Style then is at bottom something quite distinct from either ease or difficulty of apprehension. It is founded, not on apprehension at all, but on emotional receptiveness. Hence very active and intellectual natures seem ever debarred from really entering the realms of art, because they ever fail to appreciate that the function of art is not practical, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, but emotional. The man of business, of politics, of science, of thought, cannot give himself up without questioning to be thrilled and suffused by the unanalyzable charm of mere beauty. Such natures seem incapable of receiving, they must get and acquire, and so they miss all that art to which the only open sesame is a quiet inattention and a wise passiveness. The kingdom of art is not taken by violence, and the violent do not take it by mere intellectual force.
As to the origin and nature of the feeling for beauty in style as for beauty in general, the reason may be sought in survivals of primitive pleasures. Thus the expression, before quoted, “starred with innumerable globes of their ripening fruit,” aside from the pleasure in sonorous quality and artistic construction, pleases mainly as awakening the feeling for natural beauty. But what is the psychological explanation for this æsthetic emotion in presence of tree, fruit, flower, sky, and all landscape features. It may largely be a revival of feelings felt long since by our arboreal and forest-haunting ancestors, “combinations of states which were organized in the race, during barbarous times, when its pleasurable activities were chiefly among the woods and waters” (Spencer, Psychology, Sect. 214). In the woods and by the streams there tends to revive the long outgrown physical emotion; the old savage feelings of delight and excitement in the chase come back to the civilized man, and in stealthy approach of game and skilful slaying the modern man re-experiences far distant ancestral joys. Now literary art by skilfully setting forth scenes of savage life may renew, the old survival feelings to a certain degree of illusive life. This is done to a large extent by pastoral poetry, mythic story, legend and fairy tale, whereby we drop back into a very old and simple mode of enjoyable mental life. The basis of primitive psychosis is in the particular concrete and animate, and literary art, especially in its highest manifestation, poetry, as becoming simple, sensuous, and impassioned, has a foundation in survival tendencies. Through literature mankind renews its youth. Similarly we may suppose that if in the future psychic evolution of the race the present mode of thinking in general and abstract terms should be succeeded by some new and higher phase, then the artificial stimulating the revival of this outgrown abstract phase would constitute a source of pleasure and might be achieved through a style. As a means toward revivals literary style is a backward moving spirit in sharp contrast to science, which, as generalizing and depersonifying, is the forward moving process.
However, we have sharply to distinguish between what is given in a survival state and that which accompanies it. Primitive realization is always single and naïve, but when it comes up in a survival it is generally consciously contrasted with accustomed modes by consciousness, and there arises a reflective pleasure of contrast which is not contained in the survival itself, but of which the survival is merely a condition. Further, our realization of the outgrown psychic elements is very generally dramatic. We take self-conscious pleasure in investigating, assuming, and re-enacting past psychic phases. Even when a survival state arises spontaneously and naturally, it holds consciousness at best in its original status for a moment only, for self-consciousness quickly occurs and brings in a variety of secondary emotions. However attained, the obsolescent type of consciousness does not stand in its simple original force, but most often there is more or less make-believe, some sense of its artificial and unreal nature: we do not become children by playing at being children. Children and savages are in the animistic psychic stage, but the poetic interpretation of nature by adult man is plainly far more than mere revival of this stage, it is dramatic self-conscious realization. Original animism is often painful; the savage fears his gods and the child dreads ghosts; but myths and ghost stories are sources of amusement to us, and the twinge of fear which comes up as survival loses its real force and is dramatically realized and enjoyed. Literary art is a dramatic induction into the past rather than incentive to mere revival; and it makes us to pleasurably renew alike the outgrown pains and pleasures. We certainly should go far astray if we should consider style as effectual mainly by its exciting to revival of ancestral experiences. What is recurrent is but a small element compared to what is concurrent.
We must note the particular case of landscape beauty. Shelley’s description of the orange tree laden with fruit excites in us the feeling of pleasure in the beauty of nature, a feeling which is declared by some to be merely the reminiscent revived feelings which our distant progenitors felt in the presence of natural forms and forces. But what was the emotion our remote progenitor felt at sight of a well-fruited orange tree? Did he feel moved as Shelley was and as we through Shelley are? and is our emotion but a faint survival of that which welled up in him at viewing the mass of green and gold, or has it any relation thereto? The civilized traveller in wild regions is often charmed by the beauty of the scenery which the savage natives do not in the least appreciate. But the revival feelings which come over him must be identical with the feelings of his unæsthetic companions who are totally insensible to natural beauty. The reversal tendency can give to the traveller only an animal pleasure in viewing an orange tree as satisfying to the taste and stomach; a fine, bright day can only suggest the pleasure of a sluggish basking. Goethe rejoiced that, though the incidental pains of æsthetic sensitivity were great, yet he could see in a tree shedding its leaves more than the approach of winter. Bare revival then cannot in itself constitute æsthetic pleasure or explain it. A savage race transferred to a civilized land for a few generations and then returned to their native haunts have acute pleasures of revival, but these are not of the æsthetic quality. An outcropping survival tendency may serve as itself an object for emotion and æsthetic emotion to the mind experiencing it, but thereby the survival is like any other object, physical or psychical, which excites æsthetic sensibility, and it no more explains the emotion for beauty than any other object.
It is evident thus far that the psychological basis of stylistic effect is very complex, and in this essay we certainly lay no claim to making an exhaustive enumeration of its factors. However, we have still to consider one more element, and perhaps, at least for cultivated minds, the most important psychic element of literary art. Read now the following extract, and analyze the impression it makes:—
“The natural thirst that ne’er is satisfied
Excepting with the water for whose grace
The woman of Samaria besought,
Put me in travail, and haste goaded me
Along the encumbered path behind my Leader,