Moreover, as the "beautiful character" and "splendid operation" have taught us, rare and desirable qualities are apt to be contemplated in a "platonic" way. And even objects of bodily desire, so long as that desire is not acute and pressing, may give rise to merely contemplative longings. All this, added to what has previously been said, sufficiently explains the many and heterogeneous items which are irradiated by the word Beautiful and the emotion originally arising from the satisfied contemplation of mere shapes.

And that this contemplation of beautiful shapes should be at once so life-corroborating and so strangely impersonal, and that its special emotion should be so susceptible of radiation and transfer, is sufficient explanation of the elevating and purifying influence which, ever since Plato, philosophers have usually ascribed to the Beautiful. Other moralists however have not failed to point out that art has, occasionally and even frequently, effects of the very opposite kind. The ever-recurrent discussion of this seeming contradiction is, however, made an end of, once we recognise that art has many aims besides its distinguishing one of increasing our contemplation of the beautiful. Indeed some of art's many non-aesthetic aims may themselves be foreign to elevation and purification, or even, as for instance the lewd or brutal subjects of some painting and poetry, and the nervous intoxication of certain music, exert a debasing or enervating influence. But, as the whole of this book has tried to establish, the contemplation of beautiful shapes involves perceptive processes in themselves mentally invigorating and refining, and a play of empathic feelings which realise the greatest desiderata of spiritual life, viz. intensity, purposefulness and harmony; and such perceptive and empathic activities cannot fail to raise the present level of existence and to leave behind them a higher standard for future experience. This exclusively elevating effect of beautiful shape as such, is of course proportioned to the attention it receives and the exclusion of other, and possibly baser, interests connected with the work of art. On the other hand the purifying effects of beautiful shapes depend upon the attention oscillating to and fro between them and those other interests, e.g. subject in the representative arts, fitness in the applied ones, and expression in music; all of which non-aesthetic interests benefit (enhanced if noble, redeemed if base) by irradiation of the nobler feelings wherewith they are thus associated. For we must not forget that where opposed groups of feeling are elicited, whichever happens to be more active and complex will neutralise its opponent. Thus, while an even higher intensity and complexity of aesthetic feelings is obtained when the "subject" of a picture, the use of a building or a chattel, or the expression of a piece of music, is in itself noble; and a Degas ballet girl can never have the dignity of a Phidian goddess, nor a gambling casino that of a cathedral, nor the music to Wilde's Salome that of Brahms' German Requiem, yet whatever of beauty there may be in the shapes will divert the attention from the meanness or vileness of the non-aesthetic suggestion. We do not remember the mercenary and libertine allegory embodied in Correggio's Danae, or else we reinterpret that sorry piece of mythology in terms of cosmic occurrences, of the Earth's wealth increased by the fecundating sky. Similarly it is a common observation that while unmusical Bayreuth-goers often attribute demoralising effects to some of Wagner's music, the genuinely musical listeners are unaware, and usually incredulous, of any such evil possibilities.

This question of the purifying power of the Beautiful has brought us back to our starting-point. It illustrates the distinction between contemplating an aspect and thinking about things, and this distinction's corollary that shape as such is yon-side of real and unreal, taking on the character of reality and unreality only inasmuch as it is thought of in connexion with a thing. As regards the possibility of being good or evil, it is evident from all the foregoing that shape as shape, and without the suggestion of things, can be evil only in the sense of being ugly, ugliness diminishing its own drawbacks by being, ipso facto, difficult to dwell upon, inasmuch as it goes against the grain of our perceptive and empathic activities. The contemplation of beautiful shape is, on the other hand, favoured by its pleasurableness, and such contemplation of beautiful shape lifts our perceptive and empathic activities, that is to say a large part of our intellectual and emotional life, on to a level which can only be spiritually, organically, and in so far, morally beneficial.



CHAPTER XXI

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 uses both to the individual and to the community, each of which uses is independent of the attainment of Beauty.

The remaining question concerns the usefulness of the very demand for Beauty, of that Aesthetic Imperative by which the other uses of art are more or less qualified or dominated. In what way, the Reader may ask, has sensitiveness to Beauty contributed to the survival of mankind, that it should not only have been preserved and established by evolutional selection, but invested with the tremendous power of the pleasure and pain alternative?

The late William James, as some readers may remember, placed musical pleasure between sentimental love and sea-sickness as phenomena unaccountable by any value for human survival, in fact masteries, if not paradoxes, of evolution.

The riddle, though not necessarily the mystery, does not consist in the survival of the aesthetic instinct of which the musical one is a mere sub-category, but in the origin and selectional establishment of its elementary constituents, say for instance space-perception and empathy, both of which exist equally outside that instinct which is a mere compound of them and other primary tendencies. For given space-perception and empathy and their capacity of being felt as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, the aesthetic imperative is not only intelligible but inevitable. Instead therefore of asking: Why is there a preference for what we call Beauty? we should have to ask: why has perception, feeling, logic, imagination, come to be just what it is? Indeed why are our sense-organs, our bodily structure and chemical composition, what they are; and why do they exist at all in contradistinction to the ways of being of other living or other inanimate things? So long as these elementary facts continue shrouded in darkness or taken for granted, the genesis and evolutional reason of the particular compound which we call aesthetic preference must remain only one degree less mysterious than the genesis and evolutional reason of its psychological components.

Meanwhile all we can venture to say is that as satisfaction derived from shapes we call beautiful, undoubtedly involves intense, complex, and reiterative mental activities, as it has an undeniable power for happiness and hence for spiritual refreshment, and as it moreover tends to inhibit most of the instincts whose superabundance can jeopardise individual and social existence, the capacity for such aesthetic satisfaction, once arisen, would be fostered in virtue of a mass of evolutional advantages which are as complex and difficult to analyse, but also as deep-seated and undeniable, as itself.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Lipps. Raumaesthetik, Leipzig, 1897. " Aesthetik, vol. I. part ii., Leipzig, 1906. II. Karl Groos. Aesthetik, Giessen, 1892. " Der Aesthetische Genuss, Giessen, 1902. III. Wundt. Physiologische Psychologie (5th Edition, 1903), vol. III. pg. 107 to 209. But the whole volume is full of indirect suggestion on aesthetics. IV. Muensterberg. The Principles of Art Education, New York, 1905. (Statement of Lipps' theory in physiological terms.) V. Kuelpe. Der gegenwaertige Stand der experimentellen Aesthetik, 1907. VI. Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness, 1912 (contains abundant quotations from most of the above works and other sources). VII. Ribot. Le Role latent des Images Motrices. Revue Philosophique, March 1912. VIII. Witasek. Psychologie der Raumwahrnehmung des Auges (1910). These two last named are only indirectly connected with visual aesthetics.

For art-evolutional questions consult: IX. Haddon. Evolution in Art, 1895. X. Yrjoe Hirn. Origins of Art, Macmillan, 1900. XI. Levinstein. Kinderzeichnungen, Leipzig, 1905. XII. Loewy. Nature in early Greek Art (translation), Duckworth, 1907. XIII. Delia Seta. Religione e Arte Figurata, Rome, 1912. XIV. Spearing. The Childhood of Art, 1913. XV. Jane Harrison. Ancient Art and Ritual, 1913.



INDEX

Aesthetic: aridity, 136-7; imperative, 99-100; irradiation, 147-52; purification, 149-52; responsiveness, active nature of, 128-36; habit and familiarity affecting, 134-6 Altamira cave frescoes, 95 Art: differential characteristic of, 116-18; non-aesthetic aims of, 99-100, 137-8; utility of, 153-5 Aspect: aesthetics concerned with, 15, 21, 105; shape the determining feature of, 26-8 Attention, a factor distinguishing perception from sensation, 32

Balfour, H., 95 Beautiful: aesthetic irradiation proceeding from use of adjective, 147-8; attitude implied by use of adjective, 2-7, 18-19; empathy the chief factor of preference, 67-8; implies desire for reiterated perception, 53-4 Botticelli, 83 Brahms' German Requiem, 150 Browning's Abt Vogler, 141

Coleridge's Ode to Dejection, 131 Colour, passive reception of, 23-4, 29 Contemplative satisfaction marking aesthetic attitude, 8-15 Correggio's Danae, 151 Cubic Existence: perception of, 85; pictorial suggestion of, importance attached to, discussed, 101-5

Discobolus, 115

Einfuehlung, 59; misinterpretations of, 66-7 Emotion, storage and transfer of, 139-46 Empathy, 61-69; complexity of movements of lines, 78-83; movements of lines, 70-77; second element of shape-perception, 59-60 Extension existing in perception, 35-8

Fechner, 130

Hildebrand, 102, 118

Inner Mimicry, 74-5

James, W., 153

Keats' Grecian Urn, 77

Levinstein, 96 Lipps, 66 Locomotion of Things, distinction between, and empathic movement of lines, 111-16 Lotze, 66

Mantegna, 82 Memory: a factor distinguishing perception from sensation, 32; in perception, 40-1 Michel Angelo, 114, 122 Movement of Lines, distinction between, and locomotion of Things, 111-16; see also Empathy

Object of Perception, subject's activities merged in, 57, 58

Perception: active process involved in, 29-34, 128-9; distinguished from sensation, 32; subject and object of, 55-60

Raphael's Heliodorus, 119 Relaxation an element of form-perception, 42 Rembrandt, 122 Rythm, 42-5

Semper, hypothesis regarding shape-preference, 94 Sensations: distinguished from perceptions, 32; perception of relation between, 29-30 Shape: character of, 78-83; contemplation of, its intermittent but recurrent character, 106-10; determines contemplation of an aspect, 26-8; elements of, 35-47; Empathy an element of perception of, 59; facility and difficulty of grasping, 48-54; a perception, 29-34; practical causes regarding evolution of, 90-4; preference, its evolution, 94-7; and Things, their co-operation, 117-27; thinking away from, to Things, 131-2, 84-9 Sound, passive reception of, 23-4, 29 Subject of perception, extent of awareness of self, 57-9 Symmetry, 42-3

Tension, an element of form-perception, 42 Things and Shapes, their cooperation, 117-27; thoughts about, entering into shape-contemplation, 84-9 Third Dimension, locomotor nature of knowledge of, 85-6, 101 Titchener, 59

Vinci, Leonardo da, 83, 145-6 Vischer, 66

Watts, G. F., 46 Whole and Parts, perception of relation of, 48-54 Wilde's Salome, 150 Wundt, 42, 66

THE END