In other grades of these arts also, the artist has to use special means to maintain a due balance between the two kinds of beauty. Shakespeare could not give men and women of every-day experience the wisdom, the judgment, and the foresight necessary for the presentation of the powerful pictures which some of his characters throw upon the mind, so he raises them above the level of life by according them greater virtues and nobler passions than are to be found in people of actual experience. The supreme emotional effects he produces seem perfectly appropriate therefore to the intellectual appeals. In the next lower form of art, where the representation does not go beyond life experience, the emotional appeal is of still greater relative importance because the appeal to the mind is rarely striking. The emotional effect here may indeed be so overpowering that the purely mental considerations are lost sight of, and we observe that in all the greater works of art in the division, whether of poetry, painting, sculpture, or fiction, the intellectual appeal is vastly exceeded by the emotional. When we reach the grade which deals with subjects inferior to the average level of human life, as the representation of animals, landscape, humour, still-life, the sensorial effect must be exceedingly strong relatively, otherwise the art would scarcely be recognizable, the appeal to the mind being necessarily weak.
It is clearly compulsory then that the Associated Arts, all of which may appeal to the mind as well as to the senses, should be separated into divisions for the purpose of applying the Law of Recognition, and these divisions are obvious, for they are marked by the strongest natural boundary lines. They are: 1. The art which deals with divinities. 2. That which exhibits beauty above life experience, but does not reach the divine. 3. That which represents life. 4. That which produces representations inferior to life. This separation corresponds with that applied by Aristotle to poetry and painting, except that he joined the two first sections into one, which he described as better than life. But the division of the great philosopher, while being sufficient for his purpose, is hardly close enough for the full consideration of the kinds of beauty, since it puts in the same class, representations of the divinity and the superman—joins Homer and Phidias with Praxiteles and Raphael. In dealing with the divine the artist need place no limit to his imagination in the presentation of his picture, whereas with the superman he must circumscribe his fancy within the limits of what may appear to the senses to be possibly natural. It is true that the poet may use the supernatural as distinguished from the divine, to enable him to extend his imaginative scope, and so give us beautiful pictures which would be otherwise unpresentable. Shakespeare makes us imagine Puck encircling the earth in forty minutes, and Shelley shows us iron-winged beings climbing the wind, but we immediately recognize these pictures as figures of fancy, or as in the nature of allegory, and they do not impress us so deeply as the miraculous flight of a goddess of Homer, or an assemblage of the satellites of Satan in the Hell of Milton, for we involuntarily regard these events as compatible with the religious faith of great nations, and so as having a nearer apparent semblance of truth. Sacred art therefore, being capable of providing beauty of a much higher kind than any other form, should be placed in a separate section for the purpose of considering the law under discussion. Only poetry among the arts is capable of appropriately representing divine actions, and only sculpture of producing a form so perfect as to bring a divinity to mind. Hence these arts are alone concerned with the Law of Recognition as applied to the first section of the Associated Arts.
The law applies to all the Associated Arts, and to all sections of them, except the lowest form of painting—that represented by harmony of colour without appeal to the mind of any kind—but this form is so weak and exceptional that it need hardly be considered in the general proposition. Indeed we might reasonably argue that it does not come within the fine arts, as it is produced by a mechanical arrangement of things with fixed and unalterable physical properties.
The law cannot apply to music and architecture, for the effects of these are purely emotional, and so directly vary with conditions of time and place respectively. A work of architecture may seem more beautiful in one place than in another; and a work of music more or less beautiful according as it more or less synchronizes with emotional conditions of human activity surrounding the hearer at the time of the performance.
While this law is unvarying in the Associated Arts, there are artificial restrictions which must be considered in order that apparent deviations from it may be understood. Special restrictions in relation to the higher poetry and sculpture are mentioned later on, but there is also an important general restriction. The sense nerves and the imagination, like all other functions, must be exercised in order that normal healthy conditions may be retained; but a large section of the people, by force of circumstances or want of will, have neglected this exercise, and so through disuse or misuse these functions are often in a condition which is little more than rudimentary. Hence such persons are practically debarred from appreciation of many forms of art, and particularly those wherein intellectual beauty is a marked feature. In discussing the operation of this law amongst people in general therefore, the writer must be understood to refer only to that section of the community whose sense nerves and imaginations may be supposed to be in a healthy, active condition.
Experience with all the Associated Arts has clearly demonstrated the validity of this law. The strength of the devices used by the poet lies in simplifying the presentation of his pictures. Metaphor is necessary to the poet, for without it he would be powerless to present pictures made up of a number of parts, but he also uses it for the purpose of throwing simple images upon the mind more rapidly, and consequently more forcibly, than would be possible if direct means were employed; and the beauty of the metaphor appears the greater according as it more completely fills in the picture which the poet is desirous of presenting. When other artifices than metaphor or simile are applied, the result only appears very beautiful when the condensation of the language used is extreme, and when there is no break in the delineation of the action. A few supreme examples of beauty derived from the principal devices of the poet for presenting his pictures may be instanced, and it will be found that in each case the power of the image is directly due to the brevity of expression, the simplicity of description and metaphor, or the unimpeded representation of action.
More than three thousand years have passed since the period assigned to Helen of Troy, and yet each generation of men and women as they learn of her, have deeply sealed upon their minds the impression that she was of surpassing beauty, almost beyond the reach of human conception. We have practically no details of her appearance from Homer or Hesiod, except that she was neat-ankled, white-armed, rich-haired, and had the sparkling eyes of the Graces, but already in the time of Hesiod her renown "spread over the earth." What was it then that established the eternal fame of her beauty? Simply a few words of Homer indicating the startling effect of her appearance before the elders of Troy. We are allowed to infer that these dry, shrunken-formed sages, shrill-voiced with age, became passionately disturbed by a mere glance at her figure, and nervously agreed with each other that little blame attached to the Greeks and Trojans for suffering such long and severe hardships on account of her, for only with the goddesses could she be compared. How wondrous must be the beauty when a glimpse of it suffices to hasten the blood through shrivelled veins, and provoke tempestuous currents to awake atrophied nerves! Without the record of this incident, the vague notices of Helen's appearance would be very far from sufficient to account for the universal recognition of her marvellous beauty.[22]
Greek Sculpture, 4th Century B.C. Attributed to Scopas Greek Bronze, 3d Century B.C.
Heads of Demeter