The Psychology of Beauty · Part III

Can we fail to trace in these simple words the shadow of all religious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madame Guyon is strung to a higher key than most of this dull and relaxed world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative worship. Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit. Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St. Teresa, the countless mystics of the Middle Age, and of the followers of Buddhism in its various shades, from the Ganges to the Charles. Two characteristics disengage themselves to view: the insistence on the unity of God--IN whom alone the Holy Virgin and the saints are seen--from a psychological point of view only; and the mind's emptiness of thought in a state of religious ecstasy. But without further analysis, we may ask, as the disciples of the mystics have always done, how this state of blissful union is to be reached. They have always been minute in their prescriptions, and it is possible to derive therefrom what may be called the technique of the mystic procedure.

"The word mystic," to quote Walter Pater, "has been derived from a Greek word which signifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly." Of such is the counsel of St. Luis de Granada, "Imitate the sportsman who hoods the falcon that it be made subservient to his rule;" and of another Spanish mystic, Pedro de Alcantara: "In meditation, let the person rouse himself from things temporal, and let him collect himself within himself .... Here let him hearken to the voice of God...as though there were no other in the world save God and himself." St. Teresa found happiness only in "shutting herself up within herself." Vocal prayer could not satisfy her, and she adopted mental prayer. The four stages of her experience--which she named "recollectedness," "quietude" (listening rather than speaking), "union" (blissful sleep with the faculties of the mind still), "ecstasy or rapture"--are but progressive steps in the sealing of the senses. The yoga of the Brahmins, which is the same as the "union" of the Cabalists, is made to depend upon the same conditions,--passivity, perseverance, solitude. The novice must arrest his breathing, and may meditate on mystic symbols alone, by way of reaching the formless, ineffable Buddha. But it is useless to heap up evidence; the inference is sufficiently clear.

The body is first brought into a state either of nervous instability or irritability by ascetic practices, or of nervous insensibility by the persistent withdrawal of all outer disturbance; and the mind is fixed upon a single object,--the one God, the God eternal, absolute, indivisible. Recalling our former scheme for the conditions of the sense of personality, we shall see that we have here the two poles of consciousness. Then, as the tension is sharpened, what happens? Under the artificial conditions of weakened nerves, of blank surroundings, the self-background drops. The feeling of transition disappears with the absence of related terms; and the remaining, the positive pole of consciousness, is an undifferentiated Unity, with which the person must feel himself one. The feeling of personality is gone with that on which it rests, and its loss is joined with an overwhelming sense of union with the One, the Absolute, God!

The object of mystic contemplation is the One indivisible. But we can also think the One as the unity of all differences, the Circle of the Universe. Those natures also which, like Amiel's, are "bedazzled with the Infinite" and thirst for "totality" attain in their reveries to the same impersonal ecstasy. Amiel writes of a "night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched at full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way. Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!" The reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted by Matthew Arnold, reveals the same emotion: "Vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abandonment." In the coincidence of outer circumstance-- the lake, the North Sea, night, the attitude of repose--may we not trace a dissolution of the self-background, similar to that of the mystic worshiper? And in the Infinite, no less than in the One, must the soul sink and melt into union with it, because within it there is no determination, no pause, and no change.

The contemplation of the One, however, is not the only type of mystic ecstasy. That intoxication of emotion which seizes upon the negro camp meeting of to-day, as it did upon the Delphic priestesses two thousand years ago, seems at first glance to have nothing in common psychologically with the blessed nothingness of Gautama and Meister Eckhart. But the loss of the feeling of personality and the sense of possession by a divine spirit are the same. How, then, is this state reached? By means, I believe, which recall the general formula for the Disappearance of self-feeling. To repeat the monosyllable OM (Brahm) ten thousand times; to circle interminably, chanting the while, about a sacred ire; to listen to the monotonous magic drum; to whirl the body about; to rock to and fro on the knees, vociferating prayers, are methods which enable the members of the respective sects in which they are practiced either to enter, as they say, into the Eternal Being, or to become informed with it through the negation of the self. The sense of personality, at any rate, is more or less completely lost, and the ecstasy takes a form more or less passionate, according as the worshiper depends on the rapidity rather than on the monotony of his excitations. Here, again, the self- background drops, inasmuch as every rhythmical movement tends to become automatic, and then unconscious. Thus what we are wont to call the inspired madness of the Delphic priestesses was less the expression of ecstasy than the means of its excitation. Perpetual motion, as well as eternal rest, may bring about the engulfment of the self in the object. The most diverse types of religious emotions, IN SO FAR AS THEY PRESENT VARIATIONS IN THE DEGREE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, are thus seen to be reducible to the same psychological basis. The circle, no less than the point, is the symbol of the One, and the "devouring unity" that lays hold on consciousness from the loss of the feeling of transition comes in the unrest of enthusiasm no less than in the blissful nothing of Nirvana.

At this point, I am sure, the reader will interpose a protest. Is, then, the mystery of self-abandonment to the highest to be shared with the meanest of fanatics? Are the rapture of Dante and the trance of the Omphalopsychi sprung from the same root? There is no occasion, however, for the revolt of sentiment because we fail to emphasize here the important differences in the emotional character and value of the states in question. What interests us is only one aspect which they have in common, the surrender of the sense of personality. That is based on formal relations of the elements of consciousness, and the explanation of its disappearance applies as well to the whirling dervish as to the converts of a revivalist preacher.

The mystic, then, need only shut his senses to the world, and contemplate the One. Subject fuses with object, and he feels himself melt into the Infinite. But each experience is not the exclusive property of the religious enthusiast. The worshiper of beauty has given evidence of the same feelings. And yet, in his aesthetic rapture, the latter dwells with deliberation on his delights, and while luxuriating in the infinite labyrinths of beauty can scarcely be described as musing on an undifferentiated Unity. So far, at least, it does not appear that our formula applies to aesthetic feeling.

Aesthetic feeling arises in the contemplation of a beautiful object. But what makes an object beautiful? To go still further back, just what, psychologically, does contemplation mean? To contemplate an object is to dwell on the idea or image of it, and to dwell upon an idea means to carry it out incipiently. We may go even further, and say it is the carrying out by virtue of which we grasp the idea. How do we think of a tall pine-tree? By sweeping our eyes up and down its length, and out to the ends of its branches; and if we are forbidden to use our eye muscles even infinitesimally, then we cannot think of the visual image. In short, we perceive an object in space by carrying out its motor suggestions; more technically expressed, by virtue of a complex of motor impulses aroused by it; more briefly, by incipiently imitating it. Contemplation is inner imitation.

Now a beautiful object is first of all a unified object; why this must be so has been considered in the preceding chapter. In it all impulses of soul and sense are bound to react upon one another, and to lead back to one another. And all the elements, which in contemplation we reproduce in the form of motor impulses, are bound to make a closed circle of these suggested energies. The symmetrical picture calls out a set of motor impulses which "balance,"--a system of energies reacting on one centre; the sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhythm and of thought, to bring us back on another to the same point; the sonata does the same in melody. In the "whirling circle" of the drama, not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before and after. Thus the unity of a work of art makes of the system of suggested energies which form the foreground of attention an impregnable, an invulnerable circle.

Not only, however, are we held in equilibrium in the object of attention; we cannot connect with it our self-background, for the will cannot act on the object of aesthetic feeling. We cannot eat the grapes of Apelles or embrace the Galatea of Pygmalion; we cannot rescue Ophelia or enlighten Juliet; and of impulse to interfere, to connect the scene with ourselves, we have none. But this is a less important factor in the situation. That the house is dark, the audience silent, and all motor impulses outside of the aesthetic circle stifled, is, too, only a superficial, and, so to speak, a negative condition. The real ground of the possibility of a momentary self- annihilation lies in the fact that all incitements to motor impulse--except those which belong to the indissoluble ring of the object itself--have been shut out by the perfection of unity to which the aesthetic object (here the drama) has been brought. The background fades; the foreground satisfies, incites no movement; and with the disappearance of the possibility of action which would connect the two, fades also that which dwells in this feeling of transition,--the sense of personality. The depth of aesthetic feeling lies not in the worthy countryman who interrupts the play with cries for justice on the villain, but in him who creates the drama again with the poet, who lives over again in himself each of the thrills of emotion passing before him, and loses himself in their web. The object is a unity or our whirling circle of impulses, as you like to phrase it. At any rate, out of that unity the soul does not return upon itself; it remains one with it in the truest sense.

The loss of the sense of personality is an integral part of the aesthetic experience; and we have seen how it is a necessary psychological effect of the unity of the object. From another point of view it may be said that the unity of the object is constituted just by the inhibition of all tendency to movement through the balance or centrality of impulses suggested by it. In other words, the balance of impulses makes us feel the object a unity. And this balance of impulses, this inhibition of movement, corresponding to unity, is what we know as aesthetic repose. Thus the conditions of aesthetic repose and of the loss of self-feeling are the same. In fact, it might be said that, within this realm, the two conceptions are identical. The true aesthetic repose is just that perfect rest in the beautiful object which is the essence of the loss of the sense of personality.

Subtler and rarer, again, than the raptures of mysticism and of beauty worship is the ecstasy of intellectual production; yet the "clean, clear joy of creation," as Kipling names it, is not less to be grouped with those precious experiences in which the self is sloughed away, and the soul at one with its content. I speak, of course, of intellectual production in full swing, in the momentum of success. The travail of soul over apparently hopeless difficulties or in the working out of indifferent details takes place not only in full self- consciousness, but in self-disgust; there we can take Carlyle to witness. But in the higher stages the fixation of truth and the appreciation of beauty are accompanied by the same extinction of the feeling of individuality. Of testimony we have enough and to spare. I need not fill these pages with confessions and anecdotes of the ecstatical state in which all great deeds of art and science are done. The question is rather to understand and explain it on the basis of the formal scheme to which we have found the religious and the aesthetic attitudes to conform.

Jean Paul says somewhere that, however laborious the completion of a great work, its conception came as a whole,--in one flash. We remember the dreams of Schiller in front of his red curtain and the resulting musikalische Stimmung,--formless, undirected, out of which his poem shaped itself; the half-somnambulic state of Goethe and his frantic haste in fixation of the vision, in which he dared not even stop to put his paper straight, but wrote over the corners quite ruthlessly. Henner once said to a painter who mourned that he had done nothing on his picture for the Salon, though he saw it before him, "What! You see your picture! Then it is done. You can paint it in an hour." If all these traditions be true, they are significant; and the necessary conditions of such composition seem to be highly analogous to those of the aesthetic emotion. We have, first of all, a lack of outward stimulation, and therefore possible disappearance of the background. How much better have most poets written in a garret than in a boudoir! Goethe's bare little room in the garden house at Weimar testifies to the severe conditions his genius found necessary. Tranquillity of the background is the condition of self-absorption, or-- and this point seems to me worth emphasizing--a closed circle of outer activities. I have never believed, for instance, in the case of the old tale of Walter Scott and the button, that it was the surprise of his loss that tied the tongue of the future author's rival. The poor head scholar had simply made for himself a transitionless experience with that twirling button, and could then sink his consciousness in its object,-- at that moment the master's questions. It is with many of us a familiar experience, that of not being able to think unless in constant motion. Translated into our psychological scheme, the efficiency of these movements would be explained thus: Given the "whirling circles,"--the background of continuous movement sensations, which finally dropped out of consciousness, and the foreground of continuous thought,--the first protected, so to speak, the second, since they were mutually exclusive, and what broke the one destroyed the other.

But to return from this digression, a background fading into nothingness, either as rest or as a closed circle of automatic movements, is the first condition of the ecstasy of mental production. The second is given in the character of its object. The object of high intellectual creation is a unity,-- a perfect whole, revealed, as Jean Paul says, in a single movement of genius. Within the enchanted circle of his creation, the thinker is absorbed, because here too all his impulses are turned to one end, in relation to which nothing else exists.

I am aware that many will see a sharp distinction here between the work of the creator or discoverer in science and the artist. They may maintain, in Schopenhauer's phrase, that the aim and end of science is just the connection of objects in the service of the will of the individual, and hence transition between the various terms is constant; while art, on the other hand, indeed isolates its object, and so drops transitions. But I think where we speak of "connection" thus, we mean the larger sweep of law. If the thinker looks beyond his special problem at all, it is, like Buddha, to "fix his eyes upon the chain of causation." The scientist of imagination sees his work under the form of eternity, as one link of that endless chain, one atom in that vortex of almighty purposes, which science will need all time to reveal. For him it is either one question, closed within itself by its own answer, or it is the Infinite Law of the Universe,--the point or the circle. From all points of view, then, the object of creation in art or science is a girdle of impulses from which the mind may not stray. The two conditions of our formal scheme are given: a term which disappears, and one which is a perfect whole. Transition between background and foreground has dropped. Between the objects of attention in the foreground it has no meaning, because the foreground is an indissoluble unity. With that object the self must feel itself one, since the distinctive self-feeling has disappeared with the opportunity for transition.

We have thus swung around the circle of mystical, aesthetic, and creative emotion, and we have found a single formula to apply, and a single explanation to avail for the loss of personality. The conditions of such experiences bring about the disappearance of one term, and the impregnable unity of the other. Without transition between two terms in consciousness, two objects of attention, the loss of the feeling of personality takes place according to natural psychological laws. It is no longer a mystery that in intense experience the feeling of personality dissolves.

One point, however, does remain still unexplained,--the bliss of self-abandonment. Whence are the definiteness and intensity of the religious and aesthetic emotions? The surrender of the sense of personality, it seems, is based on purely formal relations of the elements of consciousness, common to all three groups of the analyzed emotions. Yet it is precisely with a fading of self-feeling that intensity and definiteness deepen. But how can different and emotionally significant feelings arise from a single formal process? How can the worship of God become ecstatic joy through the loss of personality? The solution of this apparent paradox is demanded not only in logic, but also by those who would wish to see the religious trance distinguished also in its origin from those of baser content.

But it is, after all, the formal nature of the phenomenon that gives us light. If variation in the degree of self-feeling is the common factor, and the disappearance of the transition- feeling its cause, then the lowest member of the scale, in which the loss of self-feeling takes place with mathematical completeness, must be included. That is the hypnotic trance. It is not necessary at this place to emphasize the fact that our theory, if accepted, would constitute a theory and a definition also of hypnotism. Of interest to our inquiry is merely a characteristic mark of the hypnotic state,--its tremendous suggestibility. Why is this? Our theory would answer that all impulses are held in equilibrium, and that an external suggestion has thus no rivals. Whatever the cause, this last is at any rate the fact. All suggestions seem to double in emotional value. Tell the hypnotic subject that he is sailing up the Rhine, and the most vivid admiration is in his aspect; he gazes in heart-felt devotion if it is a pretty girl he is bid to look at; he quaffs a glass of water with livelier delight than he would show for the draught of Chateau Yquem of which he is led to think.

Now in religious and aesthetic experience there is brought about the same equilibrium or unity of impulses, resulting in analogous loss of self-feeling. But it is a most interesting fact that the FORM of the contemplated object is the cause of this arrest and repose. God, the circle of the Infinite, the Eternal One, enter into play as "unity" alone. What, then, of the content? After the analogy of the extreme case, the content--that is, emotional value and definite emotional tone--takes the place of the external suggestion. Under just the conditions of the religious trance, the element of reverence, of joyous sentiment, is able suddenly to take on a more vivid aspect. It may not be that the emotion itself is greater, but it now holds the field. It may not be that it is more intense, but the intensity of concentration which takes on its color makes it seem so. The "rapture" is just the sense of being caught up into union with the highest; the joy of the rapture is the joy of every thought of God, here left free to brighten into ecstasy; and its "revelation-value" is again the sense of immediate union with a Being the intellectual concept of whom is immensely vivified.

So may be analyzed the aesthetic ecstasy. The tension of those mutually antagonistic impulses which make balance, and so unity, and so the conditions for loss of sense of self, clears the way for tasting the full savor of pleasure in bright color, flowing line, exquisite tone-sequence, moving thought. Many a commonplace experience, says M. Souriau, suddenly takes on a charm when seen in the arrested aesthetic vision. "Every one can have observed that an object in itself agreeable to look on, like a bouquet of flowers, or the fresh face of a young girl, takes on a sort of magic and supernatural beauty if we regard it mechanically while listening to music."<1> The intensity of concentration caused by the unity of form fuses with this suggested vividness of feeling from content and material, and the whole is felt as intensity of aesthetic emotion. The Sistine Madonna would not strike so deep in feeling were it less crystalline in its unity, less trance-like in its repose, and so less enchanting in its suggestion.

<1> P. Souriau, La Suggestion en l'Art.

So it is not only the man of achievement who sees but one thing at a time. To enter intensely into any ideal experience means to be blind to all others. One must lose one's own soul to gain the world, and none who enter and return from the paradise of selfless ecstasy will question that it is gained. It may be that personality is a hindrance and a barrier, and that we are only truly in harmony with the secret of our own existence when we cease to set ourselves over against the world. Nevertheless, the sense of individuality is a possession for which the most of mankind would pay the price, if it must be paid, even of eternal suffering. The delicious hour of fusion with the universe is precious, so it seems to us now, just because we can return from it to our own nest, and, close and warm there, count up our happiness. The fragmentariness and multiplicity of life are, then, the saving of the sense of selfhood, and we must indeed

"Rejoice that man is hurled From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled."

IV THE BEAUTY OF FINE ART

IV A. THE BEAUTY OF VISUAL FORM

I

IN what consists the Beauty of Visual Form? The older writers on what we now know as the science of art did not ask themselves this question. Although we are accustomed to hear that order, symmetry, unity in variety, was the Greek, and in particular the Platonic, formula for beauty, we observe, on examining the passages cited in evidence, that it is rather the moral quality appertaining to these characteristics that determines them as beautiful; symmetry is beautiful, because harmonious, and inducing order and self-restraint. Aristotle's single pronouncement in the sense of our question is the dictum: there is no beauty without a certain magnitude. Lessing, in his "Laocoon," really the first modern treatise in aesthetics, discusses the excellences of painting and poetry, but deals with visible beauty as if it were a fixed quality, understood when referred to, like color. This is undoubtedly due to his unconscious reference of beauty to the human form alone; a reference which he would have denied, but which influences his whole aesthetic theory. In speaking of a beautiful picture, for instance, he would have meant first of all the representation of beautiful persons in it, hardly at all that essential beauty of the picture as painting, to which every inch of the canvas is alike precious. It is clear to us now, however, that the beauty of the human form is the most obscure of all possible cases, complex in itself, and overlaid and involved as it is with innumerable interests and motives of extra-aesthetic character. Beauty in simple forms must be our first study; and great credit is due to Hogarth for having propounded in his "Analysis of Beauty" the simple question,--what makes the quality of beauty to the eye?

But in visible beauty, the aesthetic value of pure form is not the only element involved: or at least is must be settled whether or not it is the only element involved. If in a work of art, as we believe, what belongs to its excellence belongs to its beauty, we may not applaud one painter, for instance, for his marvelous color-schemes, another for his expression of emotion, another for his delineation of character, without acknowledging that expression of character and emotion come within our concept of visible beauty. Franz von Lenbach was once asked what he thought likely to be the fate of his own work. "As for that," he replied, "I think I may possibly have a chance of living; but ONLY if Individualization or Characterization be deemed to constitute a quality of permanent value in a picture. This, however, I shall never know, for it can only be adjudged by posterity. If that verdict should prove unfavorable, then my work, too, will perish with the rest,--for it cannot compare on their lines with the great masters of the past." That this is indeed an issue is shown by the contrasting opinion of the critic who exclaimed before a portrait, "Think away the head and face, and you will have a wonderful effect of color!" The analysis of visible beauty accordingly resolves itself into the explanation of the beauty of form (including shape and color) and the fixing in relation thereto of other factors.

The most difficult part of our task is indeed behind us. We have already defined Beauty in general: we have outlined in a preceding essay the abstract aesthetic demands, and we have now only to ask through what psychological means these demands can be and are in fact met. In other words we have to show that what we intensely feel as Beauty can and does exemplify these principles, and through them is explained and accounted for. Beauty has been defined as that combination of qualities in the object which brings about a union of stimulation and repose in the enjoyer. How must this be interpreted with reference to the particular facts of visual form?

The most immediate reference is naturally to the sense organ itself; and the first question is therefore as to the favorable stimulations of the eye. What, in general, does the eye demand of its object?

II

The simplest element of visual experience is of course found in light and color, the sensation of the eye as such. Yet there is no branch of aesthetic which is so incomplete. We know that the sensation of light or color, if not too weak or too violent, is in itself pleasing. The bright, the glittering, shining object, so long as it is not painful, is pleasantly stimulating. Gems, tinsel, lacquer, polish, testify to this taste, from the most primitive to the most civilized man. Color, too, if distinct, not over-bright, nor too much extended in field, is in itself pleasing. The single colors have been the object of comparatively little study. Experiment seems to show that the colors containing most brightness--white, red, and yellow--are preferred. Baldwin, in his "dynamogenic" experiments,<1> based on "the view that the infant's hand movements in reaching or grasping are the best index of the kind and intensity of its sensory experiences," finds that the colors range themselves in order of attractiveness, blue, white, red, green, brown. Further corrections lay more emphasis upon the white. Yellow was not included in the experiments. Cohn's results, which show a relative dislike of yellow, are contradicted by other observers, notably Major and Baker,<2> and (unpublished) experiments of my own, including the aesthetic preferences of seven or eight different sets of students at Radcliffe and Wellesley colleges. Experiments of this kind are particularly difficult, inasmuch as the material, usually colored paper, varies considerably from the spectral color, and differences in saturation, hue, and brightness make great differences in the results, while the feeling-tone of association, individual or racial, very often intrudes. But other things being equal, the bright, the clear, the saturated color is relatively more pleasing, and white, red, and yellow seem especially preferred.

<1> Mental Development in the Child and the Race, 1895, pp. 39, 50, ff. <2> E. S. Baker, Univ. of Toronto Studies, Psychol. Series, No. 4; J. Cohn, Philos. Studien, vol. X; Major, Amer. Jour. of Psychol., vol. vii.

Now, according to the Hering theory of color, white, red, and yellow are the so-called "dissimilating" colors in the three pairs, white-black, red-green, and yellow-blue, corresponding to three hypothetical visual substances in the retina. These substances, that is, in undergoing a kind of chemical disintegration under the action of light-rays, are supposed to give the sensations white, red, or yellow respectively, and in renewing themselves again to give the sensations of black, green, and blue. The dissimilating process seems to bring about stronger reactions on the physiological side, as if it were a more exciting process. Thus it is found<1> that as measured by the increase in strength of the hand grip under the stimulation of the respective colors, red has particularly exciting qualities, but the other colors have an analogous effect, lessening, however, with the descent from red to violet. The pleasure in bright red, or yellow, for instance, may thus well be the feeling-tone arising in the purely physiological effect of the color. If red works like a trumpet call, while blue calms and cools, and if red is preferred to blue, it is because a sharp stimulation is so felt, and so preferred.

<1> Ch. Fere, Sensation et Mouvement, 1887, p. 80.

The question of the demands of the eye in color combination is still more complicated. It has been traditional to consider the complementaries black-white, red-green, blue-yellow, and the other pairs resulting from the mixtures of these as the best combinations. The physiological explanation is of course found in the relief and refreshment to the organs in successive alternation of the processes of assimilation and dissimilation, and objectively in the reinforcement, through this stronger functioning of the retina, of the complementary colors themselves. This tendency to mutual aid is shown in the familiar experiment of fixating for some moments a colored object, say red, and then transferring the gaze to a white or gray expanse. The image of the object appears thereon in the complementary green. Per contra, the most complete lack of contrast makes the most unpleasing combination, because instead of a refreshing alternation of processes in the retina, a fatiguing repetition results. Red and orange (red-yellow), or red and purple (red-blue), successively stimulate the red- process with most evil effect.

This contrast theory should, however, not be interpreted too narrowly. There are pairs of so-called complementaries which make a very crude, harsh, even painful impression. The theory is happily supplemented by showing<1> that the ideal combination involves all three contrast factors, hue, saturation, and brightness. Contrast of saturation or brightness within the same hue is also pleasant. For any two qualities of the color circle, in fact, there can be found degrees of saturation and brightness in which they will form an agreeable combination, and this pleasing effect will be based on some form of contrast. But the absolute and relative extension and the space-form of the components have also a great influence on the pleasurableness of combinations.

<1> A. Kirschmann, "Die psychol.-aesthet. Bedeutung des Licht und Farbencontrastes," Philos. Studien, vol. vii.

Further rules can hardly be given; but the results of various observers<1> seem to show that the best combinations lie, as already said, among the complementaries, or among those pairs nearer together in the color circle than complementaries, which are "warmer." The reason for this last is that, in Chevreul's phraseology, combinations of cold colors change each other's peculiar hue the most, and of warm colors the least; because the complementaries of these cold colors are "warm," i.e. bright, and each, appearing on the field of the neighboring cold color, seems to fade it out; while the complementaries of the juxtaposed warm colors are not bright, and do not have sufficient strength to affect their neighbors at all. With a combination of blue and green for instance, a yellow shade would appear in the green and a red in the blue. Such a result fails to satisfy the demand, already touched on, for purity and homogeneity of color,--that is, for unimpeded seeing of color.

<1> Chevreul, De la Loi du Contraste Simultane des Couleurs. E. S. Banker, op. Cit.

What significance have these abstract principles of beauty in the combination of colors for representative art? In the choice of objects with a definite local color, of course, these laws will be found operative. A scheme of blues and yellows is likely to be more effective than one of reds and violets. If we analyze the masterpiece of coloring, we shall find that what we at first supposed to be the wonderful single effects of color is really the result of juxtapositions which bring out each color to its highest power.

III

While all this may be true, however, the most important question has not yet been asked. Is truth of color in representative art the same thing as beauty of color? It might be said that the whole procedure of the so-called Impressionist school, in fact the whole trend of the modern treatment of color, took their identity for granted. Yet we must discriminate. Truth of color may be truth to the local color of the given objects, alone or together; in this case we should have to say that beauty did or did not exist in the picture, according as it did or did not exist in the original combination. A red hat on a purple chair would set one's teeth on edge, in model or picture. Secondly, truth of color may be truth to the modifications of the enveloping light, and in this case truth would make for beauty. For the colors of any given scene are in general not colors which the objects themselves, if isolated, would have, but the colors which the eye itself is forced to see. The bluish shadow of an object in bright sunlight (yellowish light) is only an expression of the law that in the neighborhood of a colored object we see its complementary color. If such an effect is reproduced in a picture, it gives the same relief to the eye which the original effect showed the need of. The eye fatigued with yellow sees blue; so if the blue is really supplied in the picture, it is not only true, but on the road to beauty, because meting the eye's demand. The older methods of painting gave the local color of an object, with an admixture of white for the lights, and a warm dark for the shadows; the modern--which had been touched on, indeed, sporadically, by Perugino and Vermeer, for instance,--gives in the shadow the complementary color of the object combined with that of the light falling upon it--all conditions of favorable stimulation.

Further favorable stimulation of the eye is given in the method of the Impressionists in treating "values," that is, comparative relations of light and shade. The real tones of objects including the sky, light, etc., can never be reproduced. The older schools, conscious of this, were satisfied to paint in a scale of correspondence, in which the relative values were fairly kept. But even by that means, the great differences of intensity could not be given, for the brightest spot of any painting is never more than sixty-six times brighter than the darkest, while the gray sky on a dull rainy day is four hundred and twenty times brighter than a white painted cross-bar of a window seen against the sky as background.<1> There were various ways of combating this difficulty. Rembrandt, for instance, as Kirschmann tells us, chose the sombre brown tone, "not out of caprice or an inclination for mystic dreaming (Fromentin), but because the yellow and orange side of the color-manifold admits of the greatest number of intervals between full saturation and the darkest shade." The precursors of the Impressionists, on the other hand, succeeded in painting absolute values, confining themselves to a very limited gamut; for this reason the first landscapes of the school were all gray-green, dull, cloudy. But Monet did not stop there. He painted the ABSOLUTE VALUES of objects IN SHADE on a sunny day, which of course demands the brightest possibilities of the palette, and got the lighted objects themselves as nearly as he could,--thus destroying the relative values, but getting an extraordinary joyous and glowing effect; and one, too, of unexpected verisimilitude, for it would seem that in a sunlit scene we are really attentive to the shaded objects alone, and what becomes of the others does not so much matter. This effect was made still more possible by the so-called dissociation of colors,--i.e. the juxtaposing of tints, the blending of which by the eye gives the desired color, without the loss of brightness which a mixing of pigments would involve. Thus by putting touches of black and white side by side, for instance, a gray results much brighter than could have been otherwise reached by mixing; or blue and red spots are blended by the eye to an extraordinarily vivid purple. Thus, by these methods, using the truth of color in the sense of following the nature of retinal functioning, Monet and his followers raised the color scale many degrees in brightness. Now we have seen that the eye loves light, warmth, strong color-effects, related to each other in the way that the eye must see them. Impressionism, as the name of the method just described, makes it more possible than it had been before to meet the demands of the eye for light and color, to recover "the innocence of the eye," in Ruskin's phrase. Truth to the local color of objects is relatively indifferent, unless that color is beautiful in itself; truth to the reciprocal relations and changes of hue is beauty, because it allows for the eye's own adaptations of its surroundings in the interest of its own functioning. Thus in this case, and to sum up, truth is synonymous with beauty, in so far as beauty is constituted by favorable stimulation of an organ. The further question, how far this vivid treatment of light is of importance for the realization of depth and distance, is not here entered on.

<1> Kirschmann, Univ. of Toronto Studies, Psychol. Series No. 4, p. 20.

IV

The moment we touch upon line-form we are already, in strictness, beyond the elements. For with form enters the motor factor, which cannot be separated from the motor innervations of the whole body. It is possible, however, to abstract for the moment from the form as a unit, and to consider here only what may be called the quality of line. A line may be straight or broken, and if curved, curving continuously or brokenly, etc. That this quality of line is distinct from form may be shown by the simple experiment of turning a spiral--a logarithmic spiral, let us say--in different ways about its focus. The aesthetic effect of the figure is absolutely different in the different positions, and yet the feeling about the character of the line itself seems to remain the same. In what sense, and for what reasons, does this curved line satisfy the demands of the eye? The discussion of this question precipitates us at once into one of the burning controversies of aesthetics, which may perhaps best be dealt with at this point.

An early answer to the question would have been, that the eye is so hung in its muscles as to move most easily in curved lines, and this easy action in following the curve is felt as favorable stimulation. But recent experiment<1> has shown that the eye in fact moves by most irregular, angular leaps from point to point of the figure. The theory is therefore remodeled by substituting for the movement sensations of the eye, the tendencies corresponding to those early movements of touching imitative of the form, by which we learned to know a form for what it is, and the reproduction of feeling-tones belonging to the character of such movement. The movements of touching and feeling for a smooth continuous curved object are themselves pleasant. This complex of psychical factors makes a pleasurably stimulating experience. The greater the tendency to complete reproduction of these movements, that is, the stronger the "bodily resonance," the more vivid the pleasure. Whether we (with Groos) designate this as sympathetic reproduction, or (with Lipps) attribute to the figure the movements and the feelings which resound in us after this fashion, or even (with Witasek) insist on the purely ideal character of the reproduction, seems to me not essential to the explanation of the pleasing character of the experience, and hence of the beauty of the object. Not THAT we sympathetically reproduce ("Miterleben"), or "feel ourselves into" a form ("Einfuhlen"), but HOW we do so, is the question.

<1> G. M. Stratton, Philos. Studies, xx.

All that Hogarth says of the beauty of the serpentine line, as "leading the eye a kind of chase," is fully in harmony with this view, if we add to the exploiting movements of the eyes those other more important motor innervations of the body. But we should still have to ask, WHAT kind of chase? Sharp, broken, starting lines might be the basis of a much more vivid experience, --but it would be aesthetically negative. "The complete sensuous experience of the spatial" is not enough, unless that experience is positively, that is, favorably toned. Clear or vivid seeing made possible by the form of the object is not enough. Only as FAVORABLY stimulating, that is, only as calling up ideal reproductions, or physical imitations, of movements which in themselves were suited to the functions of the organs involved, can forms be found positively aesthetic, that is, beautiful.

Moreover, we have to note here, and to emphasize, that the organs involved are more than the eye, as has already been made plain. We cannot separate eye innvervations from bodily innervations in general. And therefore "the demands of the eye" can never alone decide the question of the beauty of visual form. If it were not so, the favorable stimulation combined with repose of the eye would alone make the conditions of beauty. The "demands of the eye" must be interpreted as the demands of the eye plus the demands of the motor system,--the whole psychophysical personality, in short.

It is in these two principles,--"bodily resonance," and favorable as opposed to energetic functioning,--and these alone, that we have a complete refutation of the claim made by many artists to-day, that the phrase "demands of the eye" embodies a complete aesthetic theory. The sculptor Adolph Hildebrand, in his "Problem of Form in the Plastic Art" first set it forth as the task of the artist "to find a form which appears to have arisen only from the demands of the eye;"<1> and this doctrine is to-day so widely held, that it must here be considered at some length.

<1> Das Proablem der form in d. bildenden Kunst, 1897.

It is the space-form, all that is seen, and not the object itself, that is the object of vision. Now in viewing a plastic object near at hand, the focus of the eye must be constantly changed between the nearer and further points. In a more distant view, on the other hand (Hildebrand's "Fernbild"), the contour is denoted by differences of light and shadow, but it is nevertheless perceived in a single act of accommodation. Moreover, being distant, the muscles of accommodation are relaxed; the eye acts at rest. The "Fernbild" thus gives the only unified picture of the three-dimensional complex, and hence the only unity of space- values. In the perception of this unity, the author holds, consists the essential pleasure which the work of art gives us. Hildebrand's treatment is difficult, and lends itself to varying interpretations, which have laid stress now on unity as the essential of art,<1> now on "the joy in the complete sensuous experience of the spatial."<2> The latter seems in harmony with the passage in which Hildebrand says "all pleasure in Form is pleasure in our not being obliged to create this clearness for ourselves, in its being created for us, nay, even forced upon us, by the form itself."

<1> A. Riehl, Vierteljahrschr. f. wissenensch. Philos., xxi, xxii. <2> K. Groos, Der Aesthetische Genuss, 1902, p. 17.

But supposing the first interpretation correct: supposing space-unity, conditioned by the unified and reposeful act of seeing, to be the beauty we seek--it is at once clear that the reduction of three dimensions to two does not constitute unity even for the eye alone; how much less for the motor system of the whole body, which we have seen must be involved. Hildebrand's "demands of the eye" resolves itself into the stimulation plus repose of the ciliary muscle,--the organ of accommodation. A real unity even for the eye alone would have to include not only space relations in the third dimension, but relations of line and mass and color in the flat. As for the "complete sensuous experience of the spatial" (which would seem to be equivalent to Berenson's "tactile values"), the "clearness" of Hildebrand's sentence above quoted, it is evident that completeness of the experience does not necessarily involve the positive or pleasurable toning of the experience. The distinction is that between a beautiful and a completely realistic picture.

A further extension or restatement of this theory, in a recent article,<1> seems to me to express it in the most favorable way. Beauty is again connected with the functioning of our organs of perception (Auffassungorgane). "We wish to be put into a fresh, lively, energetic and yet at the same time effortless activity.... The pleasure in form is a pleasure in this, that the conformation of the object makes possible or rather compels a natural purposeful functioning of our apprehending organs." But purposeful for what? For visual form, evidently to the end of seeing clearly. The element of repose, of unity, hinted at in the "effortless" of the first sentence, disappears in the second. The organs of apprehension are evidently limited to the eye alone. It is not the perfect moment of stimulation and repose for the whole organism which is aimed at, but the complete sensuous experience of the spatial, again.