The Psychology of Beauty

by Ethel Puffer Howes

The phenomenon of our aesthetic reaction on the so-called painful experiences of the drama has then been discussed at length and accounted for. There is an undoubted emotional experience of great intensity; and yet that emotion turns out to be not the emotion IN the drama, but rather the emotion FROM the drama,—a unique independent emotion of tension, otherwise a form of the characteristic aesthetic emotion with which we have been before engaged. The playwright who scornfully rejects the spectator supposed to be aesthetic, ideally contemplative and emotionally indifferent, is vindicated. There must be a vivid emotional effect, but it is the spectator's very own, and not a copy of the hero's emotion, because it is the product of the essential form of the drama itself, the confrontation of forces.

Secondly, that confrontation of forces has revealed itself as indeed essential. This is not the time-honored view of tragedy as collision, which has been arrived at simply by observing that great tragic dramas are mostly collisions, making the drama a picture thereof, but not explaining why it must be such. I have tried, on the contrary, to show that confrontation is a necessary product of the bare form of dramatic representation,—two people face to face. But if this bare form or scheme of confrontation is understood and interpreted as profoundly as possible, then all the other characteristics of the tragic drama are seen to flow from it; and thus for the first time to be really explained by being accounted for. The tragic drama not only is, but must be, collision, because confrontation, understood as richly as possible, must be collision. It must be "inevitable," and it must have movement, because only so is the confrontation reinforced.

In brief, others have said that the drama, or tragedy, is conflict, the perfect opposition of two forces. We should rather say that the drama is first of all picture, living representation of colloquy; as such, it is balance, confrontation; and confrontation to its ideal degree of intensity is conflict. No drama can dispense with picture; and so no drama is free from the obligation to add unto itself these other qualities also. The acting play is the play of confrontations.

VIII THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS

VIII THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS

I

THE Idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; to-day we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; and that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation. But while this view is a natural development, it is not of necessity unassailable; and it is open to question whether the addition of an independent element of expression to the older definition of beauty can be justified by its consequences for art.

Such an inquiry, however, cannot stop with the relation of the deeper meanings of modern art to the conception of beauty. It must go further and find out what elements, the sensuous form or the ideas that are bound up with it, in a work of art, of the classical as well as of the idealistic type, really constitute its aesthetic value. What is it that makes the beauty of the "Venus of Milo"? Is it the pose and the modeling, or the idea of the eternal feminine that it expresses to us? What is it that makes the beauty of St. Mark's or of Giotto's tower? the relation of the lines and masses or the sacred significance of the edifices they go to form? What is it that makes the beauty of the Ninth Symphony? the perfection of the melodic sequence, or the Hymn of Joy, the message from the Infinite which they are meant to utter?

The antithesis between these two points of view is, of course, not the same as that other antithesis between "art for art's sake" and art in the light of its moral meanings and effects. What we now call romantic or expressive art can certainly be made the more fruitful in moral suggestions; but this fact bears not at all on the question of what belongs fundamentally to the nature of beauty. We know, moreover, that on this matter the camps of the formalists and the romanticists are divided. The Greeks, the lovers of formal beauty, were so alive to the moral effects of art that their theories were in danger of being quite overwhelmed by this view. On the other hand, the lovers of ideas in art, the natural enemies, as one would have thought, of art for art's sake, have been most often impatient of any consideration of its moral elements or effects. This second question, then, of art as pleasure or as moral influence can be once for all excluded from the discussion. So far as yet appears, the issue is between form and expression.

There is, perhaps, some point of common agreement from which to survey and distinguish more exactly these two diverging tendencies. Such a coign of vantage is offered by the nature of the aesthetic attitude,—for since Kant there has been among aestheticians no essential difference of opinion on this point. The aesthetic attitude, all agree, is disinterested. We care for the image or appearance of the object, for the way its form affects us, and not for the actual existence of the object itself. If I delight aesthetically in a cluster of grapes, I do not want to eat them, but only to enjoy their image, and my feeling of pleasure, as aesthetic, would not be changed if before me were only a mirage, an hallucination, or a picture. It is just the pleasure in perception that appeals to me,— therein both schools agree,—and the only matter at issue is the question of what this disinterested pleasure of perception includes. Is that pleasure bound up with the mechanisms of perception itself, or does it come from the end of the process and the ease with which it is reached,—from the IDEA, in the contemplation of which we delight?