The Principles of Aesthetics

by De Witt H. Parker

The ideas and images associated with a work of art depend very largely on the education, experience, and idiosyncrasy of the spectator. The scholar, for example, will put tenfold more meaning into his reading of the Divine Comedy than the untrained person. Or compare Pater's interpretation of the "Mona Lisa" with Muther's. Can we say that certain ideas and images belong properly to the work of art, while others do not? With regard to this, we can, I think, set up two criteria. First, the intention of the artist—whatever the artist meant his work to express: that it expresses. Yet, since this can never be certainly and completely discovered, there must always remain a large region of undetermined interpretation. Now for judging the relevancy of this penumbra of meaning and association the following test applies—does it bring us back to the sensuous medium of the work of art or lead us away? Anything is legitimate which we actually put into the form of the work of art and keep there, while whatever merely hangs loose around it is illegitimate. For example, if while listening to music we give ourselves up to personal memories and fancies, we are almost sure to neglect the sounds and their structure; we cannot objectify the former in the latter; with the result that the composition is largely lost to us. Naturally, no hard and fast lines can be drawn, especially in the case of works of vague import like music; yet we can use this criterion as a principle for regulating and inhibiting our associations. It demands of us a wide-awake and receptive appreciation. The genuine meanings and associations of a work of art are those which are the irresistible and necessary results of the sense stimuli working upon an attentive percipient; the rest are not only arbitrary, but injurious.

To this, some people would doubtless object on the ground that art was made for man and not man for art. The work of art, they would claim, should interpret the personal experience of the spectator; hence whatever he puts into it belongs there of right. There are, however, two considerations limiting the validity of this assertion. First, the work of art is primarily an expression of the artist's personality and, second, its purpose is to provide a common medium of expression for the experience of all men. If interpretation remains a purely individual affair, both its relation to the artist and the possibility of a common aesthetic experience through it are destroyed. For this reason we should, I believe, deliberately seek to make our appreciations historically sound and definite. And in the social and historical appreciation resulting, we shall find our own lives—not so different from the artist's and our fellows'—abundantly and sufficiently expressed.

CHAPTER V

THE ANALYSIS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: THE STRUCTURE OF THE EXPERIENCE

In our discussion of first principles, we set down a high degree of unity as one of the distinguishing characteristics of works of art. In this we followed close upon ancient tradition; for the markedly structural character of beauty was noticed by the earliest observers. Plato, the first philosopher of art, identified beauty with simplicity, harmony, and proportion, and Aristotle held the same view. They were so impressed with aesthetic unity that they compared it with the other most highly unified type of thing they knew, the organism; and ever afterwards it has been called "organic unity." With the backing of such authority, unity in variety was long thought to be the same as beauty; and, although this view is obviously one-sided, no one has since succeeded in persuading men that an object can be beautiful without unity.

Since art is expression, its unity is, unavoidably, an image of the unity of the things in nature and mind which it expresses. A lyric poem reflects the unity of mood that binds together the thoughts and images of the poet; the drama and novel, the unity of plan and purpose in the acts of men and the fateful sequence of causes and effects in their lives. The statue reflects the organic unity of the body; the painting, the spatial unity of visible things. In beautiful artifacts, the basal unity is the purpose or end embodied in the material structure.

But the unity of works of art is not wholly derivative; for it occurs in the free arts like music, where nothing is imitated, and even in the representative arts, as we have observed, it is closer than in the things which are imaged. Aesthetic unity is therefore unique and, if we would understand it, we must seek its reason in the peculiar nature and purpose of art. Since, moreover, art is a complex fact, the explanation of its unity is not simple; the unity itself is very intricate and depends upon many cooperating factors.

In the case of the imitative arts, taking the given unity of the objects represented as a basis, the superior unity of the image is partly due to the singleness of the artist's interest. For art, as we know, is never the expression of mere things, but of things so far as they have value. Out of the infinite fullness of nature and of life, the artist selects those elements that have a unique significance for him.

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Observe how, out of the countless things which he knows, the poet has chosen those which he feels akin to his faith in the immortality of love. The painter would not, if he could, reproduce all the elements of a face, but only those that are expressive of the interpretation of character he wishes to convey. The novelist and the dramatist proceed in a like selective fashion in the treatment of their material. In the lives of men there are a thousand actions and events—casual spoken words, recurrent processes such as eating and dressing, hours of idleness and futility which, because repetitious, habitual, or inconsequential, throw no light upon that alone in which we are interested,—character and fortune. To describe a single example of these facts suffices. In the novel and drama, therefore, the personalities and life histories of men have a simplicity and singleness of direction not found in reality. The artist seeks everywhere the traits that individualize and characterize, and neglects all others.