The Psychology of Beauty

by Ethel Puffer Howes

Such, then, are some of the means by which language becomes identical with thought, and most truly the dialect of life. The genius will have ways, to which these briefly outlined ones will seem crude and obvious, but they will be none the less of the same nature. Shall we then conclude that the beauty of literature is here? that, in the words of Pater, from the essay I have quoted, "In that perfect justice (of the unique word)…omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art."

In its last analysis, such a conception of literature amounts to the unimpeded intercourse of mind with mind. Literature would be a language which dispenses with gesture, facial expression, tone of voice; which is, in its halts, accelerations and retardations, emphases and concessions, the apotheosis of conversation. But this clearness,—in the sublime sense, including the ornate and the subtle,—this luminous lucidity,— is it not quite indeterminate? Clearness is said of a medium. WHAT is it that shines through?

Were this clearness the beauty we are seeking, whatever in the world that wanted to get itself said, would, if it were perfectly said, become a final achievement of literature. All that the plain man looks for, we must think rightly, in poetry and prose, might be absent, and yet we should have to acknowledge its excellence. Let us then consider this quality by which the words become what they signify as the specific beauty rather of style than of literature; the mere refining of the gold from which the work of art has yet to be made. Language is the dialect of life; and the most perfect language can be no more than the most perfect truth of intercourse. It must then be through the treatment of life, or the sense of life itself, that we are somehow to attain the perfect moment of beauty.

The sense of life! In what meaning are these words to be taken? Not the completest sense of all, because the essence of life is in personal responsibility to a situation, and this is exactly what in our experience of literature disappears. First of all, then, before asking how the moment of beauty is to be attained, we must see how it is psychologically possible to have a sense of life that is yet purged of the will to live.

All experience of life is a complication of ideas, emotions, and attitudes or impulses to action in varying proportions. The sentiment of reality is constituted by our tendency to interfere, to "take a hand." Sometimes the stage of our consciousness is so fully occupied by the images of others that our own reaction is less vivid. Finally, all conditions and possibilities of reaction may be so minimized that the only attitude possible is our acceptance or rejection of a world in which such things can be. What does it "matter" to me whether or not "the old, unhappy, far-off things" really happened? The worlds of the Borgias, of Don Juan, and of the Russian war stand on the same level of reality. Aucassin and Nicolette are as near to me as Abelard and Heloise. For in relation to these persons my impulse is NIL. I submit to them, I cannot change or help them; and because I have no impulse to interfere, they are not vividly real to me. And, in general, in so far as I am led to contemplate or to dwell on anything in idea, in so far does my personal attitude tend to parallel this impersonal one toward real persons temporally or geographically out of reach.

Now in literature all conditions tend to the enormous preponderance of the ideal element in experience. My mind in reading is completely filled with ideas of the appearance, ways, manners, and situation of the people concerned. I leave them a clear field. My emotions are enlisted only as the inevitable fringe of association belonging to vivid ideas— the ideas of their emotions. So far as all the possibilities of understanding are fulfilled for me, so far as I am in possession of all the conditions, so far do I "realize" the characters, but realize them as ideas tinged with feeling.

Here there will be asseverations to the contrary. What! feel no real emotion over Little Nell, or Colonel Newcome? no emotion in that great scene of passion and despair, the parting of Richard Feverel and Lucy,—a scene which none can read save with tight throat and burning eyes! Even so. It is not real emotion. You have the vivid ideas, so vivid that a fringe of emotional association accompanies them, as you might shudder remembering a bad dream. But the real emotion arises only from the real impulse, the real responsibility.

The sense of life that literature gives might be described as life in its aspect as idea. That this fact is the cause of the peace and painlessness of literature—since it is by his actions, as Aristotle says, that man is happy or the reverse— need not concern us here. For the beauty of literature, and our joy in it, lie not primarily in its lack of power to hurt us. The point is that literature gives none the less truly a sense of life because it happens to be one extreme aspect of life. The literary way is only one of the ways in which life can be met.

To give the sense of life perfectly—to create the illusion of life—is this, then, the beauty of literature? But we are seeking for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. Why should the perfect illusion of life give this, any more than life itself does? So the "vision" of a picture might be intensely clear, and yet the picture itself unbeautiful. Such a complete "sense of life," such clear "vision," would show the artist's mastery of technique, but not his power to create beauty. In the art of literature, as in the art of painting, the normal function is but the first condition, the state of perfection is the end at which to aim.

It is just this distinction that we can properly make between the characteristic or typical in the sense of differentiated, and the great or excellent in literature. In the theory of some writers, perfect fidelity to the type is the only originality. To paint the Russian peasant or the French bourgeois as he is, to catch the exact shade of exquisite soullessness in Oriental loves, to reproduce the Berserker rage or the dull horror of battle, is indeed to give the perfect sense of life. But the perfect, or the complete, sense of life is not the moment of perfect life.