The Adjective Beautiful
THIS little book, like the great branch of mental science to which it
is an introduction, makes no attempt to "form the taste" of the public
and still less to direct the doings of the artist. It deals not with
ought but with is, leaving to Criticism the inference from the
latter to the former. It does not pretend to tell how things can be
made beautiful or even how we can recognise that things are
beautif
to analyse and account for Beauty's existence and enjoyment. More
strictly speaking, it analyses and accounts for Beauty not inasmuch
as existing in certain objects and processes, but rather as calling
forth (and being called forth by) a particular group of mental
activities and habits. It does not ask: What are the peculiarities of the
things (and the proceedings) which we call Beautiful? but: What
are the peculiarities of our thinking and feeling when in the presence
of a thing to which we apply this adjective? The study of single
beautiful things, and even more, the comparison of various
categories thereof, is indeed one-half of all scientific aesthetics, but
only inasmuch as it adds to our knowledge of the particular mental
activities which such "Beautiful" (and vice versa "Ugly") things
elicit in us. For it is on the nature of this active response on our own
part that depends the application of those terms Beautiful and
Ugly in every single instance; and indeed their application in any
instances whatsoever, their very existence in the human vocabulary.
In accordance with this programme I shall not start with a formal
definition of the word Beautiful, but ask: on what sort of
occasions we make use of it. Evidently, on occasions when we feel
satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction, satisfaction meaning
willingness either to prolong or to repeat the particular experience
which has called forth that word; and meaning also that if it comes
to a choice between two or several experiences, we prefer the
experience thus marked by the word Beautiful. Beautiful, we may
therefore formulate, implies on our part an attitude of satisfaction
and preference. But there are other words which imply that much;
first and foremost the words, in reality synonyms, USEFUL and
GOOD. I call these synonyms because good always implies
good for, or good in, that is to say fitness for a purpose, even
though that purpose may be masked under conforming to a
standard or obeying a commandment, since the standard or
commandment represents not the caprice of a community, a race or a
divinity, but some (real or imaginary) utility of a less immediate
kind. So much for the meaning of good when implying standards
and commandments; ninety-nine times out of a hundred there is,
however, no such implication, and good means nothing more than
satisfactory in the way of use and advantage. Thus a good road
is a road we prefer because it takes us to our destination quickly and
easily. A good speech is one we prefer because it succeeds in
explaining or persuading. And a good character (good friend,
father, husband, citizen) is one that gives satisfaction by the
fulfilment of moral obligations.
But note the difference when we come to Beautiful. A beautiful
road is one we prefer because it affords views we like to look at; its
being devious and inconvenient will not prevent its being
beautiful. A beautiful speech is one we like to hear or
remember, although it may convince or persuade neither us nor
anybody. A beautiful character is one we like to think about but
which may never practically help anyone, if for instance, it exists
not in real life but in a novel. Thus the adjective Beautiful implies
an attitude of preference, but not an attitude of present or future
turning to our purposes. There is even a significant lack of
symmetry in the words employed (at all events in English, French
and German) to distinguish what we like from what we dislike in the
way of weather. For weather which makes us uncomfortable and
hampers our comings and goings by rain, wind or mud, is described
as bad; while the opposite kind of weather is called beautiful,
fine, or fair, as if the greater comfort, convenience, usefulness of
such days were forgotten in the lively satisfaction afforded to our
mere contemplation.
Our mere contemplation! Here we have struck upon the main
difference between our attitude when we use the word good or
useful, and when we use the word beautiful. And we can add to
our partial formula "beautiful implies satisfaction and preference"--the
distinguishing predicate--"of a contemplative kind." This
general statement will be confirmed by an everyday anomaly in our
use of the word beautiful; and the examination of this seeming
exception will not only exemplify what I have said about our
attitude when employing that word, but add to this information the
name of the emotion corresponding with that attitude: the emotion
of admiration. For the selfsame object or proceeding may
sometimes be called good and sometimes beautiful, according
as the mental attitude is practical or contemplative. While we
admonish the traveller to take a certain road because he will find it
good, we may hear that same road described by an enthusiastic
coachman as beautiful, anglice fine or splendid, because there
is no question of immediate use, and the road's qualities are merely
being contemplated with admiration. Similarly, we have all of us
heard an engineer apply to a piece of machinery, and even a surgeon
to an operation, the apparently far-fetched adjective Beautiful, or
one of the various equivalents, fine, splendid, glorious (even
occasionally jolly!) by which Englishmen express their
admiration. The change of word represents a change of attitude. The
engineer is no longer bent upon using the machine, nor the surgeon
estimating the advantages of the operation. Each of these highly
practical persons has switched off his practicality, if but for an
imperceptible fraction of time and in the very middle of a practical
estimation or even of practice itself. The machine or operation, the
skill, the inventiveness, the fitness for its purposes, are being
considered apart from action, and advantage, means and time,
to-day or yesterday; platonically we may call it from the first great
teacher of aesthetics. They are being, in one word, contemplated
with admiration. And admiration is the rough and ready name for
the mood, however transient, for the emotion, however faint,
wherewith we greet whatever makes us contemplate, because
contemplation happens to give satisfaction. The satisfaction may be
a mere skeleton of the "I'd rather than not" description; or it may be
a massive alteration in our being, radiating far beyond the present,
evoking from the past similar conditions to corroborate it; storing
itself up for the future; penetrating, like the joy of a fine day, into
our animal spirits, altering pulse, breath, gait, glance and demeanour;
and transfiguring our whole momentary outlook on life. But,
superficial or overwhelming, this hind of satisfaction connected
with, the word Beautiful is always of the Contemplative order.
And upon the fact we have thus formulated depend, as we shall see,
most of the other facts and formulae of our subject.
This essentially unpractical attitude accompanying the use of the
word Beautiful has led metaphysical aestheticians to two famous,
and I think, quite misleading theories. The first of these defines
aesthetic appreciation as disinterested interest, gratuitously
identifying self-interest with the practical pursuit of advantages we
have not yet got; and overlooking the fact that such appreciation
implies enjoyment and is so far the very reverse of disinterested.
The second philosophical theory (originally Schiller's, and revived
by Herbert Spencer) takes advantage of the non-practical attitude
connected with the word Beautiful to define art and its enjoyment
as a kind of play. Now although leisure and freedom from cares
are necessary both for play and for aesthetic appreciation, the latter
differs essentially from the former by its contemplative nature. For
although it may be possible to watch other people playing football
or chess or bridge in a purely contemplative spirit and with the
deepest admiration, even as the engineer or surgeon may
contemplate the perfections of a machine or an operation, yet the
concentration on the aim and the next moves constitutes on the part
of the players themselves an eminently practical state of mind,
one diametrically opposed to contemplation, as I hope to make
evident in the next section.
More
-
Aesthetic Irradiation And Purification
THE storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion explain yet another fact, with which indeed I began this little book: namely that the word Beautiful has been extended from whatever is satisfactory in our contemplation of shapes, to a great number of c... Aesthetic Responsiveness
OUR examination has thus proceeded from aesthetic contemplation to the work of Art, which seeks to secure and satisfy it while furthering some of life's various other claims. We must now go back to aesthetic contemplation and find out how the behold... Aspects Versus Things
HAVING settled upon a particular point of view as the one he liked best, he remained there in contemplation of the aspect it afforded him. Had he descended another twenty minutes, or looked through powerful glasses, he would have seen the plain belo... Attention To Shapes
TO explain how art in general, and any art in particular, succeeds in reconciling these contradictory demands, I must remind the Reader of what I said (p. 93) about the satisfactory or unsatisfactory possibilities of shapes having begun to be notice... Conclusion Evolutional
SOME of my Readers, not satisfied by the answer implicit in the last chapter and indeed in the whole of this little book, may ask a final question concerning our subject. Not: What is the use of Art? since, as we have seen, Art has many and various ... Contemplative Satisfaction
WE have thus defined the word Beautiful as implying an attitude of contemplative satisfaction, marked by a feeling, sometimes amounting to an emotion, of admiration; and so far contrasted it with the practical attitude implied by the word good. But ... Elements Of Shape
LET us now examine some of these relations, not in the genealogical or hierarchic order assigned to them by experimental psychology, but in so far as they constitute the elements of shape, and more especially as they illustrate the general principle... Empathy
THE mountain rises. What do we mean when we employ this form of words? Some mountains, we are told, have originated in an upheaval. But even if this particular mountain did, we never saw it and geologists are still disputing about HOW and WHETHER. S... Facility And Difficulty Of Grasping
OF this we get further proof when we proceed to another and less elementary relationship implied in the perception of shape: the relation of Whole and Parts. In dealing with the ground upon which we perceive our red and black patches to be extend... From The Shape To The Thing
SUCH are the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, impersonal and unpractical, we can receive, or in reality, give ourselves, in the contemplation of shape. But life has little leisure for contemplation; it demands recognition, inference and readin... From The Thing To The Shape
THE necessities of analysis and exposition have led us from the Shape to the Thing, from aesthetic contemplation to discursive and practical thinking. But, as the foregoing chapter itself suggests, the real order of precedence, both for the individu... Information About Things
AMONG the facts which Painting is set to tell us about things, the most important, after cubic existence, is Locomotion. Indeed in the development of the race as well as in that of the individual, pictorial attention to locomotion seems to precede a... Perception Of Relations
WHY should this be the case? Briefly, because colours (and sounds) as such are forced upon us by external stimulation of our organs of sight and hearing, neither more nor less than various temperatures, textures, tastes and smells are forced upon us... Sensations
IN the contemplation of the Aspect before him, what gave that aesthetic man the most immediate and undoubted pleasure was its colour, or, more correctly speaking, its colours. Psycho-Physiologists have not yet told us why colours, taken singly and a... Subject And Object
BUT before proceeding to this additional factor in shape-perception, namely that of Empathic Interpretation, I require to forestall an objection which my Reader has doubtless been making throughout my last chapters; more particularly that in clearin... The Adjective Beautiful
THIS little book, like the great branch of mental science to which it is an introduction, makes no attempt to "form the taste" of the public and still less to direct the doings of the artist. It deals not with ought but with is, leaving to Critici... The Aims Of Art
WE have thus at last got to Art, which the Reader may have expected to be dealt with at the outset of a primer on the Beautiful. Why this could not be the case, will be more and more apparent in my remaining chapters. And, in order to make those c... The Character Of Shapes
IN my example of the Rising Mountain, I have been speaking as if Empathy invested the shapes we look at with only one mode of activity at a time. This, which I have assumed for the simplicity of exposition, is undoubtedly true in the case either of ... The Co-operation Of Things And Shapes
DURING the Middle Ages and up to recent times the chief task of painting has been, ostensibly, the telling and re-telling of the same Scripture stories; and, incidentally, the telling them with the addition of constantly new items of information abo... The Movement Of Lines
ANY tendency to Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need for practical thinking. We are made to think in the most summary fashion from one to another of those grouped possibilities, past, present and future, which we call a Thing; and in suc... The Storage And Transfer Of Emotion
IN dealing with familiarity as a multiplying factor of aesthetic appreciation, I have laid stress on its effect in facilitating the perception and the empathic interpretation of shapes. But repetition directly affects the emotion which may result fr...