Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

But we are as yet far from exhausting the psychological significance of pleasure in style when we trace it to a reflex from either decrease or increase of attentive effort. The pleasure we have so far considered is naïve and direct; it is from literary art rather than in or at literary art as such. The child and the most ordinary reader derive from books a simple and natural pleasure which they do not reflect upon, and do not in any wise conceive the ways and means by which the effect is produced. Indeed, in the presence of the most lucid and perfect art these readers, like Partridge at the play, take everything as a matter of course, as just the way they would themselves express it. The dilettante alone tastes the pleasure in style as such; as an art, an adaptation of means to ends, he alone appreciates the delicate adjustment of expression to thought, the choice diction, the deft management of word and phrase. The quality of this technical pleasure in style is exemplified in its highest form in this note of a great artist-critic, Shelley, appended to his fine translation of the opening chorus in “Faust”:—

"Such is a literal translation of this astonishing chorus; it is impossible to represent in another language the melody of the versification; even the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation, and its reader is surprised to find a caput mortuum."

The psychological nature of this pleasure in style is obviously quite distinct from the direct pleasures from reading which have been previously discussed. Here is pleasure in literary art, not for what it brings, but for its own sake. The distinction between the pleasure the average tourist takes in travelling swiftly and smoothly in a de luxe train, and that taken by the professional engineer inspecting the high-speed locomotive, is analogous in quantity and quality to the distinctive pleasures of critical and uncritical appreciation of fine art. But we have as yet only cleared the ground toward ascertaining the psychological rationale of literary style. We have marked only general causes of literary pleasure, we have noticed in this pleasure only those elements which flow from the psychological and physiological basis of all pleasure as reflex of functioning. That we admire and take pleasure in nice adjustment of means to ends is also a general law of pleasure with all who act teleologically, and are capable of appreciating actions of this kind. But is there not a specific quality in the æsthetic pleasure from or in literary art which has not yet been accounted for? Certainly the common expression, “more forcible than elegant,” as applied to spoken or written language, denotes that for the popular consciousness style is somewhat more than and different from mere force and consequent ease and largeness of apprehension. We hear a very loud sound with greater ease than smaller sounds, there is economy of attention, yet this does not bestow æsthetic quality on the great sound. At the renderings of the finest music we are often called on to strain the ear, and the mental receptiveness as a whole to the utmost, in order to hear, note, and appreciate the delicate effects. So in literary art it is not that which speaks most loudly and strongly to the mind that thereby becomes the best style. In fact, the most forcible method of expression is often, as is generally acknowledged, slang, which is debarred from style. Literary style seems, then, more than a mental labour-saving machine. As a utilitarian device it certainly does save mental exertion, and gives rapidity, accuracy, and facility to psychic function. Like grammar, a mechanic rhetoric is useful, and we receive a pleasure from its use as from any other mechanism of man’s industry; and further, we may take a certain pride and pleasure in its consciously recognised effectiveness. However, we have not yet reached style in the higher sense, which may be clear and forcible, but must be dignified, graceful, and beautiful. For purposes of business, for conventional communication, for science, for philosophy, language fulfils its end in stating accurately, clearly, and forcibly; but style as literary art is more than instrument to intelligibility, it has an independent office of its own. Language in the lower service as a medium of communication is a lens which cannot be too transparent; but in the higher service to fine art, language is rather a mosaic window of stained glass which both absorbs and transmits light, which both conceals and reveals, which we look at as well as through. In literary art or style, language has a value of beauty for itself alone, as well as a value of use as a means of communication.

But the root of style is in emotion; it is as expression of emotion, and in the main of one kind of emotion, that language rises to style. All emotions influence language expression, and any one may, under certain conditions, lead towards literary art; there is an eloquence of wrath and of fear, of hate and of love, and these emotions may induce artistic creativeness in written language; but the main impulse to art is in the feeling for beauty per se. This is a certain mode of emotional delight which every one who has felt it knows at once in its quality as quite distinct as a psychic mode. How literary style rises and falls with æsthetic emotion might be exemplified by a wide range of quotations, but an example or two must suffice. This, from one of Shelley’s letters, will, I trust, illustrate the point:—

“My dear P——, I wrote to you the day before our departure from Naples. We came by slow journeys, with our own horses, to Rome, resting one day at Mola di Gaeta, at the inn called Villa di Cicerone—from being built on the ruins of his villa, whose immense substructions overhang the sea, and are scattered among the orange groves. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene from the terraces of the inn. On one side precipitous mountains whose bases slope into an inclined plane of olive and orange copses, the latter forming, as it were, an emerald sky of leaves, starred with innumerable globes of their ripening fruit, whose rich splendour contrasted with the deep green foliage; on the other the sea, bounded on one side by the antique town of Gaeta, and the other by what appears to be an island, the promontory of Circe. From Gaeta to Terracina the whole scenery is of the most sublime character. At Terracina precipitous conical crags of immense height shoot into the sky and overhang the sea. At Albano we arrived again in sight of Rome. Arches after arches in unending lines stretching across the uninhabited wilderness, the blue defined line of the mountains seen between them, masses of nameless ruin standing like rocks out of the plain, and the plain itself, with its billowy and unequal surface, announced the neighbourhood of Rome. And what shall I say to you of Rome? If I speak of the inanimate ruins, the rude stones piled upon stones which are the sepulchres of the fame of those who once arrayed them with the beauty which has faded, will you believe me insensible to the vital, the almost breathing creations of genius yet subsisting in their perfection?”

This letter opens with language as method of conventional commonplace communication. The second and third sentences are barely tinged by æsthetic emotion, as in “immense substructions” and “lovelier”; but it is not till the fourth sentence that style fairly begins. Then it rapidly falls away in the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences, to arise again with a new wave of æsthetic emotion, which progresses through the remainder of the quotation. The culminating points of the æsthetic emotion are precisely the culminating points of style, namely, in the phrases, “an emerald sky of leaves, starred with innumerable globes of their ripening fruit,” and in “sepulchres of the fame of those who once arrayed them with the beauty which has faded.” What constitutes the peculiar attractiveness of these expressions is this, that they are rich in æsthetic feeling, and communicate it to us. We are by the power of style sharers in high delights. In the first case we are awakened to a visualizing, to a sensuous beauty, though compounded with other elements, through metaphor; and in the second case the emotion is a complex of sensuous and spiritual elements.

Take also the verses from Shelley already quoted. Mr. Spencer, in commenting on these lines, has correctly pitched upon the word “shepherded” as the culminating point; but when he intimates that the beauty and pleasing effect is due to the “distinctness with which it calls up the feature of the scene, bringing the mind by a bound to the desired conception,” we must dissent. This purely utilitarian explanation fails to recognise that poetic metaphor is confusing—here two classes of objects, clouds and sheep—and misleading, except to the poetic mind. A writer who was aiming purely at clearness and correctness of imaging, as a popular scientific writer, might mention the clouds as like patches of white wool; but he would not bring in the extraneous ideas of sheep and shepherd. If Mr. Spencer were trying to give us a vivid idea of clouds, he would surely not speak in this purely poetic fashion. It is a mode of fancy and emotion which the poet is indulging when he writes these lines, and not an intellectual impulse to clarify and illustrate. If Mr. Spencer receives them in this latter spirit, he misses their psychic content and explanation. Poetry is only intelligible to the poetic, and the German pedant who emended “Celia, drink to me only with thine eyes,” to “Celia, wink to me only with thine eyes,” was certainly economizing attention and rendering conception easy, but at the expense of poetic beauty. The source of the pleasure we take in poetic style—the highest and purest form of literary art—is evidently not for its intelligibility, at least primarily, but its æsthetic quality, an expression of a peculiar emotional attitude toward objects.

To illustrate this psychological distinction between the sense of beauty as inherent in style, and style as mere force and clearness, I instance further only this sentence from Mr. W. D. Howell’s Italian sketches, describing a side wheel steamer in motion: “The wheel of the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable, and making vain efforts at expectoration.” This is the ne plus ultra of a pseudo literary style, of affected and strained literary art. An ugly metaphor, forcible and clear enough, is relentlessly pursued to its ugliest conclusion. Here is style in pin feathers, and we are glad to remember that it was writ in callow youth. It brings “the mind by a bound to the desired conception,” but this does not sanction it as fine art, for it is utterly without taste and beauty.

I believe then from considering the previous examples—and they might be indefinitely extended—that the main function of literary art is not intelligibility, and that pleasure in style in its specific quality does not arise out of economy of attention, but it is a direct communication of pleasant æsthetic emotion artistically conveyed. Intelligibility is a regulative by-law of art, but it is neither standard nor goal. Literary art is then a compromise between intellectual and emotional motives, between sense and sensibility. The natural choice and order of words for easiest apprehension is rarely the artistic order, as every littérateur knows full well. It is, for example, simplest and clearest to repeat the best and exact word, yet the literary artist avoids, and rightly, the repetition of words in the same sentence or paragraph. Thus also, while, as Mr. Spencer suggests, rhythm and euphony may often help sense, yet I believe they as often distract from it. We often tend to turn over in a very senseless way words and verses which please the ear. As language is both an organ for meaning and for beauty, literary art, like architectural, is always a compromise between utility and beauty, that is, neither literature nor architecture are pure and perfectly independent arts. However, it is possible that poetic license may, as has already been done to some extent in English, ultimately develop a pure poetic language, entirely distinct from the utilitarian product, and bound by none of its practical rules; then and then only will literature become a pure art.

Further, that literary art does not always imply clearness and consequent economy of attention is evident when we reflect that the nature of emotion is to disturb the mind, and hence also the language expression. Incoherence, dimness, darkness, as qualities of æsthetic emotion, render literary art correspondingly broken and obscure. The weird, fantastic, and mysterious issues in style which is far from being easily intelligible. In the dreamy poetry of the Orient all is hazy and evanescent, and the mind strives in vain for clear impressions, yet here is the peculiar charm of style. Among Occidentals William Blake, with his childish incoherence, and Robert Browning, with his harsh abruptness, have a certain obscurity, but both are great stylists and great poets.