[48] The objection commonly made to the psychological analyses which resolve Beauty into association, is that they confound the Beautiful with the merely agreeable. This objection is urged, for example, by Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria. He admits, with every one else, that things not in themselves agreeable, are often made agreeable by association; that is, the pleasantness which belongs to the ideas with which they are associated, adheres to themselves: but this cannot, it is asserted, be the cause of their producing the particular emotion to which we attach the name of Beauty; because, as no feeling of beauty belongs to the ideas that are supposed to generate the emotion, no such feeling can be transferred from them to what they are associated with.
Any one who has studied the Analysis up to this point, is aware of the inconclusiveness of this last argument. That a complex feeling generated out of a number of single ones, should be as unlike to any of those from which it is generated, as the sensation of white is unlike the sensations of the seven prismatic colours, is no unexampled or rare fact in our sensitive nature.
But it will also, I think, be found, in the case of our feelings of Beauty, and still more, of Sublimity, that the theory which refers their origin mainly to association, is not only not contradictory to facts, but is not even paradoxical. For if our perceptions of beauty and sublimity are of a more imposing character than the feelings ordinarily excited in us by the contemplation of objects, it will be found that the associations which form those impressions are themselves of a peculiarly imposing nature. This is apparent even from Alison; and if the Author of the Analysis had written later, he might have referred to a deeper thinker than Alison, and a more valuable because an unconscious witness to the truth of the Association theory. Mr. Ruskin, with profounder and more thoughtful views respecting the beauties both of Nature and of Art than any 253 psychologist I could name, undertakes, in the second volume of “Modern Painters,” to investigate the conditions of Beauty. The result he brings out is, that every thing which gives us the emotion of the Beautiful, is expressive and emblematic of one or other of certain lofty or lovely ideas, which are, in his apprehension, embodied in the universe, and correspond to the various perfections of its Creator. He holds these ideas to be, Infinity, Unity, Repose, Symmetry, Purity, Moderation, and Adaptation to Ends. And he is, in my judgment, to a very considerable degree successful in making out his case. Mr. Ruskin, it is true, never thinks of inferring that our feelings of Beauty are the actual consequence of our having those elevating or cheering ideas recalled to us through manifold channels of association. He deems the emotion to be arbitrarily attached to these ideas by a pre-established harmony. But the evidence which he adduces goes far to prove the other point. If he succeeds, as I think he does, in showing that the things which excite the emotions of beauty or sublimity are always things which have a natural association with certain highly impressive and affecting ideas (whether the catalogue which he has made of those ideas is correct and complete or not), we need no other mode of accounting for the peculiar character of the emotions, than by the actual, though vague and confused, recal of the ideas. It cannot be deemed surprising that a state of consciousness made up of reminiscences of such ideas as Mr. Ruskin specifies, and of the grand and interesting objects and thoughts connected with ideas like those, must be of a more elevated character, and must stir our nature to a greater depth, than those associations of commonplace and every-day pleasures, which often combine with them as parts of the mass of pleasurable feeling set up in us by the objects of Nature and Art. In a windy country, a screen of trees so placed as to be a barrier against the prevailing winds, excites ideas of warmth, comfort, and shelter, which belong to the “agreeable,” as distinguished by Coleridge from the Beautiful; and these enter largely into the pleasurable feeling with which we contemplate the trees, without contributing to give 254 them the peculiar character distinctive of æsthetic feelings. But besides these there are other elements constituting the beauty, properly speaking, of the trees, which appeal to other, and what we are accustomed, not without meaning, to call higher, parts of our nature; which give a stronger stimulus and a deeper delight to the imagination, because the ideas they call up are such as in themselves act on the imagination with greater force.
As is observed by the author of the Analysis, the exposition in detail of the associations which enter into our various feelings of the sublime and beautiful, would require the examination of the subject on a scale not suited to the character nor proportioned to the dimensions of this Treatise. Of all our feelings, our acquired pleasures and pains, especially our pleasures, are the most complex; resulting from the whole of our nature and of our past lives, and involving, consequently, a greater multitude and variety of associations than almost any other phenomena of the mind. And among our various pleasures, the æsthetic are without doubt the most complex. It may also be remarked, and is a considerable confirmation of the association theory, that the feelings of beauty or sublimity with which different people are affected by the contemplation of the same object, are evidently as different, as the pleasurable associations of different persons with the same object are likely to be. But there are some ingredients which are universally, or almost universally, present, when the emotions have their characteristic peculiarity; and to which they seem to be mainly indebted for the extraordinary power with which they act on the minds which have the greatest susceptibility to them. These ingredients are probably more numerous and various than is commonly suspected; but some of the most important and powerful of them are undoubtedly pointed to, and illustrated with great force, in the discussion which I have mentioned, by Mr. Ruskin; to whose work I willingly refer the psychological student, as a copious source of at least far-reaching suggestions, and often of much more.
Supposing that all Beauty had been successfully analysed 255 into a lively suggestion of one or more of the ideas to which it is referred by Mr. Ruskin, the question would still remain for psychologists, why the suggestion of those ideas is so impressive and so delightful. But this question may, in general, be answered with little difficulty. It is no mystery, for example, why anything which suggests vividly the idea of infinity, that is, of magnitude or power without limit, acquires an otherwise strange impressiveness to the feelings and imagination. The remaining ideas in Mr. Ruskin’s list (at least if we except those which, like Moderation, are chiefly ancillary to the others, by excluding what would jar with their effect) all represent to us some valuable or delightful attribute, in a completeness and perfection of which our experience presents us with no example, and which therefore stimulates the active power of the imagination to rise above known reality, into a more attractive or a more majestic world. This does not happen with what we call our lower pleasures. To them there is a fixed limit at which they stop: or if, in any particular case, they do acquire, by association, a power of stirring up ideas greater than themselves, and stimulate the imagination to enlarge its conceptions to the dimensions of those ideas, we then feel that the lower pleasure has, exceptionally, risen into the region of the æsthetic, and has superadded to itself an element of pleasure of a character and quality not belonging to its own nature.—Ed.