The Psychology of Beauty | Page 7

of art have of producing impressions on us makes a part of their
definition. It is not in order to be eaten that the tree produces its fruit."
But this is giving away his whole position! As little as the conformity
of the fruit to its species has to do with our pleasure in eating it, just so
little has the conformity of a literary work to its genre to do with the
quality by virtue of which it is defined as art.
The Greek temple is a product of Greek religion applied to
geographical conditions. To comprehend it as a type, we must know
that it was an adaptation of the open hilltop to the purpose of the

worship of images of the gods. But the most penetrating study of the
slow moulding of this type will never reveal how and why just those
proportions were chosen which make the joy and the despair of all
beholders. Early Italian art was purely ecclesiastical in its origin. The
exigencies of adaptation to altars, convent walls, or cathedral domes
explain the choice of subjects, the composition, even perhaps the color
schemes (as of frescoes, for instance); and yet all that makes a Giotto
greater than a Pictor Ignotus is quite unaccounted for by these
considerations.
The quality of beauty is not evolved. All that comes under the category
of material and practical purpose, of idea or of moral attitude, belongs
to the succession, the evolution, the type But the defining characters of
the work of art are independent of time. The temple, the fresco, and the
symphony, in the moment they become objects of the critical judgment,
become also qualities of beauty and transparent examples of its laws.
If the true critical judgment, then, belongs to an order of ideas of which
natural science can take no cognizance, the self-styled scientific
criticism must show the strange paradox of ignoring the very qualities
by virtue of which a given work has any value, or can come at all to be
the object of aesthetic judgment. In two words, the world of beauty and
the world of natural processes are incommensurable, and scientific
criticism of literary art is a logical impossibility.
But the citadel of scientific criticism has yet one more stronghold.
Granted that beauty, as an abstract quality, is timeless; granted that, in
the judgment of a piece of literary art, the standard of value is the canon
of beauty, not the type; yet the old order changeth. Primitive and
civilized man, the Hottentot and the Laplander, the Oriental and the
Slav, have desired differing beauties. May it, then, still be said that
although a given embodiment of beauty is to be judged with reference
to the idea of beauty alone, yet the concrete ideal of beauty must wear
the manacles of space and time,-- that the metamorphoses of taste
preclude the notion of an objective beauty? And if this is true, are we
not thrown back again on questions of genesis and development, and a
study of the evolution, not of particular types of art, but of general

aesthetic feeling; and, in consequence, upon a form of criticism which
is scientific in the sense of being based on succession, and not on
absolute value?
It is indeed true that the very possibility of a criticism which shall judge
of aesthetic excellence must stand or fall with this other question of a
beauty in itself, as an objective foundation for criticism. If there is an
absolute beauty, it must be possible to work out a system of principles
which shall embody its laws,--an aesthetic, in other words; and on the
basis of that aesthetic to deliver a well-founded critical judgment. Is
there, then, a beauty in itself? And if so, in what does it consist?
We can approach such an aesthetic canon in two ways: from the
standpoint of philosophy, which develops the idea of beauty as a factor
in the system of our absolute values, side by side with the ideas of truth
and of morality, or from the standpoint of empirical science. For our
present purpose, we may confine ourselves to the empirical facts of
psychology and physiology.
When I feel the rhythm of poetry, or of perfect prose, which is, of
course, in its own way, no less rhythmical, every sensation of sound
sends through me a diffusive wave of nervous energy. I am the rhythm
because I imitate it in myself. I march to noble music in all my veins,
even though I may be sitting decorously by my own hearthstone; and
when I sweep with my eyes the outlines of a great picture, the curve of
a Greek vase, the arches of a cathedral, every line is lived over again in
my own frame. And when rhythm and melody