The Psychology of Beauty

by Ethel Puffer Howes

The ingenious Bernays has said that it was all the fault of Aristotle. The last phrase of the famous definition in the "Poetics," which should relate the nature, end, and aim of tragedy, is left, in his works as we have them, probably through the suppression or loss of context, without elucidating commentary. And the writers on tragedy have ever since so striven to guess his meaning, and to make their answers square with contemporary drama, that they have given comparatively slight attention to the immediate, unbiased investigation of the phenomenon itself. Aristotle's definition is as follows:<1> "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play: in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." In what follows, he takes up and explains this definition, phrase by phrase, until the very last. What is meant by the Purgation (Katharsis) through pity and fear? It is at least what tragedy "effects," and is thus evidently the function of tragedy. But a thing is determined, constructed, judged, according to its function; the function is, so to speak, its genetic formula. With a clear view of that, the rest of the definition could conceivably have been constructed without further explanation; without it, the key to the whole fails. "Purgation of these emotions;" did it mean purification of the emotions, or purgation of the soul FROM the emotions? And what emotions? Pity and fear, or "these and suchlike," thus including all emotions that tragedy could bring to expression?

<1> S.H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 1895.

Our knowledge of the severely moral bent of the explicit art criticism of the Greeks has inclined many to accept the first interpretation; and modern interests impel in the same direction. It is natural to think of the generally elevating and softening effects of great art as a kind of moral clarifying, and the question how this should be effected just by pity and fear was not pressed. So Lessing in the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" takes Katharsis as the conversion of the emotions in general into virtuous dispositions.

Before we ask ourselves seriously how far this represents our experience of the drama, we must question its fidelity to the thought of Aristotle; and that question seems to have received a final answer in the exhaustive discussion of Bernays.<1> Without going into his arguments, suffice it to say that Aristotle, scientist and physician's son as he was, had in mind in using this striking metaphor of the Katharsis of the emotions, a perfectly definite procedure, familiar in the treatment, by exciting music, of persons overcome by the ecstasy or "enthusiasm" characteristic of certain religious rites. Bernays quotes Milton's preface to "Samson Agonistes:" "Tragedy is said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions; that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred by reading or seeing those passions well imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion; for so in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours," adding "the homoeopathic comparison shows how near he was to the correct notion." Bernays concludes that by Katharsis is denoted the "alleviating discharge" of the emotions themselves. In other words, pity and fear are bad, and it is a good thing to get rid of them in a harmless way, as it is better to be vaccinated than to have small pox.

<1> Zwei adhandlungen uber d. Aristotelische Theories d. Drama, 1880.

Now this alleviating discharge is pleasurable (meth hedones), and the pleasure seems, from allied passages, to arise not in the accomplished relief from oppression, but in the process itself. This becomes intelligible from the point of view of Aristotle's definition of pleasure as an ecstatic condition of the soul. For every emotion contains, according to Aristotle, be it ever so painful, an ecstatic degree would effect, at the same time with an alleviating discharge, a pleasure also. Pity and fear are aroused to be allayed, and to give pleasure in the arousing and the relief.

Such, approximately, is Aristotle's view of the Tragic Emotion, or Katharsis. Is it also our own? To clear the field for this inquiry, it will be well first of all to insist on a distinction which is mostly discounted in significance because taken for granted. We speak o Aristotle's Katharsis as the Tragic Emotion, forgetting that to-day Tragedy and the Tragic are no longer identical. Aristotle conceives himself to be dealing with the peculiar emotion aroused by a certain dramatic form, the name of which ha nothing to do with its content. For Tragedy is literally goat-song, perhaps from the goat-skins worn by the first performers of tragedy disguised as satyrs. Since then we have borrowed the name of that dramatic form to apply to events which have the same type or issue as in that form. In popular speech to-day the word tragic attaches itself rather to the catastrophe than to the struggle, and therefore, I cannot but think, modern discussion of "the tragic" is wrong in attempting to combine the Aristotelian and the modern shades of meaning, and to embody them both in a single definition. Aristotle is dealing with the whole effect of the dramatic representation of what we should call a tragic occurrence. It is really the theory of the dramatic experience and not of the tragic, in our sense, which occupies him. Therefore, as I say, we must not assume, with many modern critics, than an analysis of the tragic in experience will solve the problem of the Katharsis. Our "tragic event," it is true, is of the kind which dramatically treated helped to bring about this peculiar effect. But the question of Aristotle and our problem of Katharsis is the problem of the emotion aroused by the Tragic Drama. What, then, is the nature of dramatic emotion?

II

The analogy of Aristotle's conception of the emotion of tragedy with certain modern views is evident. To feel pain is to live intensely, it is said; to be absorbed in great, even though overwhelming, events is to make us realize our own pulsing life. The criticism to be made on this theory is, however, no less simple: it consists merely in denying the fact. It does not give us pleasure to have painful emotions or to see other people's sorrows, in spite of the remains of the "gorille feroce" in us, to which Taine and M. Faguet attribute this imputed pleasure. And if we feel pleasure, excitement, elevation in the representation of the tragic, it must be due to some other element in the experience than the mere self-realization involved in suffering. It is indeed our first impulse to say that the painful quality vanishes when the exciting events are known to be unreal; pity and fear are painful because too intense, and in the drama are just sufficiently moderated. The rejoinder is easy, that pity and fear are never anything, but painful down to the vanishing point. The slight pity for a child's bruised finger is not more pleasurable because less keen; while our feeling, whatever it is, for Ophelia or Gretchen, becomes more pleasurable in proportion to its intensity.

It is clear that the matter is not so simple as Aristotle's psychology would make it. Pity and fear do not in themselves produce pleasure, relief, and repose. These emotions as aroused by tragedy are either not what we know as pity and fear in real life, or the manner of their undergoing brings in an entirely new element, on which Aristotle has not touched. In some way or other the pity and fear of tragedy are not like the pity and fear of real life, and in this distinction lies the whole mystery of the dramatic Katharsis.