this interrelation of parts, the sonnet, the
_non plus ultra_ of rhyme, is the most classic of modern poetical
forms: much more classic in spirit than blank verse, which lacks
almost entirely the power of synthesizing the phrase, and making
the unexpected seem the inevitable.

This beauty given to the ancients by the syntax of their language,
the moderns can only attain by the combination of their rhymes. It
is a bad substitute perhaps, but better than the total absence of form,
favoured by the atomic character of our words, and the flat
juxtaposition of our clauses. The art which was capable of making
a gem of every prose sentence, -- the art which, carried, perhaps, to,
a pitch at which it became too conscious, made the phrases of
Tacitus a series of cameos, -- that art is inapplicable to our looser
medium; we cannot give clay the finish and nicety of marble. Our
poetry and speech in general, therefore, start out upon a lower level;
the same effort will not, with this instrument, attain the same
beauty. If equal beauty is ever attained, it comes from the wealth of
suggestion, or the refinement of sentiment. The art of words
remains hopelessly inferior. And what best proves this, is that
when, as in our time, a reawakening of the love of beauty has
prompted a refinement of our poetical language, we pass so soon
into extravagance, obscurity, and affectation. Our modern
languages are not susceptible of great formal beauty.

_Literary form. The plot._

§ 44. The forms of composition in verse and prose which are
practised in each language are further organizations of words, and
have formal values. The most exacting of these forms and that
which has been carried to the greatest perfection is the drama; but
it belongs to rhetoric and poetics to investigate the nature of these
effects, and we have here sufficiently indicated the principle which
underlies them. The plot, which Aristotle makes, and very justly,
the most important element in the effect of a drama, is the formal
element of the drama as such: the ethos and sentiments are the
expression, and the versification, music, and stage settings are the
materials. It is in harmony with the romantic tendency of modern
times that modern dramatists -- Shakespeare as well as Molière,
Calderon, and the rest -- excel in ethos rather than in plot; for it is
the evident characteristic of modern genius to study and enjoy
expression, -- the suggestion of the not-given, -- rather than form,
the harmony of the given.

Ethos is interesting mainly for the personal observations which it
summarizes and reveals, or for the appeal to one's own actual or
imaginative experience; it is portrait-painting, and enshrines
something we love independently of the charm which at this
moment and in this place it exercises over us. It appeals to our
affections; it does not form them. But the plot is the synthesis of
actions, and is a reproduction of those experiences from which our
notion of men and things is originally derived; for character can
never be observed in the world except as manifested in action.

Indeed, it would be more fundamentally accurate to say that a
character is a symbol and mental abbreviation for a peculiar set of
acts, than to say that acts are a manifestation of character. For the
acts are the data, and the character the inferred principle, and a
principle, in spite of its name, is never more than a description _a
posteriori,_ and a summary of what is subsumed under it. The plot,
moreover, is what gives individuality to the play, and exercises
invention; it is, as Aristotle again says, the most difficult portion of
dramatic art, and that for which practice and training are most
indispensable. And this plot, giving by its nature a certain picture
of human experience, involves and suggests the ethos of its actors.

What the great characterizes, like Shakespeare, do, is simply to
elaborate and develope (perhaps far beyond the necessities of the
plot) the suggestion of human individuality which that plot
contains. It is as if, having drawn from daily observation some
knowledge of the tempers of our friends, we represented them
saying and doing all manner of ultra-characteristic things, and in
an occasional soliloquy laying bare, even more clearly than by any
possible action, that character which their observed behaviour had
led us to impute to them. This is an ingenious and fascinating
invention, and delights us with the clear discovery of a hidden
personality; but the serious and equable development of a plot has
a more stable worth in its greater similarity to life, which allows us
to see other men's minds through the medium of events, and not
events through the medium of other men's minds.

_Character as an aesthetic form._

§ 45. We have just come upon one of the unities most coveted in
our literature, and most valued by us when attained, -- the portrait,
the individuality, the character. The construction of a plot we call
invention, but that of a character we dignify with the name of
creation. It may therefore not be amiss, in finishing our discussion
of form, to devote a few pages to the psychology of character-drawing.
How does the unity we call a character arise, how is it described, and
what is the basis of its effect?

We may set it down at once as evident that we have here a case of
the type: the similarities of various persons are amalgamated, their
differences cancelled, and in the resulting percept those traits
emphasized which have particularly pleased or interested us. This,
in the abstract, may serve for a description of the origin of an idea
of character quite as well as of an idea of physical form. But the
different nature of the material -- the fact that a character is not a
presentation to sense, but a rationalistic synthesis of successive
acts and feelings, not combinable into any image -- makes such a
description much more unsatisfying in this case than in that
of material forms. We cannot understand exactly how these
summations and cancellings take place when we are not dealing
with a visible object. And we may even feel that there is a
wholeness and inwardness about the development of certain ideal
characters, that makes such a treatment of them fundamentally
false and artificial. The subjective element, the spontaneous
expression of our own passion and will, here counts for so much,
that the creation of an ideal character becomes a new and peculiar
problem.

There is, however, a way of conceiving and delineating character
which still bears a close resemblance to the process by which the
imagination produces the type of any physical species. We may
gather, for instance, about the nucleus of a word, designating some
human condition or occupation, a number of detached observations.
We may keep a note-book in our memory, or even in our pocket,
with studious observations of the language, manners, dress, gesture,
and history of the people _we_ meet, classifying our statistics
under such heads as innkeepers, soldiers, housemaids, governesses,
adventuresses, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Americans, actors,
priests, and professors. And then, when occasion offers, to describe,
or to put into a book or a play, any one of these types, all we have
to do is to look over our notes, to select according to the needs of
the moment, and if we are skilful in reproduction, to obtain by that
means a life-like image of the sort of person we wish to represent.

This process, which novelists and playwrights may go through
deliberately, we all carry on involuntarily. At every moment
experience is leaving in our minds some trait, some expression,
some image, which will remain there attached to the name of a
person, a class, or a nationality. Our likes and dislikes, our
summary judgments on whole categories of men, are nothing but
the distinct survival of some such impression. These traits have
vivacity. If the picture they draw is one-sided and inadequate, the
sensation they recall may be vivid, and suggestive of many other
aspects of the thing. Thus the epithets in Homer, although they are
often far from describing the essence of the object -- glankopis Athena
enkeides Achaioi -- seem to recall a sensation, and to give
vitality to the narrative. By bringing you, through one sense, into
the presence of the object, they give you that same hint of further
discovery, that same expectation of experience, which we have at
the sight of whatever we call real.

The graphic power of this method of observation and aggregation
of characteristic traits is thus seen to be great. But it is not by this
method that the most famous or most living characters have been
conceived. This method gives the average, or at most the salient,
points of the type, but the great characters of poetry -- a Hamlet, a
Don Quixote, an Achilles -- are no averages, they are not even a
collection of salient traits common to certain classes of men. They
seem to be persons; that is, their actions and words seem to spring
from the inward nature of an individual soul. Goethe is reported to
have said that he conceived the character of his Gretchen entirely
without observation of originals. And, indeed, he would probably
not have found any. His creation rather is the original to which we
may occasionally think we see some likeness in real maidens. It is
the fiction here that is the standard of naturalness. And on this, as
on so many occasions, we may repeat the saying that poetry is
truer than history. Perhaps no actual maid ever spoke and acted so
naturally as this imaginary one.

If we think there is any paradox in these assertions, we should
reflect that the standard of naturalness, individuality, and truth is in
us. A real person seems to us to have character and consistency
when his behaviour is such as to impress a definite and simple
image upon our mind. In themselves, if we could count all their
undiscovered springs of action, all men have character and
consistency alike: all are equally fit to be types. But their
characters are not equally intelligible to us, their behaviour is not
equally deducible, and their motives not equally appreciable.
Those who appeal most to us, either in themselves or by the
emphasis they borrow from their similarity to other individuals, are
those we remember and regard as the centres around which
variations oscillate. These men are natural: all others are more or
less eccentric.

_Ideal characters._

§ 46. The standard of naturalness being thus subjective, and
determined by the laws of our imagination, we can understand why
a spontaneous creation of the mind can be more striking and living
than any reality, or any abstraction from realities. The artist can
invent a form which, by its adaptation to the imagination, lodges
there, and becomes a point of reference for all observations, and a
standard of naturalness and beauty. A type may be introduced to
the mind suddenly, by the chance presentation of a form that by its
intrinsic impressiveness and imaginative coherence, acquires that
pre-eminence which custom, or the mutual reinforcement of
converging experiences, ordinarily gives to empirical percepts.

This method of originating types is what we ordinarily describe as
artistic creation. The name indicates the suddenness, originality,
and individuality of the conception thus attained. What we call
idealization is often a case of it. In idealization proper, however,
what happens is the elimination of individual eccentricities; the
result is abstract, and consequently meagre. This meagreness is
often felt to be a greater disadvantage than the accidental and
picturesque imperfection of real individuals, and the artist
therefore turns to the brute fact, and studies and reproduces that
with indiscriminate attention, rather than lose strength and
individuality in the presentation of an insipid type. He seems
forced to a choice between an abstract beauty and an unlovely
example.

But the great and masterful presentations of the ideal are somehow
neither the one nor the other. They present ideal beauty with just
that definiteness with which nature herself sometimes presents it.
When we come in a crowd upon an incomparably beautiful face,
we know it immediately as an embodiment of the ideal; while it
contains the type, -- for if it did not we should find it monstrous
and grotesque, -- it clothes that type in a peculiar splendour of
form, colour, and expression. It has an individuality. And just so
the imaginary figures of poetry and plastic art may have an
individuality given them by the happy affinities of their elements
in the imagination. They are not idealizations, they are
spontaneous variations, which can arise in the mind quite as easily
as in the world. They spring up in

     The wreathèd trellis of a working brain;
     . . . With all the gardener fancy e'er could feign
     Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.

Imagination, in a word, generates as well as abstracts; it observes,
combines, and cancels; but it also dreams. Spontaneous syntheses
arise in it which are not mathematical averages of the images it
receives from sense; they are effects of diffused excitements left in
the brain by sensations. These excitements vary constantly in their
various renewals, and occasionally take such a form that the soul is
surprised by the inward vision of an unexampled beauty. If this
inward vision is clear and steady, we have an aesthetic inspiration,
a vocation to create; and if we can also command the technique of
an appropriate art, we shall hasten to embody that inspiration, and
realize an ideal. This ideal will be gradually recognized as
supremely beautiful for the same reason that the object, had it been
presented in the real world, would have been recognized as
supremely beautiful; because while embodying a known type of
form, -- being, that is, a proper man, animal, or vegetable, -- it
possessed in an extraordinary degree those direct charms which
most subjugate our attention.

Imaginary forms then differ in dignity and beauty not according to
their closeness to fact or type in nature, but according to the ease
with which the normal imagination reproduces the synthesis they
contain. To add wings to a man has always been a natural fancy;
because man can easily imagine himself to fly, and the idea is
delightful to him. The winged man is therefore a form generally
recognized as beautiful; although it can happen, as it did to
Michael Angelo, that our appreciation of the actual form of the
human body should be too keen and overmastering to allow us to
relish even so charming and imaginative an extravagance. The
centaur is another beautiful monster. The imagination can easily
follow the synthesis of the dream in which horse and man melted
into one, and first gave the glorious suggestion of their united
vitality.

The same condition determines the worth of imaginary
personalities. From the gods to the characters of comedy, all are, in
proportion to their beauty, natural and exhilarating expressions of
possible human activity. We sometimes remould visible forms into
imaginary creatures; but our originality in this respect is meagre
compared with the profusion of images of action which arise in us,
both asleep and awake; we constantly dream of new situations,
extravagant adventures, and exaggerated passions. Even our
soberer thoughts are very much given to following the possible
fortunes of some enterprise, and foretasting the satisfactions of
love and ambition. The mind is therefore particularly sensitive to
pictures of action and character; we are easily induced to follow
the fortunes of any hero, and share his sentiments.

Our will, as Descartes said in a different context, is infinite, while
our intelligence is finite; we follow experience pretty closely in our
ideas of things, and even the furniture of fairyland bears a sad
resemblance to that of earth; but there is no limit to the elasticity of
our passion; and we love to fancy ourselves kings and beggars,
saints and villains, young and old, happy and unhappy. There
seems to be a boundless capacity of development in each of us,
which the circumstances of life determine to a narrow channel; and
we like to revenge ourselves in our reveries for this imputed
limitation, by classifying ourselves with all that we are not, but
might so easily have been. We are full of sympathy for every
manifestation of life, however unusual; and even the conception of
infinite knowledge and happiness -- than which nothing could be
more removed from our condition or more unrealizable to our
fancy -- remains eternally interesting to us.

The poet, therefore, who wishes to delineate a character need not
keep a note-book. There is a quicker road to the heart -- if he has
the gift to find it. Probably his readers will not themselves have
kept note-books, and his elaborate observations will only be
effective when he describes something which they also happen to
have noticed. The typical characters describable by the empirical
method are therefore few: the miser, the lover, the old nurse, the
ingénue, and the other types of traditional comedy. Any greater
specification would appeal only to a small audience for a short
time, because the characteristics depicted would no longer exist to
be recognized. But whatever experience a poet's hearers may have
had, they are men. They will have certain imaginative capacities to
conceive and admire those forms of character and action which,
although never actually found, are felt by each man to express
what he himself might and would have been, had circumstances
been more favourable.

The poet has only to study himself, and the art of expressing his
own ideals, to find that he has expressed those of other people. He
has but to enact in himself the part of each of his personages, and if
he possesses that pliability and that definiteness of imagination
which together make genius, he may express for his fellows those
inward tendencies which in them have remained painfully dumb.
He will be hailed as master of the human soul. He may know
nothing of men, he may have almost no experience; but his
creations will pass for models of naturalness, and for types of
humanity. Their names will be in every one's mouth, and the lives
of many generations will be enriched by the vision, one might
almost say by the friendship, of these imaginary beings. They have
individuality without having reality, because individuality is a
thing acquired in the mind by the congeries of its impressions.
They have power, also, because that depends on the appropriateness
of a stimulus to touch the springs of reaction in the soul.
And they of course have beauty, because in them is embodied
the greatest of our imaginative delights, -- that of giving body to
our latent capacities, and of wandering, without the strain and
contradiction of actual existence, into all forms of possible being.

_The religious imagination._

§ 47. The greatest of these creations hare not been the work of any
one man. They have been the slow product of the pious and poetic
imagination. Starting from some personification of nature or some
memory of a great man, the popular and priestly tradition has
refined and developed the ideal; it has made it an expression of
men's aspiration and a counterpart of their need. The devotion of
each tribe, shrine, and psalmist has added some attribute to the god
or some parable to his legend; and thus, around the kernel of some
original divine function, the imagination of a people has gathered
every possible expression of it, creating a complete and beautiful
personality, with its history, its character, and its gifts. No poet has
ever equalled the perfection or significance of these religious
creations. The greatest characters of fiction are uninteresting and
unreal compared with the conceptions of the gods; so much so that
men have believed that their gods have objective reality.

The forms men see in dreams might have been a reason for
believing in vague and disquieting ghosts; but the belief in
individual and well-defined divinities, with which the visions of
the dreams might be identified, is obviously due to the intrinsic
coherence and impressiveness of the conception of those deities.
The visions would never have suggested the legend and attributes
of the god; but when the figure of the god was once imaginatively
conceived, and his name and aspect fixed in the imagination, it
would be easy to recognize him in any hallucination, or to interpret
any event as due to his power. These manifestations, which
constitute the evidence of his actual existence, can be regarded as
manifestations of him, rather than of a vague, unknown power,
only when the imagination already possesses a vivid picture of him,
and of his appropriate functions. This picture is the work of a
spontaneous fancy.

No doubt, when the belief is once specified, and the special and
intelligible god is distinguished in the night and horror of the
all-pervading natural power, the belief in his reality helps to
concentrate our attention on his nature, and thus to develope and
enrich our idea. The belief in the reality of an ideal personality
brings about its further idealization. Had it ever occurred to any
Greek seer to attribute events to the influence of Achilles, or to
offer sacrifices to him in the heat of the enthusiasm kindled by the
thought of his beauty and virtue, the legend of Achilles, now
become a god, would have grown and deepened; it would have
been moralized like the legend of Hercules, or naturalized like that
of Persephone, and what is now but a poetic character of
extraordinary force and sublimity would have become the adored
patron of generation after generation, and a manifestation of the
divine man.

Achilles would then have been as significant and unforgettable a
figure as Apollo or his sister, as Zeus, Athena, and the other
greater gods. If ever, while that phase of religion lasted, his
character had been obscured and his features dimmed, he would
have been recreated by every new votary: poets would never have
tired of singing his praises, or sculptors of rendering his form.
When, after the hero had been the centre and subject of so much
imaginative labour, the belief in his reality lapsed, to be transferred
to some other conception of cosmic power, he would have
remained an ideal of poetry and art, and a formative influence of
all cultivated minds. This he is still, like all the great creations of
avowed fiction, but he would have been immensely more so, had
belief in his reality kept the creative imagination continuously
intent upon his nature.

The reader can hardly fail to see that all this applies with equal
force to the Christian conception of the sacred personalities. Christ,
the Virgin Mary, and the saints may have been exactly what our
imagination pictures them to be; that is entirely possible; nor can I
see that it is impossible that the conceptions of other religions
might themselves have actual counterparts somewhere in the
universe. That is a question of faith and empirical evidence with
which we are not here concerned. But however descriptive of truth
our conceptions may be, they have evidently grown up in our
minds by an inward process of development. The materials of
history and tradition have been melted and recast by the devout
imagination into those figures in the presence of which our piety
lives.

That is the reason why the reconstructed logical gods of the
metaphysicians are always an offence and a mockery to the
religious consciousness. There is here, too, a bare possibility that
some one of these absolutes may be a representation of the truth;
but the method by which this representation is acquired is violent
and artificial; while the traditional conception of God is the
spontaneous embodiment of passionate contemplation and long
experience.

As the God of religion differs from that of metaphysics, so does
the Christ of tradition differ from that of our critical historians.
Even if we took the literal narrative of the Gospels and accepted it
as all we could know of Christ, without allowing ourselves any
imaginative interpretation of the central figure, we should get an
ideal of him, I will not say very different from that of St. Francis or
St. Theresa, but even from that of the English, prayer-book. The
Christ men have loved and adored is an ideal of their own hearts,
the construction of an ever-present personality, living and
intimately understood, out of the fragments of story and doctrine
connected with a name. This subjective image has inspired all the
prayers, all the conversions, all the penances, charities, and
sacrifices, as well as half the art of the Christian world.

The Virgin Mary, whose legend is so meagre, but whose power
over the Catholic imagination is so great, is an even clearer
illustration of this inward building up of an ideal form. Everything
is here spontaneous sympathetic expansion of two given events:
the incarnation and the crucifixion. The figure of the Virgin, found
in these mighty scenes, is gradually clarified and developed, until
we come to the thought on the one hand of her freedom from
original sin, and on the other to that of her universal maternity. We
thus attain the conception of one of the noblest of conceivable
rôles and of one of the most beautiful of characters. It is a pity that
a foolish iconoclasm should so long have deprived the Protestant
mind of the contemplation of this ideal.

Perhaps it is a sign of the average imaginative dulness or fatigue of
certain races and epochs that they so readily abandon these
supreme creations. For, if we are hopeful, why should we not
believe that the best we can fancy is also the truest; and if we are
distrustful in general of our prophetic gifts, why should we cling
only to the most mean and formless of our illusions? From the
beginning to the end of our perceptive and imaginative activity, we
are synthesizing the material of experience into unities the
independent reality of which is beyond proof, nay, beyond the
possibility of a shadow of evidence. And yet the life of intelligence,
like the joy of contemplation, lies entirely in the formation and
inter-relation of these unities. This activity yields us all the objects
with which we can deal, and endows them with the finer and more
intimate part of their beauty. The most perfect of these forms,
judged by its affinity to our powers and its stability in the presence
of our experience, is the one with which we should be content; no
other kind of veracity could add to its value.

The greatest feats of synthesis which the human mind has yet
accomplished will, indeed, be probably surpassed and all ideals yet
formed be superseded, because they were not based upon enough
experience, or did not fit that experience with adequate precision.
It is also possible that changes in the character of the facts, or in
the powers of intelligence, should necessitate a continual
reconstruction of our world. But unless human nature suffers an
inconceivable change, the chief intellectual and aesthetic value of
our ideas will always come from the creative action of the
imagination.


PART IV

EXPRESSION

_Expression defined._

§ 48. We have found in the beauty of material and form the
objectification of certain pleasures connected with the process of
direct perception, with the formation, in the one case of a sensation,
or quality, in the other of a synthesis of sensations or qualities. But
the human consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with
distinct boundaries and clear-cut images, determinate in number
and exhaustively perceived. Our ideas half emerge for a moment
from the dim continuum of vital feeling and diffused sense, and are
hardly fixed before they are changed and transformed, by the
shifting of attention and the perception of new relations, into ideas
of really different objects. This fluidity of the mind would make
reflection impossible, did we not fix in words and other symbols
certain abstract contents; we thus become capable of recognizing
in one perception the repetition of another, and of recognizing in
certain recurrences of impressions a persistent object. This
discrimination and classification of the contents of consciousness
is the work of perception and understanding, and the pleasures that
accompany these activities make the beauty of the sensible world.

But our hold upon our thoughts extends even further. We not only
construct visible unities and recognizable types, but remain aware
of their affinities to what is not at the time perceived; that is, we
find in them a certain tendency and quality, not original to them, a
meaning and a tone, which upon investigation we shall see to have
been the proper characteristics of other objects and feelings,
associated with them once in our experience. The hushed
reverberations of these associated feelings continue in the brain,
and by modifying our present reaction, colour the image upon
which our attention is fixed. The quality thus acquired by objects
through association is what we call their expression. Whereas in
form or material there is one object with its emotional effect, in
expression there are two, and the emotional effect belongs to the
character of the second or suggested one. Expression may thus
make beautiful by suggestion things in themselves indifferent, or it
may come to heighten the beauty which they already possess.

Expression is not always distinguishable in consciousness
from the value of material or form, because we do not always
have a distinguishable memory of the related idea which the
expressiveness implies. When we have such a memory, as at
the sight of some once frequented garden, we clearly and
spontaneously attribute our emotion to the memory and not to the
present fact which it beautifies. The revival of a pleasure and its
embodiment in a present object which in itself might have been
indifferent, is here patent and acknowledged.

The distinctness of the analysis may indeed be so great as to
prevent the synthesis; we may so entirely pass to the suggested
object, that our pleasure will be embodied in the memory of that,
while the suggestive sensation will be overlooked, and the
expressiveness of the present object will fail to make it beautiful.
Thus the mementos of a lost friend do not become beautiful by
virtue of the sentimental associations which may make them
precious. The value is confined to the images of the memory; they
are too clear to let any of that value escape and diffuse itself over
the rest of our consciousness, and beautify the objects which we
actually behold. We say explicitly: I value this trifle for its
associations. And so long as this division continues, the worth of
the thing is not for us aesthetic.

But a little dimming of our memory will often make it so. Let the
images of the past fade, let them remain simply as a halo and
suggestion of happiness hanging about a scene; then this scene,
however empty and uninteresting in itself, will have a deep and
intimate charm; we shall be pleased by its very vulgarity. We shall
not confess so readily that we value the place for its associations;
we shall rather say: I am fond of this landscape; it has for me an
ineffable attraction. The treasures of the memory have been melted
and dissolved, and are now gilding the object that supplants them;
they are giving this object expression.

Expression then differs from material or formal value only as habit
differs from instinct -- in its origin. Physiologically, they are both
pleasurable radiations of a given stimulus; mentally, they are both
values incorporated in an object. But an observer, looking at the
mind historically, sees in the one case the survival of an experience,
in the other the reaction of an innate disposition. This experience,
moreover, is generally rememberable, and then the extrinsic source
of the charm which expression gives becomes evident even to the
consciousness in which it arises. A word, for instance, is often
beautiful simply by virtue of its meaning and associations; but
sometimes this expressive beauty is added to a musical quality in
the world itself.  In all expression we may thus distinguish two
terms: the first is the object actually presented, the word, the image,
the expressive thing; the second is the object suggested, the further
thought, emotion, or image evoked, the thing expressed.

These lie together in the mind, and their union constitutes
expression. If the value lies wholly in the first term, we have no
beauty of expression. The decorative inscriptions in Saracenic
monuments can have no beauty of expression for one who does not
read Arabic; their charm is wholly one of material and form. Or if
they have any expression, it is by virtue of such thoughts as they
might suggest, as, for instance, of the piety and oriental
sententiousness of the builders and of the aloofness from us of all
their world. And even these suggestions, being a wandering of our
fancy rather than a study of the object, would fail to arouse a
pleasure which would be incorporated in the present image. The
scroll would remain without expression, although its presence
might have suggested to us interesting visions of other things. The
two terms would be too independent, and the intrinsic values of
each would remain distinct from that of the other. There would be
no visible expressiveness, although there might have been
discursive suggestions.

Indeed, if expression were constituted by the external relation of
object with object, everything would be expressive equally,
indeterminately, and universally. The flower in the crannied wall
would express the same thing as the bust of Caesar or the _Critique
of Pure Reason._ What constitutes the individual expressiveness of
these things is the circle of thoughts allied to each in a given mind;
my words, for instance, express the thoughts which they actually
arouse in the reader; they may express more to one man than to
another, and to me they may have expressed more or less than to
yon. My thoughts remain unexpressed, if my words do not arouse
them in you, and very likely your greater wisdom will find in what
I say the manifestation of a thousand principles of which I never
dreamed. Expression depends upon the union of two terms, one of
which must be furnished by the imagination; and a mind cannot
furnish what it does not possess. The expressiveness of everything
accordingly increases with the intelligence of the observer.

But for expression to be an element of beauty, it must, of course,
fulfil another condition. I may see the relations of an object, I may
understand it perfectly, and may nevertheless regard it with entire
indifference. If the pleasure fails, the very substance and
protoplasm of beauty is wanting. Nor, as we have seen, is even the
pleasure enough; for I may receive a letter full of the most joyous
news, but neither the paper, nor the writing, nor the style, need
seem beautiful to me. Not until I confound the impressions, and
suffuse the symbols themselves with the emotions they arouse, and
find joy and sweetness in the very words I hear, will the
expressiveness constitute a beauty; as when they sing, _Gloria in
excelsis Deo_.

The value of the second term must be incorporated in the first; for
the beauty of expression is as inherent in the object as that of
material or form, only it accrues to that object not from the bare act
of perception, but from the association with it of further processes,
due to the existence of former impressions. We may conveniently
use the word "expressiveness" to mean all the capacity of
suggestion possessed by a thing, and the word "expression" for the
aesthetic modification which that expressiveness may cause in it.
Expressiveness is thus the power given by experience to any image
to call up others in the mind; and this expressiveness becomes an
aesthetic value, that is, becomes expression, when the value
involved in the associations thus awakened are incorporated in the
present object.

_The associative process._

§ 49. The purest case in which, an expressive value could arise
might seem to be that in which both terms were indifferent in
themselves, and what pleased was the activity of relating them. We
have such a phenomenon in mathematics, and in any riddle, puzzle,
or play with symbols. But such pleasures fall without the aesthetic
field in the absence of any objectification; they are pleasures of
exercise, and the objects involved are not regarded as the
substances in which those values inhere. We think of more or less
interesting problems or calculations, but it never occurs to the
mathematician to establish a hierarchy of forms according to their
beauty. Only by a metaphor could he say that (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab +
b2 was a more beautiful formula than 2 + 2 = 4. Yet in proportion
as such conceptions become definite and objective in the mind,
they approach aesthetic values, and the use of aesthetic epithets in
describing them becomes more constant and literal.

The beauties of abstract music are but one step beyond such
mathematical relations -- they are those relations presented in a
sensible form, and constituting an imaginable object. But, as we
see clearly in this last case, when the relation and not the terms
constitute the object, we have, if there is beauty at all, a beauty of
form, not of expression; for the more mathematical the charm of
music is the more form and the less expression do we see in it. In
fact, the sense of relation is here the essence of the object itself,
and the activity of passing from term to term, far from taking us
beyond our presentation to something extrinsic, constitutes that
presentation. The pleasure of this relational activity is therefore the
pleasure of conceiving a determined form, and nothing could be
more thoroughly a formal beauty.

And we may here insist upon a point of fundamental importance;
namely, that the process of association enters consciousness as
directly, and produces as simple a sensation, as any process in any
organ. The pleasures and pains of cerebration, the delight and the
fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impressions; they have the
same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is
not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them
disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to
the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical
necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind.
We involve ourselves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce
excellence and beauty, unity and necessity, from the describable
qualities of things; we repeat the rationalistic fiction of turning the
notions which we abstract from the observation of facts into the
powers that give those facts character and being.

We have, for instance, in the presence of two images a sense of
their incongruity; and we say that the character of the images
causes this emotion; whereas in dreams we constantly have the
most rapid transformations and patent contradictions without any
sense of incongruity at all; because the brain is dozing and the
necessary shock and mental inhibition is avoided. Add this
stimulation, and the incongruity returns. Had such a shock never
been felt, we should not know what incongruity meant; no more
than without eyes we should know the meaning of blue or yellow.

In saying this, we are not really leaning upon physiological theory.
The appeal to our knowledge of the brain facilitates the conception
of the immediacy of our feelings of relation; but that immediacy
would be apparent to a sharp introspection. We do not need to
think of the eye or skin to feel that light and heat are ultimate data;
no more do we need to think of cerebral excitements to see that
right and left, before and after, good and bad, one and two, like and
unlike, are irreducible feelings. The categories are senses without
organs, or with organs unknown. Just as the discrimination of our
feelings of colour and sound might never have been distinct and
constant, had we not come upon the organs that seem to convey
and control them; so perhaps our classification of our inner
sensations will never be settled until their respective organs are
discovered; for psychology has always been physiological, without
knowing it. But this truth remains -- quite apart from physical
conceptions, not to speak of metaphysical materialism -- that
whatever the historical conditions of any state of mind may be said
to be, it exists, when it does exist, immediately and absolutely;
each of its distinguishable parts might conceivably have been
absent from it; and its character, as well as its existence, is a mere
datum of sense.

The pleasure that belongs to the consciousness of relations is
therefore as immediate as any other; indeed, our emotional
consciousness is always single, but we treat it as a resultant of
many and even of conflicting feelings because we look at it
historically with a view to comprehending it, and distribute it into
as many factors as we find objects or causes to which to attribute it.
The pleasure of association is an immediate feeling, which we
account for by its relation to a feeling in the past, or to cerebral
structure modified by a former experience; just as memory itself,
which we explain by a reference to the past, is a peculiar
complication of present consciousness.

_Kinds of value in the second term._

§ 50. These reflections may make less surprising to us what is the
most striking fact about the philosophy of expression; namely, that
the value acquired by the expressive thing is often of an entirely
different kind from that which the thing expressed possesses. The
expression of physical pleasure, of passion, or even of pain, may
constitute beauty and please the beholder. Thus the value of the
second term may be physical, or practical, or even negative; and it
may be transmuted, as it passes to the first term, into a value at
once positive and aesthetic. The transformation of practical values
into aesthetic has often been noted, and has even led to the theory
that beauty is utility seen at arm's length; a premonition of pleasure
and prosperity, much as smell is a premonition of taste. The
transformation of negative values into positive has naturally
attracted even more attention, and given rise to various theories of
the comic, tragic, and sublime. For these three species of aesthetic
good seem to please us by the suggestion of evil; and the problem
arises how a mind can be made happier by having suggestions of
unhappiness stirred within it; an unhappiness it cannot understand
without in some degree sharing in it. We must now turn to the
analysis of this question.

The expressiveness of a smile is not discovered exactly through
association of images. The child smiles (without knowing it) when
he feels pleasure; and the nurse smiles back; his own pleasure is
associated with her conduct, and her smile is therefore expressive
of pleasure. The fact of his pleasure at her smile is the ground of
his instinctive belief in her pleasure in it. For this reason the
circumstances expressive of happiness are not those that are
favourable to it in reality, but those that are congruous with it in
idea. The green of spring, the bloom of youth, the variability of
childhood, the splendour of wealth and beauty, all these are
symbols of happiness, not because they have been known to
accompany it in fact, -- for they do not, any more than their
opposites, -- but because they produce an image and echo of it in
us aesthetically. We believe those things to be happy which it
makes us happy to think of or to see; the belief in the blessedness
of the supreme being itself has no other foundation. Our joy in the
thought of omniscience makes us attribute joy to the possession of
it, which it would in fact perhaps be very far from involving or
even allowing.

The expressiveness of forms has a value as a sign of the life that
actually inhabits those forms only when they resemble our own
body; it is then probable that similar conditions of body involve, in
them and in us, similar emotions; and we should not long continue
to regard as the expression of pleasure an attitude that we know, by
experience in our own person, to accompany pain. Children,
indeed, may innocently torture animals, not having enough sense
of analogy to be stopped by the painful suggestions of their
writhings; and, although in a rough way we soon correct these
crying misinterpretations by a better classification of experience,
we nevertheless remain essentially subject to the same error. We
cannot escape it, because the method which involves it is the only
one that justifies belief in objective consciousness at all. Analogy
of bodies helps us to distribute and classify the life we conceive
about us; but what leads us to conceive it is the direct association
of our own feeling with images of things, an association which
precedes any clear representation of our own gestures and attitude.
I know that smiles mean pleasure before I have caught myself
smiling in the glass; they mean pleasure because they give it.

Since these aesthetic effects include some of the most moving and
profound beauties, philosophers have not been slow to turn the
unanalyzed paradox of their formation into a principle, and to
explain by it the presence and necessity of evil. As in the tragic and
the sublime, they have thought, the sufferings and dangers to
which a hero is exposed seem to add to his virtue and dignity, and
to our sacred joy in the contemplation of him, so the sundry evils
of life may be elements in the transcendent glory of the whole.
And once fired by this thought, those who pretend to justify the
ways of God to man have, naturally, not stopped to consider
whether so edifying a phenomenon was not a hasty illusion. They
have, indeed, detested any attempt to explain it rationally, as
tending to obscure one of the moral laws of the universe. In
venturing, therefore, to repeat such an attempt, we should not be
too sanguine of success; for we have to encounter not only the
intrinsic difficulties of the problem, but also a wide-spread and
arrogant metaphysical prejudice.

For the sake of greater clearness we may begin by classifying the
values that can enter into expression; we shall then be better able to
judge by what combinations of them various well-known effects
and emotions are produced. The intrinsic value of the first term can
be entirely neglected, since it does not contribute to expression. It
does, however, contribute greatly to the beauty of the expressive
object. The first term is the source of stimulation, and the
acuteness and pleasantness of this determine to a great extent the
character and sweep of the associations that will be aroused. Very
often the pleasantness of the medium will counterbalance the
disagreeableness of the import, and expressions, in themselves
hideous or inappropriate, may be excused for the sake of the object
that conveys them. A beautiful voice will redeem a vulgar song, a
beautiful colour and texture an unmeaning composition. Beauty in
the first term -- beauty of sound, rhythm, and image -- will make
any thought whatever poetic, while no thought whatever can be so
without that immediate beauty of presentation.[14]

_Aesthetic value in the second term._

§ 51. That the noble associations of any object should embellish
that object is very comprehensible. Homer furnishes us with a
good illustration of the constant employment of this effect. The
first term, one need hardly say, leaves with him little to be desired.
The verse is beautiful. Sounds, images, and composition conspire
to stimulate and delight. This immediate beauty is sometimes used
to clothe things terrible and sad; there is no dearth of the tragic in
Homer. But the tendency of his poetry is nevertheless to fill the
outskirts of our consciousness with the trooping images of things
no less fair and noble than the verse itself. The heroes are virtuous.
There is none of importance who is not admirable in his way. The
palaces, the arms, the horses, the sacrifices, are always excellent.
The women are always stately and beautiful. The ancestry and the
history of every one are honourable and good. The whole Homeric
world is clean, clear, beautiful, and providential, and no small part
of the perennial charm of the poet is that he thus immerses us in an
atmosphere of beauty; a beauty not concentrated and reserved for
some extraordinary sentiment, action, or person, but permeating
the whole and colouring the common world of soldiers and sailors,
war and craft, with a marvellous freshness and inward glow. There
is nothing in the associations of life in this world or in another to
contradict or disturb our delight. All is beautiful, and beautiful
through and through.

Something of this quality meets us in all simple and idyllic
compositions. There is, for instance, a popular demand that stories
and comedies should "end well." The hero and heroine must be
young and handsome; unless they die, -- which is another matter, --
they must not in the end be poor. The landscape in the play must
be beautiful; the dresses pretty; the plot without serious mishap. A
pervasive presentation of pleasure must give warmth and ideality
to the whole. In the proprieties of social life we find the same
principle; we study to make our surroundings, manner, and
conversation suggest nothing but what is pleasing. We hide the
ugly and disagreeable portion of our lives, and do not allow the
least hint of it to come to light upon festive and public occasions.
Whenever, in a word, a thoroughly pleasing effect is found, it is
found by the expression, as well as presentation, of what is in itself
pleasing -- and when this effect is to be produced artificially, we
attain it by the suppression of all expression that is not suggestive
of something good.

If our consciousness were exclusively aesthetic, this kind of
expression would be the only one allowed in art or prized in nature.
We should avoid as a shock or an insipidity, the suggestion of
anything not intrinsically beautiful. As there would be no values
not aesthetic, our pleasure could never be heightened by any other
kind of interest. But as contemplation is actually a luxury in our
lives, and things interest us chiefly on passionate and practical
grounds, the accumulation of values too exclusively aesthetic
produces in our minds an effect of closeness and artificiality. So
selective a diet cloys, and our palate, accustomed to much daily
vinegar and salt, is surfeited by such unmixed sweet.

Instead we prefer to see through the medium of art -- through the
beautiful first term of our expression -- the miscellaneous world
which is so well known to us -- perhaps so dear, and at any rate so
inevitable, an object. We are more thankful for this presentation, of
the unlovely truth in a lovely form, than for the like presentation of
an abstract beauty; what is lost in the purity of the pleasure is
gained in the stimulation of our attention, and in the relief of
viewing with aesthetic detachment the same things that in practical
life hold tyrannous dominion over our souls. The beauty that is
associated only with other beauty is therefore a sort of aesthetic
dainty; it leads the fancy through a fairyland of lovely forms,
where we must forget the common objects of our interest. The
charm of such an idealization is undeniable; but the other
important elements of our memory and will cannot long be
banished. Thoughts of labour, ambition, lust, anger, confusion,
sorrow, and death must needs mix with our contemplation and lend
their various expressions to the objects with which in experience
they are so closely allied. Hence the incorporation in the beautiful
of values of other sorts, and the comparative rareness in nature or
art of expressions the second term of which has only aesthetic
value.

_Practical value in the same._

§ 52. More important and frequent is the case of the expression of
utility. This is found whenever the second term is the idea of
something of practical advantage to us, the premonition of which
brings satisfaction; and this satisfaction prompts an approval of the
presented object. The tone of our consciousness is raised by the
foretaste of a success; and this heightened pleasure is objectified in
the present image, since the associated image to which the
satisfaction properly belongs often fails to become distinct. We do
not conceive clearly what this practical advantage will be; but the
vague sense that an advantage is there, that something desirable
has been done, accompanies the presentation, and gives it
expression.

The case that most resembles that of which we have been just
speaking, is perhaps that in which the second term is a piece of
interesting information, a theory, or other intellectual datum. Our
interest in facts and theories, when not aesthetic, is of course
practical; it consists in their connexion with our interests, and in
the service they can render us in the execution of our designs.
Intellectual values are utilitarian in their origin but aesthetic in
their form, since the advantage of knowledge is often lost sight of,
and ideas are prized for their own sake. Curiosity can become a
disinterested passion, and yield intimate and immediate satisfaction
like any other impulse.

When we have before us, for instance, a fine map, in which the line
of coast, now rocky, now sandy, is clearly indicated, together with
the windings of the rivers, the elevations of the land, and the
distribution of the population, we have the simultaneous
suggestion of so many facts, the sense of mastery over so much
reality, that we gaze at it with delight, and need no practical motive
to keep us studying it, perhaps for hours together. A map is not
naturally thought of as an aesthetic object; it is too exclusively
expressive. The first term is passed over as a mere symbol, and the
mind is filled either with imaginations of the landscape the country
would really offer, or with thoughts about its history and
inhabitants. These circumstances prevent the ready objectification
of our pleasure in the map itself. 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; a
thing the charm of which consists almost entirely in its meaning,
but which nevertheless pleases us in the same way as a picture or a
graphic symbol might please. Give the symbol a little intrinsic
worth of form, line, and colour, and it attracts like a magnet all the
values of the things it is known to symbolize. It becomes beautiful
in its expressiveness.

Hardly different from this example is that of travel or of reading;
for in these employments we get many aesthetic pleasures, the
origin of which is in the satisfaction of curiosity and intelligence.
When we say admiringly of anything that it is characteristic, that it
embodies a whole period or a whole man, we are absorbed by the
pleasant sense that it offers innumerable avenues of approach to
interesting and important things. The less we are able to specify
what these are, the more beautiful will the object be that expresses
them. For if we could specify them, the felt value would
disintegrate, and distribute itself among the ideas of the suggested
things, leaving the expressive object bare of all interest, like the
letters of a printed page.

The courtiers of Philip the Second probably did not regard his
rooms at the Escurial as particularly interesting, but simply as
small, ugly, and damp. The character which we find in them and
which makes us regard them as eminently expressive of whatever
was sinister in the man, probably did not strike them. They knew
the king, and had before them words, gestures, and acts enough in
which to read his character. But all these living facts are wanting to
our experience; and it is the suggestion of them in their
unrealizable vagueness that fills the apartments of the monarch
with such pungent expression. It is not otherwise with all emphatic
expressiveness -- moonlight and castle moats, minarets and
cypresses, camels filing through the desert -- such images get their
character from the strong but misty atmosphere of sentiment and
adventure which clings about them. The profit of travel, and the
extraordinary charm of all visible relics of antiquity, consists in the
acquisition of images in which to focus a mass of discursive
knowledge, not otherwise felt together. Such images are concrete
symbols of much latent experience, and the deep roots of
association give them the same hold upon our attention which
might be secured by a fortunate form or splendid material.

_Cost as an element of effect._

§ 53. There is one consideration which often adds much to the
interest with which we view an object, but which we might be
virtuously inclined not to admit among aesthetic values. I mean
cost. Cost is practical value expressed in abstract terms, and from
the price of anything we can often infer what relation it has to the
desires and efforts of mankind. There is no reason why cost, or the
circumstances which are its basis, should not, like other practical
values, heighten the tone of consciousness, and add to the pleasure
with which we view an object. In fact, such is our daily experience;
for great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their rarity and price
adds an expression of distinction to them, which they would never
have if they were cheap.

The circumstance that makes the appreciation of cost often
unaesthetic is the abstractness of that quality. The price of an
object is an algebraic symbol, it is a conventional term, invented to
facilitate our operations, which remains arid and unmeaning if we
stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its
concrete equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that
intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the calculator's senses
are muffled by his intellect and by his habit of abbreviated thinking.
His mental process is a reckoning that loses sight of its original
values, and is over without reaching any concrete image. Therefore
the knowledge of cost, when expressed in terms of money, is
incapable of contributing to aesthetic effect, but the reason is not
so much that the suggested value is not aesthetic, as that no real
value is suggested at all. No object of any kind is presented to the
mind by the numerical expression. If we reinterpret our price,
however, and translate it back into the facts which constitute it,
into the materials employed, their original place and quality, and
the labour and art which transformed them into the present thing,
then we add to the aesthetic value of the object, by the expression
which we find in it, not of its price in money, but of its human cost.
We have now the consciousness of the real values which it
represents, and these values, sympathetically present to the fancy,
increase our present interest and admiration.

I believe economists count among the elements of the value of an
object the rarity of its material, the labour of its manufacture, and
the distance from which it is brought. Now all these qualities, if
attended to in themselves, appeal greatly to the imagination. We
have a natural interest in what is rare and affects us with unusual
sensations. What comes from a far country carries our thoughts
there, and gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its
associations. And that on which human labour has been spent,
especially if it was a labour of love, and is apparent in the product,
has one of the deepest possible claims to admiration. So that the
standard of cost, the most vulgar of all standards, is such only
when it remains empty and abstract. Let the thoughts wander back
and consider the elements of value, and our appreciation, from
being verbal and commercial, becomes poetic and real.

We have in this one more example of the manner in which
practical values, when suggested by and incorporated in any object,
contribute to its beauty. Our sense of what lies behind, unlovely
though that background may be, gives interest and poignancy to
that which is present; our attention and wonder are engaged, and a
new meaning and importance is added to such intrinsic beauty as
the presentation may possess.

_The expression of economy and fitness._

§ 54. The same principle explains the effect of evident cleanliness,
security, economy, and comfort. This Dutch charm hardly needs
explanation; we are conscious of the domesticity and neatness
which pleases us in it. There are few things more utterly
discomforting to our minds than waste: it is a sort of pungent
extract and quintessence of folly. The visible manifestation of it is
therefore very offensive; and that of its absence very reassuring.
The force of our approval of practical fitness and economy in
things rises into an appreciation that is half-aesthetic, and which
becomes wholly so when the fit form becomes fixed in a type, to
the lines of which we are accustomed; so that the practical
necessity of the form is heightened and concentrated into the
aesthetic propriety of it.

The much-praised expression of function and truth in architectural
works reduces itself to this principle. The useful contrivance at
first appeals to our practical approval; while we admire its
ingenuity, we cannot fail to become gradually accustomed to its
presence, and to register with attentive pleasure the relation of its
parts. Utility, as we have pointed out in its place, is thus the
guiding principle in the determination of forms.

The recurring observation of the utility, economy, and fitness of
the traditional arrangement in buildings or other products of art,
re-enforces this formal expectation with a reflective approval. We are
accustomed, for instance, to sloping roofs; the fact that they were
necessary has made them familiar, and the fact that they are
familiar has made them objects of study and of artistic enjoyment.
If at any moment, however, the notion of condemning them passes
through the mind, -- if we have visions of the balustrade against
the sky, -- we revert to our homely image with kindly loyalty,
when we remember the long months of rain and snow, and the
comfortless leaks to be avoided. The thought of a glaring, practical
unfitness is enough to spoil our pleasure in any form, however
beautiful intrinsically, while the sense of practical fitness is enough
to reconcile us to the most awkward and rude contrivances.

This principle is, indeed, not a fundamental, but an auxiliary one;
the expression of utility modifies effect, but does not constitute it.
There would be a kind of superstitious haste in the notion that what
is convenient and economical is necessarily and by miracle
beautiful. The uses and habits of one place and society require
works which are or may easily become intrinsically beautiful; the
uses and habits of another make these beautiful works impossible.
The beauty has a material and formal basis that we have already
studied; no fitness of design will make a building of ten equal
storeys as beautiful as a pavilion or a finely proportioned tower; no
utility will make a steamboat as beautiful as a sailing vessel. But
the forms once established, with their various intrinsic characters,
the fitness we know to exist in them will lend them some added
charm, or their unfitness will disquiet us, and haunt us like a
conscientious qualm. The other interests of our lives here mingle
with the purely aesthetic, to enrich or to embitter it.

If Sybaris is so sad a name to the memory -- and who is without
some Sybaris of his own? -- if the image of it is so tormenting and
in the end so disgusting, this is not because we no longer think its
marbles bright, its fountains cool, its athletes strong, or its roses
fragrant; but because, mingled with all these supreme beauties,
there is the ubiquitous shade of Nemesis, the sense of a vacant will
and a suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral
condition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt. If this
beauty did not exist, and was not still desired, the tragedy would
disappear and Jehovah would be deprived of the worth of his
victim. The sternness of moral forces lies precisely in this, that the
sacrifices morality imposes upon us are real, that the things it
renders impossible are still precious.

We are accustomed to think of prudence as estranging us only
from low and ignoble things; we forget that utility and the need of
system in our lives is a bar also to the free flights of the spirit. The
highest instincts tend to disorganization as much as the lowest,
since order and benefit is what practical morality everywhere
insists upon, while sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man
only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the
understanding. For this reason, utility keeps close watch over
beauty, lest in her wilfulness and riot she should offend against our
practical needs and ultimate happiness. And when the conscience
is keen, this vigilance of the practical imagination over the
speculative ceases to appear as an eventual and external check. The
least suspicion of luxury, waste, impurity, or cruelty is then a
signal for alarm and insurrection. That which emits this _sapor
hoereticus_ becomes so initially horrible, that naturally no beauty
can ever be discovered in it; the senses and imagination are in that
case inhibited by the conscience.

For this reason, the doctrine that beauty is essentially nothing but
the expression of moral or practical good appeals to persons of
predominant moral sensitiveness, not only because they wish it
were the truth, but because it largely describes the experience of
their own minds, somewhat warped in this particular. It will further
be observed that the moralists are much more able to condemn
than to appreciate the effects of the arts. Their taste is delicate
without being keen, for the principle on which they judge is one
which really operates to control and extend aesthetic effects; it is a
source of expression and of certain _nuances_ of satisfaction; but it
is foreign to the stronger and more primitive aesthetic values to
which the same persons are comparatively blind.

_The authority of morals over aesthetics._

§ 55. The extent to which aesthetic goods should be sacrificed is,
of course, a moral question; for the function of practical reason is
to compare, combine, and harmonize all our interests, with a view
to attaining the greatest satisfactions of which our nature is capable.
We must expect, therefore, that virtue should place the same
restraint upon all our passions -- not from superstitious aversion to
any one need, but from an equal concern for them all. The
consideration to be given to our aesthetic pleasures will depend
upon their greater or less influence upon our happiness; and as this
influence varies in different ages and countries, and with different
individuals, it will be right to let aesthetic demands count for more
or for less in the organization of life.

We may, indeed, according to our personal sympathies, prefer one
type of creature to another. We may love the martial, or the angelic,
or the political temperament. We may delight to find in others that
balance of susceptibilities and enthusiasms which we feel in our
own breast. But no moral precept can require one species or
individual to change its nature in order to resemble another, since
such a requirement can have no power or authority over those on
whom we would impose it. All that morality can require is the
inward harmony of each life: and if we still abhor the thought of a
possible being who should be happy without love, or knowledge,
or beauty, the aversion we feel is not moral but instinctive, not
rational but human. What revolts us is not the want of excellence
in that other creature, but his want of affinity to ourselves. Could
we survey the whole universe, we might indeed assign to each
species a moral dignity proportionate to its general beneficence
and inward wealth; but such an absolute standard, if it exists, is
incommunicable to us; and we are reduced to judging of the
excellence of every nature by its relation to the human.

All these matters, however, belong to the sphere of ethics, nor
should we give them here even a passing notice, but for the
influence which moral ideas exert over aesthetic judgments. Our
sense of practical benefit not only determines the moral value of
beauty, but sometimes even its existence as an aesthetic good.
Especially in the right _selection_ of effects, these considerations
have weight. Forms in themselves pleasing may become disagreeable
when the practical interests then uppermost in the mind
cannot, without violence, yield a place to them. Thus too
much eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter,
or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense, but
also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of
sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli.

If things of moment are before us, we cannot stop to play with
symbols and figures of speech. We cannot attend to them with
pleasure, and therefore they lose the beauty they might elsewhere
have had. They are offensive, not in themselves, -- for nothing is
intrinsically ugly, -- but by virtue of our present demand for
something different. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church as dumb
as a prison, offend by their failure to support by their aesthetic
quality the moral emotion with, which we approach them. The arts
must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until
they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This is the
consequence of the superficial stratum on which they flourish;
their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the world, and they
appear only as unstable, superadded activities, employments of our
freedom, after the work of life is done and the terror of it is allayed.
They must, therefore, fit their forms, like parasites, to the stouter
growths to which they cling.

Herein lies the greatest difficulty and nicety of art. It must not only
create things abstractly beautiful, but it must conciliate all the
competitors these may have to the attention of the world, and must
know how to insinuate their charms among the objects of our
passion. But this subserviency and enforced humility of beauty is
not without its virtue and reward. If the aesthetic habit lie under the
necessity of respecting and observing our passions, it possesses the
privilege of soothing our griefs. There is no situation so terrible
that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to
contemplate it aesthetically.

Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain; a sweetness is
added to it by our reflection. The saddest scenes may lose their
bitterness in their beauty. This ministration makes, as it were, the
piety of the Muses, who succour their mother, Life, and repay her
for their nurture by the comfort of their continual presence. The
aesthetic world is limited in its scope; it must submit to the control
of the organizing reason, and not trespass upon more useful and
holy ground. The garden must not encroach upon the corn-fields;
but the eye of the gardener may transform the corn-fields
themselves by dint of loving observation into a garden of a soberer
kind. By finding grandeur in our disasters, and merriment in our
mishaps, the aesthetic sense thus mollifies both, and consoles us
for the frequent impossibility of a serious and perfect beauty.

_Negative values in the second term._

§ 56. All subjects, even the most  repellent, when the
circumstances of life thrust them before us, can thus be observed
with curiosity and treated with art. The calling forth of these
aesthetic functions softens the violence of our sympathetic reaction.
If death, for instance, did not exist and did not thrust itself upon
our thoughts with painful importunity, art would never have been
called upon to soften and dignify it, by presenting it in beautiful
forms and surrounding it with consoling associations. Art does not
seek out the pathetic, the tragic, and the absurd; it is life that has
imposed them upon our attention, and enlisted art in their service,
to make the contemplation of them, since it is inevitable, at least as
tolerable as possible.

The agreeableness of the presentation is thus mixed with the horror
of the thing; and the result is that while we are saddened by the
truth we are delighted by the vehicle that conveys it to us. The
mixture of these emotions constitutes the peculiar flavour and
poignancy of pathos. But because unlovely objects and feelings are
often so familiar as to be indifferent or so momentous as to be
alone in the mind, we are led into the confusion of supposing that
beauty depends upon them for its aesthetic value; whereas the truth
is that only by the addition of positive beauties can these evil
experiences be made agreeable to contemplation.

There is, in reality, no such paradox in the tragic, comic, and
sublime, as has been sometimes supposed. We are not pleased by
virtue of the suggested evils, but in spite of them; and if ever the
charm of the beautiful presentation sinks so low, or the vividness
of the represented evil rises so high, that the balance is in favour of
pain, at that very moment the whole object becomes horrible,
passes out of the domain of art, and can be justified only by its
scientific or moral uses. As an aesthetic value it is destroyed; it
ceases to be a benefit; and the author of it, if he were not made
harmless by the neglect that must soon overtake him, would have
to be punished as a malefactor who adds to the burden of mortal
life. For the sad, the ridiculous, the grotesque, and the terrible,
unless they become aesthetic goods, remain moral evils.

We have, therefore, to study the various aesthetic, intellectual, and
moral compensations by which the mind can be brought to
contemplate with pleasure a thing which, if experienced alone,
would be the cause of pain. There is, to be sure, a way of avoiding
this inquiry. We might assert that since all moderate excitement is
pleasant, there is nothing strange in the fact that the representation
of evil should please; for the experience is evil by virtue of the
pain it gives; but it gives pain only when felt with great intensity.
Observed from afar, it is a pleasing impression; it is vivid enough
to interest, but not acute enough to wound. This simple explanation
is possible in all those cases where aesthetic effect is gained by the
inhibition of sympathy.

The term "evil" is often a conventional epithet; a conflagration
may be called an evil, because it usually involves loss and
suffering; but if, without caring for a loss and suffering we do not
share, we are delighted by the blaze, and still say that what pleases
us is an evil, we are using this word as a conventional appellation,
not as the mark of a felt value. We are not pleased by an evil; we
are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but
which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an
evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not
thinking at all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, perhaps,
which is not an evil; nothing which is not unfavourable to some
interest, and does not involve some infinitesimal or ultimate
suffering in the universe of life.

But when we are ignorant or thoughtless, this suffering is to us as
if it did not exist. The pleasures of drinking and walking are not
tragic to us, because we may be poisoning some bacillus or
crushing some worm. To an omniscient intelligence such acts may
be tragic by virtue of the insight into their relations to conflicting
impulses; but unless these impulses are present to the same mind,
there is no consciousness of tragedy. The child that, without
understanding of the calamity, should watch a shipwreck from the
shore, would hare a simple emotion of pleasure as from a jumping
jack; what passes for tragic interest is often nothing but this. If he
understood the event, but was entirely without sympathy, he would
have the aesthetic emotion of the careless tyrant, to whom the
notion of suffering is no hindrance to the enjoyment of the lyre. If
the temper of his tyranny were purposely cruel, he might add to
that aesthetic delight the luxury of _Schadenfreude;_ but the
pathos and horror of the sight could only appeal to a man who
realized and shared the sufferings he beheld.

A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured in the world
because the rudeness of the representation, or of the public, or of
both, did not allow a really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all
smile when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The treatment
and not the subject is what makes a tragedy. A parody of _Hamlet_
or of _King Lear_ would not be a tragedy; and these tragedies
themselves are not wholly such, but by the strain of wit and
nonsense they contain are, as it were, occasional parodies on
themselves. By treating a tragic subject bombastically or satirically
we can turn it into an amusement for the public; they will not feel
the griefs which we have been careful to harden them against by
arousing in them contrary emotions. A work, nominally a work of
art, may also appeal to non-aesthetic feelings by its political bias,
brutality, or obscenity. But if an effect of true pathos is sought, the
sympathy of the observer must be aroused; we must awaken in him
the emotion we describe. The intensity of the impression must not
be so slight that its painful quality is not felt; for it is this very
sense of pain, mingling with the aesthetic excitement of the
spectacle, that gives it a tragic or pathetic colouring.

We cannot therefore rest in the assertion that the slighter degree of
excitement is pleasant, when a greater degree of the same would be
disagreeable; for that principle does not express the essence of the
matter, which is that we must be aware of the evil, and conscious
of it as such, absorbed more or less in the experience of the
sufferer, and consequently suffering ourselves, before we can
experience the essence of tragic emotion. This emotion must
therefore be complex; it must contain an element of pain
overbalanced by an element of pleasure; in our delight there must
be a distinguishable touch of shrinking and sorrow; for it is this
conflict and rending of our will, this fascination by what is
intrinsically terrible or sad, that gives these turbid feelings their
depth and pungency.

_Influence of the first term in the pleasing expression of self._

§ 57. A striking proof of the compound nature of tragic effects can
be given by a simple experiment. Remove from any drama -- say
from _Othello_ -- the charm of the medium of presentation; reduce
the tragedy to a mere account of the facts and of the words spoken,
such as our newspapers almost daily contain; and the tragic dignity
and beauty is entirely lost. Nothing remains but a disheartening
item of human folly, which may still excite curiosity, but which
will rather defile than purify the mind that considers it. A French
poet has said:

     Il n'est de vulgaire chagrin
     Qua celui d'une âme vulgaire.

The counterpart of this maxim is equally true. There is no noble
sorrow except in a noble mind, because what is noble is the
reaction upon the sorrow, the attitude of the man in its presence,
the language in which he clothes it, the associations with which he
surrounds it, and the fine affections and impulses which shine
through it. Only by suffusing some sinister experience with this
moral light, as a poet may do who carries that light within him, can
we raise misfortune into tragedy and make it better for us to
remember our lives than to forget them.

There are times, although rare, when men are noble in the very
moment of passion: when that passion is not unqualified, but
already mastered by reflection and levelled with truth. Then the
experience is itself the tragedy, and no poet is needed to make it
beautiful in representation, since the sufferer has been an artist
himself, and has moulded what he has endured. But usually these
two stages have to be successive: first we suffer, afterwards we
sing. An interval is necessary to make feeling presentable, and
subjugate it to that form in which alone it is beautiful.

This form appeals to us in itself, and without its aid no
subject-matter could become an aesthetic object. The more terrible the
experience described, the more powerful must the art be which is
to transform it. For this reason prose and literalness are more
tolerable in comedy than in tragedy; any violent passion, any
overwhelming pain, if it is not to make us think of a demonstration
in pathology, and bring back the smell of ether, must be rendered
in the most exalted style. Metre, rhyme, melody, the widest nights
of allusion, the highest reaches of fancy, are there in place. For
these enable the mind swept by the deepest cosmic harmonies, to
endure and absorb the shrill notes which would be intolerable in a
poorer setting.

The sensuous harmony of words, and still more the effects of
rhythm, are indispensable at this height of emotion. Evolutionists
have said that violent emotion naturally expresses itself in rhythm.
That is hardly an empirical observation, nor can the expressiveness
of rhythms be made definite enough to bear specific association
with complex feelings. But the suspension and rush of sound and
movement have in themselves a strong effect; we cannot undergo
them without profound excitement; and this, like martial music,
nerves us to courage and, by a sort of intoxication, bears us along
amid scenes which might otherwise be sickening. The vile effect of
literal and disjointed renderings of suffering, whether in writing or
acting, proves how necessary is the musical quality to tragedy -- a
fact Aristotle long ago set forth. The afflatus of rhythm, even if it
be the pomp of the Alexandrine, sublimates the passion, and
clarifies its mutterings into poetry. This breadth and rationality are
necessary to art, which is not skill merely, but skill in the service
of beauty.

_Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth._

§ 58. To the value of these sensuous and formal elements must be
added the continual suggestion of beautiful and happy things,
which no tragedy is sombre enough to exclude. Even if we do not
go so far as to intersperse comic scenes and phrases into a pathetic
subject, -- a rude device, since the comic passages themselves need
that purifying which they are meant to effect, -- we must at least
relieve our theme with pleasing associations. For this reason we
have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtue in our heroes,
nobility in their passions and in their fate, and altogether a sort of
glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in depth
of pathos -- since things so precious are destroyed -- and in
subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.

Indeed, one of the chief charms that tragedies have is the
suggestion of what they might have been if they had not been
tragedies. The happiness which glimmers through them, the hopes,
loves, and ambitions of which it is made, these things fascinate us,
and win our sympathy; so that we are all the more willing to suffer
with our heroes, even if we are at the same time all the more
sensitive to their suffering. Too wicked a character or too
unrelieved a situation revolts us for this reason. We do not find
enough expression of good to make us endure the expression of the
evil.

A curious exception to this rule, which, however, admirably
illustrates the fundamental principle of it, is where by the diversity
of evils represented the mind is relieved from painful absorption in
any of them. There is a scene in _King Lear,_ where the horror of
the storm is made to brood over at least four miseries, that of the
king, of the fool, of Edgar in his real person, and of Edgar in his
assumed character. The vividness of each of these portrayals, with
its different note of pathos, keeps the mind detached and free,
forces it to compare and reflect, and thereby to universalize the
spectacle. Yet even here, the beautiful effect is not secured without
some touches of good. How much is not gained by the dumb
fidelity of the fool, and by the sublime humanity of Lear, when he
says, "Art cold? There is a part of me is sorry for thee yet."

Yet all these compensations would probably be unavailing but for
another which the saddest things often have, -- the compensation
of being true. Our practical and intellectual nature is deeply
interested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us for that reason;
it has an inalienable interest. However unpleasant truth may prove,
we long to know it, partly perhaps because experience has shown
us the prudence of this kind of intellectual courage, and chiefly
because the consciousness of ignorance and the dread of the
unknown is more tormenting than any possible discovery. A
primitive instinct makes us turn the eyes full on any object that
appears in the dim borderland of our field of vision -- and this all
the more quickly, the more terrible that object threatens to be.

This physical thirst for seeing has its intellectual extension. We
covet truth, and to attain it, amid all accidents, is a supreme
satisfaction. Now this satisfaction the representation of evil can
also afford. Whether we hear the account of some personal
accident, or listen to the symbolic representation of the inherent
tragedy of life, we crave the same knowledge; the desire for truth
makes us welcome eagerly whatever comes in its name. To be sure,
the relief of such instruction does not of itself constitute an
aesthetic pleasure: the other conditions of beauty remain to be
fulfilled. But the satisfaction of so imperious an intellectual instinct
insures our willing attention to the tragic object, and strengthens
the hold which any beauties it may possess will take upon us. An
intellectual value stands ready to be transmuted into an aesthetic
one, if once its discursiveness is lost, and it is left hanging about
the object as a vague sense of dignity and meaning.

To this must be added the specific pleasure of recognition, one of
the keenest we have, and the sentimental one of nursing our own
griefs and dignifying them by assimilation to a less inglorious
representation of them. Here we have truth on a small scale;
conformity in the fiction to incidents of our personal experience.
Such correspondences are the basis of much popular appreciation
of trivial and undigested works that appeal to some momentary
phase of life or feeling, and disappear with it. They have the value
of personal stimulants only; they never achieve beauty. Like the
souvenirs of last season's gayeties, or the diary of an early love,
they are often hideous in themselves in proportion as they are
redolent with personal associations. But however hopelessly mere
history or confession may fail to constitute a work of art, a work of
art that has an historical warrant, either literal or symbolical, gains
the support of that vivid interest we have in facts. And many
tragedies and farces, that to a mind without experience of this
sublunary world might seem monstrous and disgusting fictions,
may come to be forgiven and even perhaps preferred over all else,
when they are found to be a sketch from life.

Truth is thus the excuse which ugliness has for being. Many people,
in whom the pursuit of knowledge and the indulgence in sentiment
have left no room for the cultivation of the aesthetic sense, look in
art rather for this expression of fact or of passion than for the
revelation of beauty. They accordingly produce and admire works
without intrinsic value. They employ the procedure of the fine arts
without an eye to what can give pleasure in the effect. They invoke
rather the _a priori_ interest which men are expected to have in the
subject-matter, or in the theories and moral implied in the
presentation of it. Instead of using the allurements of art to inspire
wisdom, they require an appreciation of wisdom to make us endure
their lack of art.

Of course, the instruments of the arts are public property and any
one is free to turn them to new uses. It would be an interesting
development of civilization if they should now be employed only
as methods of recording scientific ideas and personal confessions.
But the experiment has not succeeded and can hardly succeed.
There are other simpler, clearer, and more satisfying ways of
expounding truth. A man who is really a student of history or
philosophy will never rest with the vague and partial oracles of
poetry, not to speak of the inarticulate suggestions of the plastic
arts. He will at once make for the principles which art cannot
express, even if it can embody them, and when those principles are
attained, the works of art, if they had no other value than that of
suggesting them, will lapse from his mind. Forms will give place
to formulas as hieroglyphics have given place to the letters of the
alphabet.

If, on the other hand, the primary interest is really in beauty, and
only the confusion of a moral revolution has obscured for a while
the vision of the ideal, then as the mind regains its mastery over the
world, and digests its new experience, the imagination will again
be liberated, and create its forms by its inward affinities, leaving
all the weary burden, archaeological, psychological, and ethical, to
those whose business is not to delight. But the sudden inundation
of science and sentiment which has made the mind of the
nineteenth century so confused, by overloading us with materials
and breaking up our habits of apperception and our ideals, has led
to an exclusive sense of the value of expressiveness, until this has
been almost identified with beauty. This exaggeration can best
prove how the expression of truth may enter into the play of
aesthetic forces, and give a value to representations which, but for
it, would be repulsive.

_The liberation of self._

§ 59. Hitherto we have been considering those elements of a
pathetic presentation which may mitigate our sympathetic emotion,
and make it on the whole agreeable. These consist in the intrinsic
beauties of the medium of presentation, and in the concomitant
manifestation of various goods, notably of truth. The mixture of
these values is perhaps all we have in mildly pathetic works, in the
presence of which we are tolerably aware of a sort of balance and
compensation of emotions. The sorrow and the beauty, the
hopelessness and the consolation, mingle and merge into a kind of
joy which has its poignancy, indeed, but which is far too passive
and penitential to contain the louder and sublimer of our tragic
moods. In these there is a wholeness, a strength, and a rapture,
which still demands an explanation.

Where this explanation is to be found may be guessed from the
following circumstance. The pathetic is a quality of the object, at
once lovable and sad, which we accept and allow to flow in upon
the soul; but the heroic is an attitude of the will, by which the
voices of the outer world are silenced, and a moral energy, flowing
from within, is made to triumph over them. If we fail, therefore, to
discover, by analysis of the object, anything which could make it
sublime, we must not be surprised at our failure. We must
remember that the object is always but a portion of our
consciousness: that portion which has enough coherence and
articulation to be recognized as permanent and projected into the
outer world. But consciousness remains one, in spite of this
diversification of its content, and the object is not really
independent, but is in constant relation to the rest of the mind, in
the midst of which it swims like a bubble on a dark surface of
water.

The aesthetic effect of objects is always due to the total emotional
value of the consciousness in which they exist. We merely attribute
this value to the object by a projection which is the ground of the
apparent objectivity of beauty. Sometimes this value may be
inherent in the process by which the object itself is perceived; then
we have sensuous and formal beauty; sometimes the value may be
due to the incipient formation of other ideas, which the perception
of this object evokes; then we have beauty of expression. But
among the ideas with which every object has relation there is one
vaguest, most comprehensive, and most powerful one, namely, the
idea of self. The impulses, memories, principles, and energies
which we designate by that word baffle enumeration; indeed, they
constantly fade and change into one another; and whether the self
is anything, everything, or nothing depends on the aspect of it
which we momentarily fix, and especially on the definite object
with which we contrast it.

Now, it is the essential privilege of beauty to so synthesize and
bring to a focus the various impulses of the self, so to suspend
them to a single image, that a great peace falls upon that perturbed
kingdom. In the experience of these momentary harmonies we
have the basis of the enjoyment of beauty, and of all its mystical
meanings. But there are always two methods of securing harmony:
one is to unify all the given elements, and another is to reject and
expunge all the elements that refuse to be unified. Unity by
inclusion gives us the beautiful; unity by exclusion, opposition,
and isolation gives us the sublime. Both are pleasures: but the
pleasure of the one is warm, passive, and pervasive; that of the
other cold, imperious, and keen. The one identifies us with the
world, the other raises us above it.

There can be no difficulty in understanding how the expression of
evil in the object may be the occasion of this heroic reaction of the
soul. In the first place, the evil may be felt; but at the same time the
sense that, great as it may be in itself, it cannot touch us, may
stimulate extraordinarily the consciousness of our own wholeness.
This is the sublimity which Lucretius calls "sweet" in the famous
lines in which he so justly analyzes it. We are not pleased because
another suffers an evil, but because, seeing it is an evil, we see at
the same time our own immunity from it. We might soften the
picture a little, and perhaps make the principle even clearer by so
doing. The shipwreck observed from the shore does not leave us
wholly unmoved; we suffer, also, and if possible, would help. So,
too, the spectacle of the erring world must sadden the philosopher
even in the Acropolis of his wisdom; he would, if it might be,
descend from his meditation and teach. But those movements of
sympathy are quickly inhibited by despair of success; impossibility
of action is a great condition of the sublime. If we could count the
stars, we should not weep before them. While we think we can
change the drama of history, and of our own lives, we are not awed
by our destiny. But when the evil is irreparable, when our life is
lived, a strong spirit has the sublime resource of standing at bay
and of surveying almost from the other world the vicissitudes of
this.

The more intimate to himself the tragedy he is able to look back
upon with calmness, the more sublime that calmness is, and the
more divine the ecstasy in which he achieves it. For the more of
the accidental vesture of life we are able to strip ourselves of, the
more naked and simple is the surviving spirit; the more complete
its superiority and unity, and, consequently, the more unqualified
its joy. There remains little in us, then, but that intellectual essence,
which several great philosophers have called eternal and identified
with the Divinity.

A single illustration may help to fix these principles in the mind.
When Othello has discovered his fatal error, and is resolved to take
his own life, he stops his groaning, and addresses the ambassadors
of Venice thus:

     Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate,
     Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak
     Of one that loved, not wisely, but too well;
     Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
     Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
     Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
     Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
     Albeit unused to the melting mood,
     Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
     Their medicinal gum. Set you down this:
     And say, besides, that in Aleppo once
     When a malignant and a turbaned Turk
     Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
     I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
     And smote him, thus.

There is a kind of criticism that would see in all these allusions,
figures of speech, and wandering reflections, an unnatural
rendering of suicide. The man, we might be told, should have
muttered a few broken phrases, and killed himself without this
pomp of declamation, like the jealous husbands in the daily papers.
But the conventions of the tragic stage are more favourable to
psychological truth than the conventions of real life. If we may
trust the imagination (and in imagination lies, as we have seen, the
test of propriety), this is what Othello would have felt. If he had
not expressed it, his dumbness would have been due to external
hindrances, not to the failure in his mind of just such complex and
rhetorical thoughts as the poet has put into his mouth. The height
of passion is naturally complex and rhetorical. Love makes us
poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
When a man knows that his life is over, he can look back upon it
from a universal standpoint. He has nothing more to live for, but if
the energy of his mind remains unimpaired, he will still wish to
live, and, being cut off from his personal ambitions, he will impute
to himself a kind of vicarious immortality by identifying himself
with what is eternal. He speaks of himself as he is, or rather as he
was. He sums himself up, and points to his achievement. This I
have been, says he, this I have done.

This comprehensive and impartial view, this synthesis and
objectification of experience, constitutes the liberation of the soul
and the essence of sublimity. That the hero attains it at the end
consoles us, as it consoles him, for his hideous misfortunes. Our
pity and terror are indeed purged; we go away knowing that,
however tangled the net may be in which we feel ourselves caught,
there is liberation beyond, and an ultimate peace.

_The sublime independent of the expression of evil._

§ 60. So natural is the relation between the vivid conception of
great evils, and that self-assertion of the soul which gives the
emotion of the sublime, that the sublime is often thought to depend
upon the terror which these conceived evils inspire. To be sure,
that terror would have to be inhibited and subdued, otherwise we
should have a passion too acute to be incorporated in any object;
the sublime would not appear as an aesthetic quality in things, but
remain merely an emotional state in the subject. But this subdued
and objectified terror is what is commonly regarded as the essence
of the sublime, and so great an authority as Aristotle would seem
to countenance some such definition. The usual cause of the
sublime is here confused, however, with the sublime itself. The
suggestion of terror makes us withdraw into ourselves: there with
the supervening consciousness of safety or indifference comes a
rebound, and we have that emotion of detachment and liberation in
which the sublime really consists.

Thoughts and actions are properly sublime, and visible things only
by analogy and suggestion when they induce a certain moral
emotion; whereas beauty belongs properly to sensible things, and
can be predicated of moral facts only by a figure of rhetoric. What
we objectify in beauty is a sensation. What we objectify in the
sublime is an act. This act is necessarily pleasant, for if it were not
the sublime would be a bad quality and one we should rather never
encounter in the world. The glorious joy of self-assertion in the
face of an uncontrollable world is indeed so deep and entire, that it
furnishes just that transcendent element of worth for which we
were looking when we tried to understand how the expression of
pain could sometimes please. It can please, not in itself, but
because it is balanced and annulled by positive pleasures,
especially by this final and victorious one of detachment. If the
expression of evil seems necessary to the sublime, it is so only as a
condition of this moral reaction.

We are commonly too much engrossed in objects and too little
centred in ourselves and our inalienable will, to see the sublimity
of a pleasing prospect. We are then enticed and flattered,
and won over to a commerce with these external goods, and
the consummation of our happiness would lie in the perfect
comprehension and enjoyment of their nature. This is the office of
art and of love; and its partial fulfilment is seen in every perception
of beauty. But when we are checked in this sympathetic endeavour
after unity and comprehension; when we come upon a great evil or
an irreconcilable power, we are driven to seek our happiness by the
shorter and heroic road; then we recognize the hopeless
foreignness of what lies before us, and stiffen ourselves against it.
We thus for the first time reach the sense of our possible separation
from our world, and of our abstract stability; and with this comes
the sublime.

But although experience of evil is the commonest approach to this
attitude of mind, and we commonly become philosophers only
after despairing of instinctive happiness, yet there is nothing
impossible in the attainment of detachment by other channels. The
immense is sublime as well as the terrible; and mere infinity of the
object, like its hostile nature, can have the effect of making the
mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like hostility, removes us from
things, and makes us conscious of our independence. The
simultaneous view of many things, innumerable attractions felt
together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as effectually as
the exclusion of all. If we may call the liberation of the self by the
consciousness of evil in the world, the Stoic sublime, we may
assert that there is also an Epicurean sublime, which consists in
liberation by equipoise. Any wide survey is sublime in that fashion.
Each detail may be beautiful. We may even be ready with a
passionate response to its appeal. We may think we covet every
sort of pleasure, and lean to every kind of vigorous, impulsive life.
But let an infinite panorama be suddenly unfolded; the will is
instantly paralyzed, and the heart choked. It is impossible to desire
everything at once, and when all is offered and approved, it is
impossible to choose everything. In this suspense, the mind soars
into a kind of heaven, benevolent but unmoved.

This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of interest or
length of years has brought balance and dignity. The sacerdotal
quality of old age comes from this same sympathy in disinterestedness.
Old men full of hurry and passion appear as fools, because
we understand that their experience has not left enough
mark upon their brain to qualify with the memory of other
goods any object that may be now presented. We cannot venerate
any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And
this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon
any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the
gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a
natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on
no other model.

When the pantheists try to conceive all the parts of nature as
forming a single being, which shall contain them all and yet have
absolute unity, they find themselves soon denying the existence of
the world they are trying to deify; for nature, reduced to the unity it
would assume in an omniscient mind, is no longer nature, but
something simple and impossible, the exact opposite of the real
world. Such an opposition would constitute the liberation of the
divine mind from nature, and its existence as a self-conscious
individual. The effort after comprehensiveness of view reduces
things to unity, but this unity stands out in opposition to the
manifold phenomena which it transcends, and rejects as unreal.

Now this destruction of nature, which the metaphysicians since
Parmenides have so often repeated (nature nevertheless surviving
still), is but a theoretical counterpart and hypostasis of what
happens in every man's conscience when the comprehensiveness of
his experience lifts him into thought, into abstraction. The sense of
the sublime is essentially mystical: it is the transcending of distinct
perception in favour of a feeling of unity and volume. So in the
moral sphere, we have the mutual cancelling of the passions in the
breast that includes them all, and their final subsidence beneath the
glance that comprehends them. This is the Epicurean approach to
detachment and perfection; it leads by systematic acceptance of
instinct to the same goal which the stoic and the ascetic reach by
systematic rejection of instinct. It is thus possible to be moved to
that self-enfranchisement which constitutes the sublime, even
when the object contains no expression of evil.

This conclusion supports that part of our definition of beauty
which declares that the values beauty contains are all positive; a
definition which we should have had to change if we had found
that the sublime depended upon the suggestion of evil for its effect.
But the sublime is not the ugly, as some descriptions of it might
lead us to suppose; it is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful.
It is the pleasure of contemplation reaching such an intensity that it
begins to lose its objectivity, and to declare itself, what it always
fundamentally was, an inward passion of the soul. For while in the
beautiful we find the perfection of life by sinking into the object, in
the sublime we find a purer and more inalienable perfection by
defying the object altogether. The surprised enlargement of vision,
the sudden escape from our ordinary interests and the identification
of ourselves with something permanent and superhuman, something
much more abstract and inalienable than our changing personality,
all this carries us away from the blurred objects before us,
and raises us into a sort of ecstasy.

In the trite examples of the sublime, where we speak of the vast
mass, strength, and durability of objects, or of their sinister aspect,
as if we were moved by them on account of our own danger, we
seem to miss the point. For the suggestion of our own danger
would produce a touch of fear; it would be a practical passion, or if
it could by chance be objectified enough to become aesthetic, it
would merely make the object hateful and repulsive, like a
mangled corpse. The object is sublime when we forget our danger,
when we escape from ourselves altogether, and live as it were in
the object itself, energizing in imitation of its movement, and
saying, "Be thou me, impetuous one!" This passage into the object,
to live its life, is indeed a characteristic of all perfect contemplation.
But when in thus translating ourselves we rise and play a higher
personage, feeling the exhilaration of a life freer and wilder than
our own, then the experience is one of sublimity. The emotion
comes not from the situation we observe, but from the powers we
conceive; we fail to sympathize with the struggling sailors because
we sympathize too much with the wind and waves. And this
mystical cruelty can extend even to ourselves; we can so feel the
fascination of the cosmic forces that engulf us as to take a fierce
joy in the thought of our own destruction. We can identify
ourselves with the abstractest essence of reality, and, raised to that
height, despise the human accidents of our own nature. Lord, we
say, though thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee. The sense of
suffering disappears in the sense of life and the imagination
overwhelms the understanding.

_The comic._

§ 61. Something analogous takes place in the other spheres where
an aesthetic value seems to arise out of suggestions of evil, in the
comic, namely, and the grotesque. But here the translation of our
sympathies is partial, and we are carried away from ourselves only
to become smaller. The larger humanity, which cannot be absorbed,
remains ready to contradict the absurdity of our fiction. The
excellence of comedy lies in the invitation to wander along some
by-path of the fancy, among scenes not essentially impossible, but
not to be actually enacted by us on account of the fixed
circumstances of our lives. If the picture is agreeable, we allow
ourselves to dream it true. We forget its relations; we forbid the
eye to wander beyond the frame of the stage, or the conventions of
the fiction. We indulge an illusion which deepens our sense of the
essential pleasantness of things.

So far, there is nothing in comedy that is not delightful, except,
perhaps, the moment when it is over. But fiction, like all error or
abstraction, is necessarily unstable; and the awakening is not
always reserved for the disheartening moment at the end.
Everywhere, when we are dealing with pretension or mistake, we
come upon sudden and vivid contradictions; changes of view,
transformations of apperception which are extremely stimulating to
the imagination. We have spoken of one of these: when the sudden
dissolution of our common habits of thought lifts us into a mystical
contemplation, filled with the sense of the sublime; when the
transformation is back to common sense and reality, and away
from some fiction, we have a very different emotion. We feel
cheated, relieved, abashed, or amused, in proportion as our
sympathy attaches more to the point of view surrendered or to that
attained.

The disintegration of mental forms and their redintegration is the
life of the imagination. It is a spiritual process of birth and death,
nutrition and generation. The strongest emotions accompany these
changes, and vary infinitely with their variations. All the qualities
of discourse, wit, eloquence, cogency, absurdity, are feelings
incidental to this process, and involved in the juxtapositions,
tensions, and resolutions of our ideas. Doubtless the last
explanation of these things would be cerebral; but we are as yet
confined to verbal descriptions and classifications of them, which
are always more or less arbitrary.

The most conspicuous headings under which comic effects are
gathered are perhaps incongruity and degradation. But clearly it
cannot be the logical essence of incongruity or degradation that
constitutes the comic; for then contradiction and deterioration
would always amuse. Amusement is a much more directly physical
thing. We may be amused without any idea at all, as when we are
tickled, or laugh in sympathy with others by a contagious imitation
of their gestures. We may be amused by the mere repetition of a
thing at first not amusing. There must therefore be some nervous
excitement on which the feeling of amusement directly depends,
although this excitement may most often coincide with a sudden
transition to an incongruous or meaner image. Nor can we suppose
that particular ideational excitement to be entirely dissimilar to all
others; wit is often hardly distinguishable from brilliancy, as
humour from pathos. We must, therefore, be satisfied with saying
vaguely that the process of ideation involves various feelings of
movement and relation, -- feelings capable of infinite gradation
and complexity, and ranging from sublimity to tedium and from
pathos to uncontrollable merriment.

Certain crude and obvious cases of the comic seem to consist of
little more than a shock of surprise: a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box,
popping from nowhere into our plodding thoughts. The liveliness
of the interruption, and its futility, often please; _dulce est
desipere in loco;_ and yet those who must endure the society of
inveterate jokers know how intolerable this sort of scintillation can
become. There is something inherently vulgar about it; perhaps
because our train of thought cannot be very entertaining in itself
when we are so glad to break in upon it with irrelevant nullities.
The same undertone of disgust mingles with other amusing
surprises, as when a dignified personage slips and falls, or some
disguise is thrown off, or those things are mentioned and described
which convention ignores. The novelty and the freedom please, yet
the shock often outlasts the pleasure, and we have cause to wish
we had been stimulated by something which did not involve this
degradation. So, also, the impossibility in plausibility which tickles
the fancy in Irish bulls, and in wild exaggerations, leaves an
uncomfortable impression, a certain aftertaste of foolishness.

The reason will be apparent if we stop to analyze the situation. We
have a prosaic background of common sense and every-day reality;
upon this background an unexpected idea suddenly impinges. But
the thing is a futility. The comic accident falsifies the nature before
us, starts a wrong analogy in the mind, a suggestion that cannot be
carried out. In a word, we are in the presence of an absurdity; and
man, being a rational animal, can like absurdity no better than he
can like hunger or cold. A pinch of either may not be so bad, and
he will endure it merrily enough if you repay him with abundance
of warm victuals; so, too, he will play with all kinds of nonsense
for the sake of laughter and good fellowship and the tickling of his
fancy with a sort of caricature of thought. But the qualm remains,
and the pleasure is never perfect. The same exhilaration might
have come without the falsification, just as repose follows more
swiftly after pleasant than after painful exertions.

Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better. The
best place for absurdity is in the midst of what is already absurd --
then we have the play of fancy without the sense of ineptitude.
Things amuse us in the mouth of a fool that would not amuse us in
that of a gentleman; a fact which shows how little incongruity and
degradation have to do with our pleasure in the comic. In fact,
there is a kind of congruity and method even in fooling. The
incongruous and the degraded displease us even there, as by their
nature they must at all times. The shock which they bring may
sometimes be the occasion of a subsequent pleasure, by attracting
our attention, or by stimulating passions, such as scorn, or cruelty,
or self-satisfaction (for there is a good deal of malice in our love of
fun); but the incongruity and degradation, as such, always remain
unpleasant. The pleasure comes from the inward rationality and
movement of the fiction, not from its inconsistency with anything
else. There are a great many topsy-turvy worlds possible to our
fancy, into which we like to drop at times. We enjoy the
stimulation and the shaking up of our wits. It is like getting into a
new posture, or hearing a new song.

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited. For
reason, after all, is one convention picked out of a thousand. We
love expansion, not disorder, and when we attain freedom without
incongruity we have a much greater and a much purer delight. The
excellence of wit can dispense with absurdity. For on the same
prosaic background of common sense, a novelty might have
appeared that was not absurd, that stimulated the attention quite as
much as the ridiculous, without so baffling the intelligence. This
purer and more thoroughly delightful amusement comes from what
we call wit.

_Wit._

§ 62. Wit also depends upon transformation and substitution of
ideas. It has been said to consist in quick association by similarity.
The substitution must here be valid, however, and the similarity
real, though unforeseen. Unexpected justness makes wit, as sudden
incongruity makes pleasant foolishness. It is characteristic of wit to
penetrate into hidden depths of things, to pick out there some
telling circumstance or relation, by noting which the whole object
appears in a new and clearer light. Wit often seems malicious
because analysis in discovering common traits and universal
principles assimilates things at the poles of being; it can apply to
cookery the formulas of theology, and find in the human heart a
case of the fulcrum and lever. We commonly keep the departments
of experience distinct; we think that different principles hold in
each and that the dignity of spirit is inconsistent with the
explanation of it by physical analogy, and the meanness of matter
unworthy of being an illustration of moral truths. Love must not be
classed under physical cravings, nor faith under hypnotization.
When, therefore, an original mind overleaps these boundaries, and
recasts its categories, mixing up our old classifications, we feel that
the values of things are also confused. But these depended upon a
deeper relation, upon their response to human needs and
aspirations. All that can be changed by the exercise of intelligence
is our sense of the unity and homogeneity of the world. We may
come to hold an object of thought in less isolated respect, and
another in less hasty derision; but the pleasures we derive from all,
or our total happiness and wonder, will hardly be diminished. For
this reason the malicious or destructive character of intelligence
must not be regarded as fundamental. Wit belittles one thing and
dignifies another; and its comparisons are as often flattering as
ironical.

The same process of mind that we observed in wit gives rise to
those effects we call charming, brilliant, or inspired. When
Shakespeare says,

     Come and kiss me, _sweet and twenty,_
     Youth's a stuff will not endure,

the fancy of the phrase consists in a happy substitution, a merry
way of saying something both true and tender. And where could
we find a more exquisite charm? So, to take a weightier example,
when St. Augustine is made to say that pagan virtues were
_splendid vices,_ we have -- at least if we catch the full meaning --
a pungent assimilation of contrary things, by force of a powerful
principle; a triumph of theory, the boldness of which can only be
matched by its consistency. In fact, a phrase could not be more
brilliant, or better condense one theology and two civilizations.
The Latin mind is particularly capable of this sort of excellence.
Tacitus alone could furnish a hundred examples. It goes with the
power of satirical and bitter eloquence, a sort of scornful rudeness
of intelligence, that makes for the core of a passion or of a
character, and affixes to it a more or less scandalous label. For in
our analytical zeal it is often possible to condense and abstract too
much. Reality is more fluid and elusive than reason, and has, as it
were, more dimensions than are known even to the latest geometry.
Hence the understanding, when not suffused with some glow of
sympathetic emotion or some touch of mysticism, gives but a dry,
crude image of the world. The quality of wit inspires more
admiration than confidence. It is a merit we should miss little in
any one we love.

The same principle, however, can have more sentimental
embodiments. When our substitutions are brought on by the
excitement of generous emotion, we call wit inspiration. There is
the same finding of new analogies, and likening of disparate things;
there is the same transformation of our apperception. But the
brilliancy is here not only penetrating, but also exalting. For
instance:

     Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
          He hath awakened from the dream of life:
     'Tis we that wrapped in stormy visions keep
          With phantoms an unprofitable strife.

There is here paradox, and paradox justified by reflection. The poet
analyzes, and analyzes without reserve. The dream, the storm, the
phantoms, and the unprofitableness could easily make a satirical
picture. But the mood is transmuted; the mind takes an upward
flight, with a sense of liberation from the convention it dissolves,
and of freer motion in the vagueness beyond. The disintegration of
our ideal here leads to mysticism, and because of this effort
towards transcendence, the brilliancy becomes sublime.

_Humour._

§ 63. A different mood can give a different direction to the same
processes. The sympathy by which we reproduce the feeling of
another, is always very much opposed to the aesthetic attitude to
which the whole world is merely a stimulus to our sensibility. In
the tragic, we have seen how the sympathetic feeling, by which
suffering is appreciated and shared, has to be overlaid by many
incidental aesthetic pleasures, if the resulting effect is to be on the
whole good. We have also seen how the only way in which the
ridiculous can be kept within the sphere of the aesthetically good is
abstracting it from its relations, and treating it as an independent
and curious stimulus; we should stop laughing and begin to be
annoyed if we tried to make sense out of our absurdity. The less
sympathy we have with men the more exquisite is our enjoyment
of their folly: satirical delight is closely akin to cruelty. Defect and
mishap stimulate our fancy, as blood and tortures excite in us the
passions of the beast of prey. The more this inhuman attitude
yields to sympathy and reason, the less are folly and error capable
of amusing us. It would therefore seem impossible that we should
be pleased by the foibles or absurdities of those we love. And in
fact we never enjoy seeing our own persons in a satirical light, or
any one else for whom we really feel affection. Even in farces, the
hero and heroine are seldom made ridiculous, because that would
jar upon the sympathy with which we are expected to regard them.
Nevertheless, the essence of what we call humour is that amusing
weaknesses should be combined with an amicable humanity.
Whether it be in the way of ingenuity, or oddity, or drollery, the
humorous person must have an absurd side, or be placed in an
absurd situation. Yet this comic aspect, at which we ought to wince,
seems to endear the character all the more. This is a parallel case to
that of tragedy, where the depth of the woe we sympathize with
seems to add to our satisfaction. And the explanation of the
paradox is the same. We do not enjoy the expression of evil, but
only the pleasant excitements that come with it; namely, the
physical stimulus and the expression of good. In tragedy, the
misfortunes help to give the impression of truth, and to bring out
the noble qualities of the hero, but are in themselves depressing, so
much so that over-sensitive people cannot enjoy the beauty of the
representation. So also in humour, the painful suggestions are felt
as such, and need to be overbalanced by agreeable elements. These
come from both directions, from the aesthetic and the sympathetic
reaction. On the one hand there is the sensuous and merely
perceptive stimulation, the novelty, the movement, the vivacity of
the spectacle. On the other hand, there is the luxury of imaginative
sympathy, the mental assimilation of another congenial experience,
the expansion into another life.

The juxtaposition of these two pleasures produces just that tension
and complication in which the humorous consists. We are satirical,
and we are friendly at the same time. The consciousness of the
friendship gives a regretful and tender touch to the satire, and the
sting of the satire makes the friendship a trifle humble and sad.
Don Quixote is mad; he is old, useless, and ridiculous, but he is the
soul of honour, and in all his laughable adventures we follow him
like the ghost of our better selves. We enjoy his discomfitures too
much to wish he had been a perfect Amadis; and we have besides a
shrewd suspicion that he is the only kind of Amadis there can ever
be in this world. At the same time it does us good to see the
courage of his idealism, the ingenuity of his wit, and the simplicity
of his goodness. But how shall we reconcile our sympathy with his
dream and our perception of its absurdity? The situation is
contradictory. We are drawn to some different point of view, from
which the comedy may no longer seem so amusing. As humour
becomes deep and really different from satire, it changes into
pathos, and passes out of the sphere of the comic altogether. The
mischances that were to amuse us as scoffers now grieve us as men,
and the value of the representation depends on the touches of
beauty and seriousness with which it is adorned.

_The grotesque._

§ 64. Something analogous to humour can appear in plastic forms,
when we call it the grotesque. This is an interesting effect
produced by such a transformation of an ideal type as exaggerates
one of its elements or combines it with other types. The real
excellence of this, like that of all fiction, consists in re-creation; in
the formation of a thing which nature has not, but might
conceivably have offered. We call these inventions comic and
grotesque when we are considering their divergence from the
natural rather than their inward possibility. But the latter
constitutes their real charm; and the more we study and develope
them, the better we understand it. The incongruity with the
conventional type than disappears, and what was impossible and
ridiculous at first takes its place among recognized ideals. The
centaur and the satyr are no longer grotesque; the type is accepted.
And the grotesqueness of an individual has essentially the same
nature. If we like the inward harmony, the characteristic balance of
his features, we are able to disengage this individual from the class
into which we were trying to force him; we can forget the
expectation which he was going to disappoint. The ugliness then
disappears, and only the reassertion of the old habit and demand
can make us regard him as in any way extravagant.

What appears as grotesque may be intrinsically inferior or superior
to the normal. That is a question of its abstract material and form.
But until the new object impresses its form on our imagination, so
that we can grasp its unity and proportion, it appears to us as a
jumble and distortion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute,
the object is simply null; it does not exist aesthetically, except by
virtue of materials. But if the confusion is not absolute, and we
have an inkling of the unity and character in the midst of the
strangeness of the form, then we have the grotesque. It is the
half-formed, the perplexed, and the suggestively monstrous.

The analogy to the comic is very close, as we can readily conceive
that it should be. In the comic we have this same juxtaposition of a
new and an old idea, and if the new is not futile and really
inconceivable, it may in time establish itself in the mind, and cease
to be ludicrous. Good wit is novel truth, as the good grotesque is
novel beauty. But there are natural conditions of organization, and
we must not mistake every mutilation for the creation of a new
form. The tendency of nature to establish well-marked species of
animals shows what various combinations are most stable in the
face of physical forces, and there is a fitness also for survival in the
mind, which is determined by the relation of any form to our fixed
method of perception. New things are therefore generally bad
because, as has been well said, they are incapable of becoming old.
A thousand originalities are produced by defect of faculty, for one
that is produced by genius. For in the pursuit of beauty, as in that
of truth, an infinite number of paths lead to failure, and only one to
success.

_The possibility of finite perfection._

§ 65. If these observations have any accuracy, they confirm this
important truth, -- that no aesthetic value is really founded on the
experience or the suggestion of evil. This conclusion will doubtless
seem the more interesting if we think of its possible extension to
the field of ethics and of the implied vindication of the ideal of
moral perfection as something essentially definable and attainable.
But without insisting on an analogy to ethics, which might be
misleading, we may hasten to state the principle which emerges
from our analysis of expression. Expressiveness may be found in
any one thing that suggests another, or draws from association with
that other any of its emotional colouring. There may, therefore, of
course, be an expressiveness of evil; but this expressiveness will
not have any aesthetic value. The description or suggestion of
suffering may have a worth as science or discipline, but can never
in itself enhance any beauty. Tragedy and comedy please in spite
of this expressiveness and not by virtue of it; and except for the
pleasures they give, they have no place among the fine arts. Nor
have they, in such a case, any place in human life at all; unless they
are instruments of some practical purpose and serve to preach a
moral, or achieve a bad notoriety. For ugly things can attract
attention, although they cannot keep it; and the scandal of a new
horror may secure a certain vulgar admiration which follows
whatever is momentarily conspicuous, and which is attained even
by crime. Such admiration, however, has nothing aesthetic about it,
and is only made possible by the bluntness of our sense of beauty.

The effect of the pathetic and comic is therefore never pure; since
the expression of some evil is mixed up with those elements by
which the whole appeals to us. These elements we have seen to be
the truth of the presentation, which involves the pleasures of
recognition and comprehension, the beauty of the medium, and the
concomitant expression of things intrinsically good. To these
sources all the aesthetic value of comic and tragic is due; and the
sympathetic emotion which arises from the spectacle of evil must
never be allowed to overpower these pleasures of contemplation,
else the entire object becomes distasteful and loses its excuse for
being. Too exclusive a relish for the comic and pathetic is
accordingly a sign of bad taste and of comparative insensibility to
beauty.

This situation has generally been appreciated in the practice of the
arts, where effect is perpetually studied; but the greatest care has
not always succeeded in avoiding the dangers of the pathetic, and
history is full of failures due to bombast, caricature, and
unmitigated horror. In all these the effort to be expressive has
transgressed the conditions of pleasing effect. For the creative and
imitative impulse is indiscriminate. It does not consider the
eventual beauty of the effect, but only the blind instinct of
self-expression. Hence an untrained and not naturally sensitive mind
cannot distinguish or produce anything good. This critical
incapacity has always been a cause of failure and a just ground for
ridicule; but it remained for some thinkers of our time -- a time of
little art and much undisciplined production -- to erect this abuse
into a principle and declare that the essence of beauty is to express
the artist and not to delight the world. But the conditions of effect,
and the possibility of pleasing, are the only criterion of what is
capable and worthy of expression. Art exists and has value by its
adaptation to these universal conditions of beauty.

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.