Prall-Judgment Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers in:sent 6 of 1,164 Prall judgment 44 kac attac Fri, May 31, 8:18 AM (3 days ago) to Stefan 42563 12 COP. 3 CHAPTER I THE EXPERIENCE RECORDED IN ESTHETIC JUDGMENT 1. The available but limited data for asthetic theory indicated in asthetic judgments. 2. Such judgments record beauties directly felt. 3. Beauties as supervening upon transactions in nature. 4. Asthetic experience distinguished by its disinterested absorption in determinate qualities and forms. § I WHEN the places in the world are not merely within a radius of thirty-three hours but immediately to be reached by light-wave transportation or perfected instruments of distance vision; when all the problems connected with having the fare to pay for these instantaneous journeys are completely solved; when there are no more wars or national rivalries or passports or customs regulations to complicate the overcoming of natural barriers by the raising of artificial ones; when men have full knowledge of their bodily mechanisms and their health-or the cure for death-and when, alive, they shall have found out how to live together in society:— when all this is accomplished, if we are not to sit down and wish for the return of our practical difficulties to give us occupation, or for death to relieve our boredom, æsthetic matters will have to be taken seriously. For the present the subject matter is to be studied in those accidental or lucky developments that have come about in spite of men's other preoccupations. In our own present world there are two main regions at our disposal. There are first the 1 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT rudimentary asthetic data to be found in tired moments of stopping to glance at the surrounding commotion or in turning to more or less violent relaxation in popular games. The one gives us asthetic contemplation as we all know it best, perhaps; the other gives us an intimation of creative activity or artistic expression. The second source for information and available data on the subject is to be found in those less popular, though no doubt most select and sometimes esoteric cases of asthetic contemplation and artistic activity that are so labeled. We may thus survey our subject matter either in primitive manifestations where it is difficult to differentiate contemplation from mere daze or stupor, or pleased infantile wonder, and where free expert activity appears rather in the guise of truancy; or we may turn to its abnormal aspects, such appreciation as is typical of concerts and museum tours and such activity as is to be found in the seclusion of studios and art schools. Not having a very healthy, mature social world we have not even the conditions for normal esthetic expression either contemplative or creative. But the crude rudimentary aspects of a subject exhibit some of its fundamentals, and its esoteric and abnormal aspects often reveal with startling clearness not only its aberrations but its purest possibilities. Insanity teaches us much of the mind, and it is possible that rats and apes offer us examples of processes common to all the thinking that goes on in connection with animal bodies. Our limited asthetic data need not then lead us altogether astray. Besides these disabilities esthetics suffers further from our lack of knowledge in many fields. What perception is exactly we do not know, nor what judgment is. We do not know too much even about sounds and colors, and we know 2 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT still less of words and language as pure meaning. Since most esthetic experience is a matter of the very surface of our world, whether we are creating it or enjoying it, and since this surface is almost all perceived as sound and color, we are greatly hampered.) But with all these difficulties there remains the genuine and natural human concern with happiness and beauty, and by noticing our limitations and taking a point of departure honestly, even though it be scarcely scientific, we may clear our minds of some confusion and perhaps indicate some of the regions to be scientifically explored in the future. We noticed that asthetics begins where mechanics and physics and biology, economics and politics and ethics, end, where most of what we know of life is perfected into habit or even cessation. But we should remember too that at any stage of any activity the asthetic aspect is likely to be pres-ent, perhaps indeed that it is always necessarily present. And the treatment of it by itself is only justified because it is so important as coloring and toning all the aspects of the world we live in. A mechanism may be beautiful; and so perhaps may social institutions be, if not in their clumsy irrational structures, at least in some of the personal human activities and relations involved in them. But since we have so little of science to guide us in all this, we may as well turn to a simpler investigation and begin at the point where we should conclude. All of us say now and then in some determinate way or other that something is beautiful. Beautiful may not be our word; we use fine, often, or grand or capital or jolly; and we say attractive or pretty or charming or lovely more appropriately and less self-consciously than we say beautiful. But any one of these more or less determinate expressions means in a loose, easy way, or in a simple, direct way what 3 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT beautiful means more vaguely and abstractly or more solemnly or dogmatically; and all of us suppose that we know what we mean when we use them. Lacking then any full knowledge of the subject matter of asthetics, we may profit by examining the meaning of our own asthetic judgments, an analysis which should supposedly tell us what that meaning is. If we knew completely what we meant by the judgment, this is beautiful, as we use it in any given case, and if we further knew exactly what it meant in all cases, we should know so much more of zs-thetics than is at present known that in an attempt at finding out this meaning, unscientific as such an attempt may appear to be, we can hardly be wasting time. In other words we are noticing frankly that in method our study is not to be strictly or narrowly scientific but general and philosophical. But this is not to be confused with being either vague or fruitless. For the method need not be uncritical or lacking in rigor; and if we keep firmly in mind what facts are available, we need not lose ourselves in arbitrary theorizing. We may comfort ourselves too, if we like, that we are not running the supposed risks of scientific method itself, which in this field is far from having any comprehensive generalizations that offer very much control over the subject matter. And we need not at all neglect the principles that have so far been suggested or formulated. But we are to begin the other way round; the æsthetic judgment is to be taken for granted as significant, and with the judgment itself as our starting point we are to investigate its meaning. §2 At once then we need to be clear as to what sthetic judgment is. It is not of course asthetic experience as such, 4 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT about which psychology and psychological asthetics have had so much to say. Nor is it criticism, which is occupied largely with assessing and analyzing relative asthetic values in a scale of value or placing a given example under some familiar rubric, as when we notice that a play is a farce or a college building pseudo-Gothic. sthetic judgment is distinguished from sthetic experience as such by the simple fact that it follows and records such experience after the experience has been had and with reference to what was experienced. And it is distinguished from criticism equally clearly by the fact that it is content with simply making this record explicit. It makes no attempt at first to say that one thing is better than another, nor to explain on what grounds it is so, nor to say just what class of things it belongs to, nor to explain it in any sense, nor yet to reproduce in an account of the thing some of its quality of beauty so that a reader of the criticism may re-enact a similar sthetic moment of more or less derivative appreciation. Positively, æsthetic judgment is easier to point to than to describe or define. But it is always a record of direct as-thetic experience, of the fact that in the presence of some object that object's beauty has been felt. Perhaps indeed feeling is the best word, even technically, to use here; but for the present we are safe in using it only in its most general sense, in which it applies as well to feeling that we were right to run away or stay behind as to feeling a thrill of emotion. The word is commonly used of the process or act of appreciation, as when we say that we feel the exquisite grace of flowers or, less probably, of the vase they are in; but in more pronounced cases, as when a young man encounters a young woman whose appearance stirs his enthusi-asm, the word is more likely to be striking. One is always 5 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT struck by great beauty, the feeling is called forth suddenly by a blow upon the senses. Instead of saying that we feel something, we say that something makes us feel, that something strikes us. It is shocks of this sort that we record in æsthetic judgment. And one more distinction. If you are struck by the beauty of something in your experience and record that fact to me, I may accept your judgment and repeat your statement in sincere belief. But here the judgment is taken merely as recording one fact among others, and to know its meaning accurately and fully I should have to have the experience myself. So that it is as well to keep to direct judgments, records of an experience had by the person making the state-ment. If we take other judgments to examine, statements that are merely accepted and repeated on authority, they may mean no more to us than any memorized phrase, or mere verbal formula, such as that a certain dye is an amido-com-pound, or that carcinoma is sometimes of epithelial tissue or that democracy is equality of opportunity. It is in this latter way that we may all believe and assert that the Parthenon is beautiful, and we should learn little of esthetics by attempting to go deeper into that judgment, since for most of us it has no depth, scarcely even a meaning of any sort. § 3 Before we turn to examples, their kinds and their various sorts of meaning, we should also be a little clear as to one further characteristic of asthetic experience and hence of the meaning of any esthetic judgment that records it. This characteristic is named variously, rapture, aloofness, disin-terestedness, indolence, uselessness, and all these expressions have some genuine applicability from some point of view. ESTHETIC JUDGMENT But there are many misunderstandings involved in them, as in a dozen other equally common descriptions,— the innocence of the artist or his perversity, the parasitical nature of art or the divineness of it, its freedom from ulterior motive or its exclusiveness and pretense. All these follow from one simple fact. Both the creation and the contemplative appreciation of beauty, the blazing red of geraniums, the intense equilibrium of a pianist, these are events that go on in the world. The geranium reflects light to an eye which perceives its color; the pianist acts upon his instrument, and if he is quite perfect, he and the instrument, so far as both produce sound, are parts of one activity, one process, one group of coördinated movements. So of the eye and the blazing red geranium in the sun. Now process and movement are extended both through time and in space, and all qualities, pitches, colors, as well as variations or changes in pitch or color, occur only along with such extended processes and motions. Nature is not static, and we are not outside nature looking on; but all things, all human beings among them, act and react in a continuum of moving reality both spatial and temporal. Not only the physical world but all life is a flux. Beauty, if it is seen or heard or felt, is recognized as a quality supervening upon this flux in some particular situation. And situations are marked for human minds by these supervening qualities and by nothing else. But the quality itself has an identity. We know red when we see it, whether it gleams proudly as a broad stripe or glows in the ashes or incarnadines the waves or spots the table linen in strawberry season. If we are to see it at all, and if it is to be at all, something must happen; very special transactions among chromatic mechanisms of the eye, and very special microscopic movements in reflecting surfaces. 7 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT Now as redness occurs only in a transaction as the quality there, so does beauty, and the mechanics of the transaction in the case of beauty are apparently complicated and certainly very little understood. They involve not only light transmission from surfaces, sound transmissions through air, nervous activities in organs of perception, brain activities, muscular movements, coördinating responses and so on and on, but also the processes involved in such perception, or such feeling, as finds more than color and sound and shape, namely, the beauties of these. But here we are noticing what is common to all qualities, beauty included. The process, whatever it is, in connection with which quality is present, has no end. If it were the process itself that were beauty, beauty would never be felt or known at all, since every process runs into other processes forever and through all space. Any single process is but one mode of the moving reality of nature. But such processes as involve certain bodily functions are marked for us by the presence of what we call qualities, defined simply and uniquely in their own immediacy as the qualities or natures they happen to be. Beauties of all sorts are among determinate qualities. Hence, while beauty is obviously trans-tory in its occurrence, it is also a defined nature, a specific sort of being; and every particular beauty is permanently the selfsame determinate nature or quality that it is, no matter how or when it appears as the quality of this or that object. Every beauty is eternally itself, eternal, not as lasting through time, but as in its own nature what it is regardless of time, eternal in the simple familiar sense in which a geometrical meaning is eternal, independent as to its nature or character of the exigencies of time and space, held to no date and no place to be what it is, as triangularity needs no 8 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT place to occupy and no time to fill in order to be what it means anywhere at any time. It simply is what it means, and when and where it is embodied makes no difference to this meaning, nor whether it is ever embodied at all. Its own nature is exhausted in its definition as itself, and the truth of any situation that happens to embody or reveal it is that this situation exemplifies triangularity and all that can be said of triangularity as such. So of any determinate beauty. A beautiful vision that has occurred cannot literally occur again; only another vision may come to take its place, and perhaps another of the same form. For the beauty of the first vision is what it is exactly, whatever the time or place of its occurrence, and whether or not any one ever sees it again. There is no recurrence of any event, for events pass; what we call recurrence of events or situations, is the identity of their apparent character or quality. It is not specific beauties that may properly be said to occur or pass away, but rather what bears these beauties upon its surface. For mind the flux of events is arrested in recognizable forms, which have thus their own permanent identity. Of course the actual material works of men's hands may change so slowly that these forms seem also permanently embodied. The pyramids are pyramidal still to our living eyes. The precise shape they once had, however, is no longer to be seen upon their physical existent masses. But that shape, identical as present to the mind of their ancient architects with what we mean when we speak even now of their original shape, is forever the same, possessed of its own identical nature, which is all that we mean when we refer to it. So of all qualities and so of all beauties. It is because any particular beauty is thus identically what it is in its own 9 hon.... Alrea 1 on ESTHETIC JUDGMENT self-defining nature or being that it is nothing else, but solely and separately its purely qualitative and unique self. Of course then asthetic experience, while it is an activity, a transaction in the flux of nature, culminates and has its characteristic point in an absolute static quality or determinate beauty, no more subject to the contingencies of ex-istence, and no more in danger of destruction, than the meanings of geometrical definitions or the logical principles of implication. Its occurrence, its happening to appear, is a passing event. Its being or nature, its qualitatively defined specific character, is independent, and hence aloof from the contingency of existing things, as logical meanings or asthetic qualities in general are aloof by being the meanings or qualities of things, not things or events themselves. But this is not to say that these qualities are separated off by distance into a special realm of their own. That would be making of them the spatial and temporal substances that they are not, instead of realizing that their whole being is quality or form, and that they appear constantly as the very surface of our perceived world everywhere. § 4 In asthetic experience attention is focussed on this qualitative identity, this permanence of form, so that such experience is the antithesis of practical activity, moral or eco-nomic. Lhe artist, however busy his hands, is absorbed in a form, an appearance felt specifically as the object and aim of his effort, perhaps even fully delineated in his imagination, a form which is to be embodied by the expert manipulation of intimately known materials, and made present to others, who may in their turn become absorbed in the contemplation of it. And we need not keep to such terms as these to illus- IO ESTHETIC JUDGMENT trate so familiar a phenomenon. If a waiter in a restaurant folds a napkin expertly and carefully, laying it beside a plate in precise and intended relation to the silver and the glasses, a prospective patron and diner may view with pleasure the neatness of the table, without perhaps being at all aware of the specific details of form that constitute this satisfying appearance. But it is this form, intended by the waiter, that the napkin and the glasses and the silver em-body, and it is this form that may strike an attentive or discriminating guest, as it was also this form, this particular appearance, that the waiter had in mind, as we say, all along. As it is only expert trained attention that discriminates and feels in all its fullness and precision of detail the effect of a well-set table, so the seeing of the quality and point of a complex work of art involves not only previous train-ing, often of years, but full attentive activity summoning the most elaborate nerve and brain and muscle processes to its aid, processes which for most of us are not even available on the spur of the moment. We may appreciate quite adequately a neat, clean table; but we are not so competent in the matter of subtle designs on plaster walls or foreign fab-rics. We miss the accuracy or the vagueness of an orchestra conductor's beat, and we may fail altogether to distinguish such discriminable and defining character in works of art as gives them their chief value or even their sole significance. Esthetic experience, full and complete, not only requires tremendous training beforehand but intense activity at the time, so great that living through the exciting complexity of an elaborate musical composition, or grasping the intricate intellectual form and detail of a fine building, produces ex-haustion. It does not tire our legs, perhaps, like mountain climbing or bicycle racing, but the mere fact that the activity I I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT involved is not gross in the anatomical sense is not a ground for calling it indolence or passivity. But as the expert wine-taster consumes no wine at all, takes none of it into his internal metabolic economy and uses up only so much of the available supply as will excite his organs of taste and be spat out again, so artistic activity and æsthetic contemplation in general, having their consummation in the presence to minds of specific forms, do not contribute to the interested practical and social activities of men. If indolence is thus hardly justified as the description even of asthetic contemplation, for practical purposes uselessness, of course, is; and since artists use up materials, and those who even stop to contemplate qualities use up time and energy in doing so, there is some sense in saying that asthetic activity is at least an expense to the world and a luxury in it. Moreover, since the form achieved is the end in view, it is clear enough that other more practical ends are neglected. While beauties are mere qualities, not substantial things, and hence permanent in their being, and independent, in their own defined nature, of mere events and physical objects, still their occurrence upon objects and their presence, to men, involve materials and activities. Artists and those who cherish art or contemplate beauty are human beings, consuming goods and in dependent contact and relation with other men, and they are subject to all the regulations of law and morals, as well as to physical and biological and economic necessities. Since sthetic qualities occur as the characters of things which are the products of long labor; since also the perception of these qualities is usually contingent on time-absorb-ing training, and the enjoyment of them always takes time and energy, asthetic and artistic activity may be judged ESTHETIC JUDGMENT critically as costing human energy and exhausting materials. And so far it seems also to be condemned, since it serves no practical purpose beyond itself. But this is a very incomplete account. For when we look for the justification of any activity, we find it at last in some human satisfaction; and if asthetic activity is itself directly satisfactory, instead of seeking ulterior justification, it is in the clear position of needing none. It is in fact the very type of the only sort of thing that ever justifies anything else. But this will appear more clearly later. For the present all we need to notice is the plain fact that asthetic experience, recorded in esthetic judgments, is aloof not in indolence, but in the intense activity of full contemplation, and aloof because what such experience takes as its object is not existing things but their essential qualities, not events but appearing essences or forms immediately and satisfyingly present to us, whether as embodied externally in things or in imagination. It is this sort of aloofness, common to all disinterested attention, that is mistaken sometimes for inattention or idle day-dream-ing or sophisticated pretense. As if all attention to anything were not also inattention to the rest of the world, or as if direct, absorbed, satisfied activity were not necessarily the neglect of other activities, and necessarily without pretense. As to indolence, it is said to have been Descartes' early morning "indolence" that invented analytical geometry; and in general it may be fair to think that a little fruitful "indolent" contemplation would make our world less frivolous and more humane. The present chapter has simply presented very generally the subject matter of asthetics, the starting point and the method of our study, and a description of the characteristic disinterestedness of asthetic experience. We have next to I 3 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT follow through some examples of asthetic judgment, so as to set before ourselves in some intelligible order the more specific and detailed aspects of what we are attempting to survey as the meaning of all such judgments. I4 CHAPTER II THE TRANSACTION INVOLVED IN ESTHETIC EXPERIENCE I. Though preference is vital to the apprehension of beauties, these lie objectively upon the surface of the experienced world. 2. Conflict in æsthetic judgment therefore not anomalous; an object may vary in beauty even for the same person. 3. Sensuous and bodily resonance a condition of the fullest beauty. BEFORE we turn to varieties of sthetic judgment and their meanings, it is worth while specifying the character of asthetic judgment in general as distinguished from other kinds of judgment bordering closely upon it. We may take as critical the case of disagreement in asthetic judgment where in other judgments there is admitted agreement, and in finding just the point of the disagreement find also just that which is the specifically asthetic nature of the judgment and its meaning. There is nothing more regularly disagreed upon, I suppose, than the beauty of women, and in such cases there is often no disagreement as to the facts. If we say, How lovely she is, such eyes, such hair, such skin! we may be answered, Yes, just such eyes, just such hair and skin, but not lovely at all. And such regular fea-tures, we add. But what if one prefers to regularity of features sensitive and intelligent mobility? As soon as the question of beauty comes clear of the rest, it turns into 15 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT preference, apparently. And since this is typical of asthetic differences of opinion, we may stop at once to notice not merely that it is typical, but that it is the heart of the matter. Not that beauty is what I prefer as against what you pre-fer, but that we never make the direct judgment that this or that was beautiful, with regard to what we have ourselves seen, unless what we judged about satisfied or pleased or charmed or attracted us, suited our preferences in the matter. The question then comes to be whether sthetic judgment is merely a record of our having preferred something to something else, or of having liked something or other. That it is not this alone is obvious at once. King James liked his old friends best because they were like comfortable old shoes, and I suppose that even King James hardly thought his old shoes beautiful. So of much that we prefer or like or even love; we should never think of calling it beautiful, whether it is oysters to eat, or old friends to see, or old shoes to wear. We are not speaking simply or mainly of affections, or of our likes or dislikes or preferences in general when we call things beautiful. How then does it happen that in disagreements in asthetic judgment, likes and dislikes are so sure to be the end of the argument? How does it happen that, even when one party to the disagreement is willing finally to concede beauty where he does not discern it, he adds, as the fundamentally important point, that, while the object in question may be beautiful, though he can't see that it is, he really doesn't like it? At least it must be admitted that no mere statement by others is in the matter of beauty acceptable. We are willing enough to admit another man's record of the dimensions of a rug or an estate, often without verification; but whether the rug is beautiful or ugly, whether the gardens or the I 6 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT buildings are fine to look at, we can only tell by looking our-selves. And once we do look and see them, if they delight us by their physical appearance, we have the experience necessary for making the judgment that they are beautiful, or for agreeing with or verifying this judgment as communicated to us by some one else. And sthetic judgments are peculiar in this respect. If we doubt that a baby weighs thirteen pounds, we can be assured of it by inspecting the scales with the baby's weight on them and finding that the weight reported was correct. If we doubt the fact that carnations are sometimes green or that a locomotive will run ninety miles an hour, the tests of these judgments, while they sometimes involve complicated processes of measurement, are sure to satisfy us if they are carefully and accurately made by any merely rational human observer. If the green is not the shade of green expected, or if the locomotive runs eighty-nine and nine-tenths miles, the statements are verified at least approximately. Not so of statements as to beauty. If we attempt to verify such a statement as that something or some one is beautiful, we must see that some one or something ourselves. And it often happens that in the very presence of a friend whose experience completely verifies the judgment, our own experience as completely fails to. Our informant, pointing to the beautiful object before us both, asks us to agree that his judgment is correct, and instead we disagree; we find the object not beautiful or even positively ugly. Since the object and its qualities, its shade of color, its shape, its dimensions, do not vary, it would seem clear that the variation which is to account for the difference, and hence for the conflict of judgments, lies in the person having it. ~ And this would accord with what we have already noticed. I 7 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT If qualities occur as qualities of objects only in certain active transactions, and if beauty is a quality present to you when you look at a building but not to me when I look, it must simply be a different transaction that goes on between me and the building from what goes on in your case. That such a difference is possible is shown by the parallel case of what are called the secondary qualities. If I have eyes sufficiently different from other eyes to be partially color-blind, I may on a trial choose what is red when I am asked to pick out the green; and when a quality is such that it is received through one sense and one sort of sense organ, there is no mystery in such a mistake nor in the mistaken judgment that would express it, nor yet in a conflict between two judgments ostensibly upon the same thing, since these are records of different experiences through different kinds of eyes. A defective or abnormal sense organ cannot furnish the same experience that a normal one does in the same cir-cumstances; or rather, the circumstances are not the same in a transaction between a colored surface and a defective eye as in a transaction involving the same surface and a normal eye. And the possessors of the two differing eyes, since they are not capable of being in the same ocular circumstances, the same perspective relation to objects, cannot have the same visual experiences. Their records of what they experience will thus conflict if they are taken to be, as of course they are not, merely two distinct records of the experiencing of identical permanent qualities. It would seem reasonable to suppose that a parallel explanation is adequate in the case of conflicting or contradictory sthetic judgments. Unfortunately for our knowledge here, we do not know what exactly is involved in our experiencing the beauty of an object, except that it seems I8 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT to be a very great deal that goes on in our bodies, including at least, beyond the apprehension of the ordinary qualities, the apprehension of the beauty either of these qualities themselves or of the object possessing them in apprehension. And since this apprehension is not merely that of the qualities as such-for these we may agree on and still disagree as to the beauty—it seems clear enough, provided that our recording judgments are honest and ingenuous, that they are a clear indication of the difference between us in what goes on at our end of the transaction that constitutes our looking at things asthetically. Since disagreement is so common be-• tween esthetic judgments, it would appear also that the processes of apprehension in the case of beauty differ from person to person much more widely, whether because of native endowment or by acquisition through training, than • the processes of ordinary sense perception of ordinary sense qualities. This apprehension of beauty, whatever it is fully and analytically, however many processes internal to our bodies and brains and nerves and muscles and our very blood it may involve, is characterized roughly by the delight we feel or fail to feel in apprehending objects. Our part of the transaction, the whole of which is our apprehension of the beauty of anything or the manifestation of that thing's beauty to us, seems then to be the delight in the object as directly apprehended, with no reference beyond this apprehended form or appearance. Thus esthetic experience is an experience of an object as apprehended delightfully, primarily too, as so apprehended directly through the senses. This is what is properly signified by the term æsthetic in the first place, and it is the primary meaning, never to be neglected in the analysis of asthetic experience. Such ex- I9 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT perience is, no matter how much of ourselves it involves, the experience of the surface of our world directly apprehended, and this surface is always, it would seem, to some degree pleasant or unpleasant to sense in immediate perception. But the use of the word perception here may too strongly suggest more than any immediacy. An act of perception may look beyond the surface and fill in our immediate data with the content of previous perceptions or similar ones. We may perceive solidity through a mere surtace area, a substantial round orange where for bare sense apprehension there is perhaps only a spot of orange color. Of the delight that is apprehended beauty it is better to say not that it is perceived but that it is intuited. For it is characteristic of æsthetic apprehension that the surface fully present to sense is the total object of apprehension. We do not so much perceive an object as intuit its appearance, and as we leave this surface in our attention, to go deeper into meanings or more broadly into connections and relations, we depart from the typically asthetic attitude. Thus the ordinary conflicts of asthetic judgment reveal at once various important points. First of all, in our apprehending beauty or in beauty's being manifested to us, the character of the transaction depends as clearly on the apprehending process as upon the other main term in the transaction, that is, the object; and while the object may remain the same, persons differ greatly by nature and training with respect to this apprehending activity. If beauty has not actually been apprehended, the sthetic judgment purporting to record its presence is either false or meaning-less; false if we are pretending to record such beauty on our own authority as discoverer or observer of it, meaningless, or at least purely formal and empty, if we accept and repeat 20 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT an esthetic judgment verbally given by another whose experience we have not had and perhaps are not capable of having. This is not to say that there is no beauty where we ourselves experience no delight in apprehending an object; but it is at least certain that some one must be so constituted as to experience this delight in apprehension, if asthetic judgment is ever to have any meaning for any human mind. If all sthetic judgments were empty of such specific meaning, it seems impossible that any of them would ever have been pronounced, or that beauty would ever have been discovered. As we shall see later, there is even ground for supposing that beauty is constituted in the very transaction that is this pleasurable apprehension, and that it is therefore properly called a tertiary quality, since for its manifestation it requires not merely sense perception as of color or shape, but such further processes as are in themselves pleasurable. But being processes of apprehension and not mere bodily feelings like pains in the eye or comfortable warmth in the interior bodily regions, their delight must be taken as the quality of what is apprehended, the only term in the transaction to which we can attach them, the only visible or sensible object to be found in the experience, the only object present at all. Not seeing the light transmissions or the nervous currents running about or the brain processes going on, but being conscious of delight in what is happening, and needing to have this attributed to something — since it is qualitative and all qualities are by us attributed to something, quality meaning attribute, of course-we attribute beauty to all that there is present to consciousness in the case, namely, the so-called external object entering into this elaborate transaction. And we call the object beau- 2 I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT tiful no more figuratively or less literally than we call it red or round or solid or external or objective, since after all the object is continuous in nature with everything else as an event within related events. Its beauty, however, is not an event, but the character of one, the specific quality which it literally has in relation to a human organism apprehending it, in the only sense in which any event or any object has qualities at all which are present to minds. Thus our example of a conflict in asthetic judgment reveals also the sense in which beauty, although it is the quality only of an occurrence in a transaction in which human organic activity is an essential, functioning element, is a quality of the object apprehended. If it is properly only a tertiary quality so-called, in distinction from qualities involving merely the processes of factual perception, it is still an objective quality just as truly as any other-shape or size or redness. Only, since all qualities of all objects are present to minds solely by virtue of transactions with bodily nervous organisms, it follows that in an organism lacking in certain training and resultant habits of mind, or defective or otherwise abnormal in more or less hypothetical internal structures and modes of functioning, the transaction which characterizes an object as delightful in some minds, will not result in such characterization of the object for other minds, since it will not be the same transaction. As a blind man misses colors, an asthetically deficient man misses beauty. As a lazy man misses the exhilaration of physical activity or an unskilled worker the feeling of skillfulness in doing his work, so a man who has not exercised his perceptive powers to discriminate fine differences, or a man who has not learned a given technique, is simply incapable, in the presence of objects or events of certain sorts, of responding in 22 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the particular and complex dynamic response that is one part of the event upon which beauty supervenes before him as an objective quality upon, and of, the object or event apprehended. We do not apprehend the full process or event going on. For apprehension there is only the form, the unified group of qualities which signifies for us an ob-ject. To this our attention is directed, and to this we attribute the felt delight as the beauty it possesses in its own right. § 2 Thus to admit genuine conflicts in sthetic judgments, conflicts which may be full contradictions as they stand, is in the first place to admit that the meanings borne by such judgments are also contradictory. While one thing delights you with its beauty, there may be in it as experienced by me no beauty at all. It is beautiful in relation to your trained apprehension or your instinctively good taste; in relation to my untrained faculties and my lacking taste it is not beautiful. But this involves no contradiction in the account of what happens in nature. There goes on in you, when you see it, a process which presents a delight necessarily attributed to what you experience, to all that there is for your conscious experience, namely, the object itself. And as we saw, beauty always is just felt. If it strikes you and you are struck by it, the blow is upon your feeling capacities through the senses, not merely upon the external senses themselves operating only so far as to apprehend the so-called primary and secondary qualities of the object, its shape and color, say. It is the object as one unified and unitary apprehended form that has the beauty that you feel. When I see the object, the same things do not happen; there is no such intense feeling to be attributed to the object, and I do not feel a great 23 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT beauty, because the process giving rise to its occurrence is not called forth in me by the object. We are both judging the same object. We define it alike, we test its qualities and properties by the same modes of verification; but the beauty of it cannot come fully into being when it strikes my senses, simply because my organic structure has not been trained, or is not naturally gifted, so to respond as to set up the processes giving intense delight and felt as the beauty of the object. Thus our contradictory judgments involve no contradictions in the statements about the actual situation as fully made out. There are simply two different situations to which the same external object is common. As gasoline under certain conditions is an active part of the event that is the smooth running of an engine, and under others is part of the event which is the storing of gasoline in a tank, so one object may be a term in the apprehension of beauty by one organism and a merely present object, not beautiful at all, in connection with another human organism. Two further points follow here at once. As the same engine sometimes runs smoothly in transactions with gasoline and sometimes does not run at all, refuses to enter into transactions with gasoline; and as we do not say either that it is not the same engine or that the gasoline has changed its nature, but only that something is wrong; so with the same subject in the presence of the same object at different times. What is apprehended at both times is, say, the prospect from a certain point of vantage in this sort of light. It is the same prospect that I saw yesterday, and I am the same person for all the purposes that require identity of name and personal responsibility. But today the beauty is not present as it was yesterday. Am I to say that the prospect is no longer beautiful? Literally I am. Or rather, 24 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT I am to say that I do not now directly feel the beauty of the apprehended prospect, not because it is there and I fail to see it, but because without my response it is absent, uncon-stituted. In other words, the processes that bring about delight in an object are not going on in the transaction, between me and the prospect, which is my present apprehension and recognition of it as what I have seen once before, then as beautiful, now not so. It has often been urged by theorists that I am then not perceiving the same object. It would be rather more to the point to say that I am not the same person. But neither statement is warranted for intelligible and practically efficacious discourse. Since no objects are anything but the forms of changing events, and no organisms anything but events either, and since, roughly, identity is established in any such slowly passing event as an animal body or a physical object, it seems more to the purpose to say that what is missing when 1 do not see the beauty is so much of the transaction as depends on or is constituted by my functioning in a particular fashion. Since such functioning is actually necessary to any beauty at all, just as necessary as the relatively permanent properties of the prospect, it also seems reasonable to say that the same object perceived by the same person may at one time be beautiful and at another time not, according as those transactions are or are not carried through, without which no beauty is ever present. What it would mean to have beauty present in the absence of these processes is the same sort of thing that is meant by the presence of determi--nate size without an agreed upon unit of measure or standard of comparison, or of sound when there are no hearing mech-anisms. Both are entirely relative matters, which means that they are constituted in a relation both terms of which 25 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT must be present as conditions of their presence. In the case of beauty the term on the human side is not mere perceptual processes, but those accompanying functional activities, perhaps deeper or more voluminous, occurring in certain apprehending relations established between the person and the object apprehended; activities that on some occasions fail to be set going, or else do not occur intensively enough to be felt and consciously recognized as beauty even in connection with the same perceived object. § 3 But it should follow that if it is apprehension that involves the feeling of beauty, all apprehension whatever, bare perception itself of length or breadth, may have some degree of delight in it. And hence all objects should have somev degree of beauty. Then the same human being could not possibly sometimes in the presence of a certain object experience its beauty and sometimes not. And this is to be taken into account. But to do so is a simple matter. The two cases of seeing a prospect as beautiful and seeing it as not beautiful are most probably cases of the relative intensity or volume of the processes going on. But at a sufficiently low degree of intensity, due to any of a thousand causes, such as indigestion, or a very low temperature, which may absorb energy or distract attention, or sorrow, which sometimes reduces all vitality nearly to coma, and so on and on—at such a low intensity the feeling is almost nil and the beauty has faded or quite vanished. In extreme cases, of course, the processes of apprehension may be actually unpleasant on account of other concurrent bodily processes, and the object which was delightful may now be directly offensive to sight. 26 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT We are often reminded that logicians and mathematicians have asthetic pleasure in their own specialized logical and mathematical objects. And this too is a clear possibility on our view, although it is also clear why other men miss these beauties, and why the appreciation of them is not primarily and typically illustrative of asthetic contemplation. Usually the attention of intellectual endeavor is focussed ahead, in the perception of spreading relations from a point rather than in the intuition of forms present and static. Only enough of this attention is given to the stage reached at any point in calculation to grasp the possibilities for future operations. But if a mathematician stops at all, if his attention even for a moment rests entirely on the form of what is before him, he of course may and no doubt usually does have sthetic pleasure in it. And if he completes a demonstration or a great scheme of operations in which are comprehended formally vast numbers of meanings in relation, he may easily dwell upon this form itself. In other words, as soon as he stops his mathematical operations and notices their form, he is a contemplating subject with precisely the sort of absorbing object of attention that is typical of all esthetic experience. Only, since pure symbolic forms lack color and sound and richness of sensuous content in general, even the purest mathematical asthetic contemplation, disinterested and intense as it may be, lacks volume. It occupies less of sense apprehension, less of those accompanying processes stirred into action by the senses that resound in felt delight. If it is the purest and most elevated sthetic pleas-ure, it is at any rate also the thinnest and most meagre. It is frugal if not ascetic. Our two added points, then, are that all apprehension may be tinged with esthetic feeling, touched with beauty, 27 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT but that it is the full sensuous resonance of the process that is typical, in cases where we stop at intuition of form or quality instead of moving on to perception of relations and connections and further meanings in general. And second, that since this resonance of sensuous volume may or may not be stirred by the same object at different times, even the same object may be perceived by the same person as beautiful at one time and not at another and still remain the same perceived object. All that we have been taking account of in the present chapter reinforces the view that actual beauty is present upon objects only in connection with processes involving more than the properties of the so-called external objects which enter into them. While these processes terminate for conscious attention in the form of the object, they involve within human bodies, which thus enter into transactions with these objects, little known, but, we may suppose, elaborate activities that extend further than those involved in the perception of sense-qualities as such. In fact, if attention is characteristically perceptive and not intuitive, these further processes remain largely in abeyance, as when in musical dictation one hears so well as to write out accurately what was perceived through the ears and the sense for rhythm, without in the least feeling the formal or sensuous or expressive beauty of the dictated passage. Experience is genuinely and characteristically asthetic only as it occurs in transactions with external objects of sense or with the objects of sensuous imagination held clearly before the mind in intuition; and the beauty attributed to objects in sthetic judgments, while it is objectively theirs, just as any quality is, is like all other qualities the essence or 28 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT form attended to by directed feeling, dependent for its nature as well as its manifestation upon human organic activities just as truly as upon the objects felt to be beautiful and afterwards recorded as beautiful in asthetic judgment. 29 CHAPTER III THE DISCRIMINATION OF SURFACE QUALITIES AND THE INTUITION OF SPECIFIC BEAUTIES I. Characteristic æsthetic judgments indicate that sense discrimination is the primary condition of asthetic experi-ence. 2. Risks involved in the neglect of discriminable surface qualities. 3. Esthetic vitality as evidenced in attention to the surface of everyday life. § I WHILE conflict in asthetic judgment indicates the kind of situation necessary to esthetic experience, the merely general account of this situation is of little interest after all. No one doubts that we differ in our tastes as expressed in judg-ments, and no one doubts that this is to be explained by the true account of the asthetic experience. But the account here given is at the best in very general terms, and if it appears to be consistent in itself and not to neglect the facts, that is a minimum to be demanded of it. If it is to give any real light on the subject, it must accord with those typical descriptions of beauty that have been made out by theorists and recognized by all of us as relevant. Further than this it must give us a basis on which to explore and systematize in our minds the whole region of asthetic experience, the intuited surface of our world, and that special part of its surface made by man, both the arts in general and the objects of fine art. It is of course the last that have been most dis cussed in books and in talk, but it is the asthetic aspect of 30 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT our more general experience of the world that would seem more appropriate to begin with, because it is with this surface that we are familiarly faced in daily living. If esthetic judgment in this field is not so characteristically expressed nor so clearly different at first sight from other sorts of judgment, the lack of emphasis on its distinctive nature is compensated perhaps by its familiarity, and we shall do well to begin with these milder, less characteristic, but better known beauties, and by clearing our minds as to the function and meaning of æsthetic judgment here, come to some realization not only of its specific nature but also of its common occurrence. This too may make it plain that the surface of all of our experience is sthetic, that everywhere and at all times the surface that our senses come upon may be dwelt on for what it is in direct intuition. If it is dwelt upon only momentarily for the most part, even so it may be dwelt upon with a degree of pleasure, and often of course it becomes the object of intense and relatively lasting contemplative delight. It will be easy to cite examples to indicate this, as well as to mark off the meaning of these judgments from that of other kinds of judgment, and so to characterize a little more specifically the asthetic aspect of experience recorded in them. We have already said that the most accessible asthetic data are to be found in casual truant glances at our sur-roundings, when the pressing occupations of practical effort either tire us or leave us for a moment to our own devices, as when in the absorbing business of driving at forty or fifty miles an hour along a highway to get to a destination, the tourist on his holiday glances at the trees or the hills or the ocean, or when, in sheer exhaustion, from a desk covered with letters to answer, or accounts to disentangle or invoices 3 I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT or contracts to check over, we look away and instead of turning to the clock to see when we must stop to meet an appointment, or when we may stop without prejudice to our wages, we turn instead, perhaps only for a moment, to the commotion about us, listen to the vast city noises roaring out-side, notice the worried look of a face bent over another desk, the odd self-confident tone of a voice giving instruc-tions, the monotonous repetition in the cadence of the telephone operator's answers and calls, the expertness of her manipulation of the switch-board, the rattle of the type-writers, the banging of the surface-cars, the smoky shafts of light striking through dull window-panes, the enveloping odor like hot glue that comes from the packing-house nearer the river, or even the image of the opaque river itself, swirling in oily patches under the bridge past the embank-ment. All of these glances at our surroundings or into our remembered images, all these day-dreams that let attention rest simply on what is presented to it in sounds and colors and smells, are recorded, if they are recorded at all, in simple judgments using such terms as we have used already in citing them. The city is noisy; the voice sounds self-confi-dent; the telephone girl is expert; the river looks thick and solid. And these sound like ordinary judgments of fact, the reports of observation, the direct perception of the nature of our surroundings. There is nothing in their form to differentiate them as asthetic, and any one of them might be, instead of the record of a dream or of the mere ingenuous contemplation of the surface of experience, part of a practical and entirely unæsthetic report. The self-confidence heard in the voice, for example, may be recorded as part of the suitableness of the office-manager for his position, or 32 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT one of the many signs that have been taken as evidence of his competence and character in the eyes of whoever put him in charge of an office. The noise is one of the conditions taken into account in deciding that the office should be moved to the other side of the building facing the slip. The smell of the packing-house is noted as the unavoidable disadvantage of the location, possibly part of the reason for a rent that is not prohibitive. There is nothing in the worded form of these recording judgments to tell us that they are records of anything but the most practical matters. But if our glance is aside, and not in the direction of our main efforts, nor towards some ulterior purpose in the interest of future activities or plans, the recording judgments are not practical at all, much less for the purposes of information or of science. That the city roars about us is a fact in isolation from all the busy activities that cause the sound we hear, a sound that takes our attention, strikes us, and holds us. And if we remain attentive to this sound, or oblivious to the rest of the world and oblivious to our business in it, inevitably the sound becomes for us characterized simply by its own heard nature, which we take satisfaction in, or else try to blot out by other more vivid or more tolerable impressions. When we looked up from work, the noise had been merely a dull sense of being called away from what we were doing by something pressing in upon us vaguely. Now, when we give ourselves to it in complete attention, it is our own work that not only becomes irrelevant but is altogether put out of mind. The sound we are listening to is our sole object, simply as the specific sound it happens to be. That we do dwell on it for a moment is a clear enough indication that it is holding us, that we are enjoying it in contemplation. If not, we turn to something else before it 33 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT even becomes fully characterized and defined in our ears. Thus quite evidently our judgment here that the city roars with noise, in this case of glancing aside from practical concerns to a sense object that strikes us, if this judgment goes into the least detail as to the nature of the experience simply as it is and with no reference to other matters, is not practical and factual primarily, but sthetic. It records the æsthetic nature of the object discovered by dwelling in the satisfied contemplation of it, taken in isolation as the focus of attention and held to for its own sake simply so long as it satisfies us or until it bores or exhausts us. This matter of being struck by something, and the dwelling on that something by itself, is the elementary necessity that has, in more complicated and highly developed cases of asthetic appreciation, been erected into a canon of critical theory. In our elementary example it is the obvious fact that if we contemplate at all we contemplate that which is before us, the single object that has struck us and that we choose to dwell upon. Even if this object is the mere diffused sounds about us, it is the single characterized blur of noise that we attend to. As judgment is always about something or other which must be singled out, and which is commonly named in the grammatical or the logical subject of the statement, so asthetic experience of the most meagre or even crude elementary sort does require unity, the unity involved in there being that which strikes us and takes our attention, that single thing on which we let our minds or senses dwell in a lingering glance or perhaps in the full absorbed activity of contemplation, properly so called. But what is interesting and characteristic, what is in the first place striking, and what holds our interested attention, 34 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT is not this oneness of the object, a character common to all objects that are distinguishable as such and capable of being experienced or judged about. What strikes us and keeps our attention is not there being a discriminated single object, but the specific discriminated nature of that object. More-over, there must be detail in this object to be further dis-criminated, or its own special character as a whole must be sufficiently striking to distinguish and differentiate it. Lacking such specific and differentiated character it will not hold our attention satisfied and lost for the time to practical con-cerns, or to other objects ready to enter our sense percep-tion, to strike upon our organs, call our attention to their own special qualities, and in their turn occupy our absorbed contemplation. It is objects as of specific discriminated char-acter, and in their variety of detail, that most fully satisfy us. And the discriminating of such absolutely specific natures and of such internal character, as distinguished from noticing that an object is of some general kind, conveniently named, or the following out of relations to other objects or to interests and purposes, is the very heart of sthetic activ-ity. Without such specific discrimination, continuous and more and more refined, asthetic experience remains mere day-dreams, mere relaxation or truancy, a rest perhaps, but not a refreshment and delight in perception. The lack of active, ever-developing powers of more and more sensitive and alert discrimination, playing upon the sensuous forms that occupy attention directly on the surface of our experienced world-this lack is the lack of the essential condition of having full asthetic experience at all, and it involves in the end complete ignorance of the meaning of any but the most undeveloped asthetic judgments. 35 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT An adult may like bright colors as well as a child or a savage. A child may appropriately say pretty lady, whether he is faced with a Siennese madonna, or a portrait of a smart Parisian, or with a Carmencita, or a Royal Academy personage with coronet and pearls and sweeping train. But when a grown man, except in the affectation of modesty in such matters, makes the equally indiscriminate comment, jolly portrait, or glorious beauty, in the face of such varied objects of sense experience, whatever else we may think of him, we must admit either that he has no means of expressing his experience and so is deficient in articulation, or else that so far as asthetic judgment goes he is in the savage or infantile stage. In our world such stunted ignorance is com-mon, of course. Public men, or men in the highest positions in universities, who would be ashamed to misspell a word or use a conventionally incorrect salutation in a letter are quite content in matters of sounds and colors and shapes, architecture and music and art, not only to fail in the most elementary discrimination, but to reveal their ignorance blatantly and offensively in a thousand ways, in public utter-ances, and in their sanction of charlatans in the arts and of commonplace stupidity or dullness in almost any strictly æsthetic matter. All of which reveals in them a lack of judgment in such matters resting on sheer lack of acquaintance and of trained discrimination. While the ignorance resulting from such lack of asthetic discrimination may possibly be unimportant for many highly practical social purposes, it can hardly be said to be less than primarily relevant to education, especially if it turns out that only such discrimination can give men any full or last- 36 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ing satisfaction in the world they live in as directly and accurately experienced. Women, of course, have traditionally had some leisure from practical achievement. In dress they have taken a natural interest, and cultivated it highly. And in general they have noticed what the world is as actually present to our eyes and ears, and our noses and our mouths,— how infinitely varied and often how ugly or taste-less. But men even take pride in the neglect of sensuous discrimination, as if paying attention to the satisfactoriness of the world as it appears about us were a weakness of char-acter, instead of being the only way to avoid the actual stunting of the mind and the loss of full satisfaction in that world as it is actually and really present. This would do for a primitive Christian, of course; but if life is lived here on earth and not mainly in heaven afterwards, it is obviously in a modern mind the neglect of one of our richest opportunities for experience itself, in a sense our only opportunity, and hence the neglect of the chief source of all actual knowledge. Discriminating senses select specific features of the world which thus become distinctly characterized objects in per-ception. Such selection and the further discrimination of details in these chosen formal objects, are the sole avenues to æsthetic pleasure. And this means that without discriminating senses, and without the cultivation of these senses, one remains in elementary and primitive ignorance of the world as it is actually presented to us to dwell in and to dwell upon. This has been the burden of so many wise admonitions that men might well pay more attention to it. Plato was as clear on the subject as Aristotle's practice was clear in exemplifying it. In later times Emerson's famous address on the American scholar is an almost dithyrambic 37 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT prophecy on the text, and the same principle constitutes the central significance of Bergson's insistence on the incomparable value of what he calls absolute metaphysical knowl-edge. In asthetics itself, the lack of discrimination in appearances is the cardinal sin, a sin apparently white and harmless in other realms, but, as we shall see, leading almost inevitably to a general blindness as to all values, even that of human character. For human beings, like other objects, come to us first of all through the senses. Those of us who neglect the discriminating of appearances, not the cut of clothes and color of skin, but the thousand and one marks left by life upon the surface of men's bodies, their motions, their features, their manner of speech, their whole bearing -those of us who neglect such appearances come gradually to judge men by no clear marks. We cannot judge by something in them which does not appear and is mystically di-vined, for what does not appear at all is in all probability a fiction of our own; and we cannot in any case avoid judg-ing, perhaps only half consciously and far from frankly, on the basis of more obvious features. But we are likely to judge vaguely and loosely as to general type, or stupidly and blindly altogether. Such neglect of detailed discrimination leaves us a world where, for example, the distinction between foreigner and compatriot is more attended to than differences between human beings in actual human traits. In important decisions on such a basis we choose men for friends or for positions either without any sound criterion, or on the strength of the judgments of others, whom for some accidental secondary or indirect reason we trust. But to turn back to more specifically sthetic judgments, recording the results of discriminating as against indiscriminate obser-vation, let us take examples where the matter will be, if not, 38 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT conventionally speaking, more strictly in the asthetic realm, at least in the realm of distinctly sensuous experience. If we leave the office and go to lunch at a restaurant in the neighborhood, we come to a place where choices are clearly a matter of taste, properly so called. And what is the meaning of such judgments as we make here? The coffee is good. The tables look fresh and pleasant. The meats are well seasoned. In such judgments there is finality. We do not choose good coffee for nourishment or any other practical purpose; the vilest would serve the purpose of stimulant, like the boiled tea of old England. That the coffee is good simply means that it tastes good, and perhaps also that it looks the right color and clearness. The judgment that it is good refers to an experience satisfactory in itself, and if we do not contemplate our cup of coffee for hours in complete absorption, we do really dwell on it a little in an act of attention directed to its qualitative nature alone, not as means but as end. Here is a directly satisfactory sensuous content, simply good to have in itself, a moment of directly felt pleasure, taken in isolation from the hurried business of a long day, and dwelt on fondly. If it is not the highest sort of asthetic satisfaction, it is at least a simple, clear example of disinterested sense pleasure on the very surface of experience directly had. It is a pleasure, too, to which we return over and over again through the years, not for any extraneous reasons, but just because the hot, clear, brown liquid is, as directly experienced in its perceived na-ture—not accurately or exhaustively describable, of course, but familiar and in no need of description or definition-one of the satisfying features of the surface of the world we live in, a feature we may dwell upon a little in aloof happi-ness, isolated in our contemplation from all the ramifying 39 re ”= really ESTHETIC JUDGMENT practical activity of business and all the pursuing zeal of inquiry into the origins and causes of coffee in nature, or its economic significance, or its consequences and cost in our own § 3 Such isolated sensuous pleasure, distinguishing in percep tion the special discriminated flavor of its object in more or less lingering and loving contemplation, is the very mark of all asthetic experience. There are of course benighted per. sons who, as we say, cannot tell good coffee from bad. And they may be blind to the delights of coffee because of the intensity of the brilliance in which other beauties of the world of nature or of art shine for them. In general, however, it is not fanciful or irrational to distrust the genuineness and sureness of any taste, the discrimination of any man, who in small matters shows himself indiscriminate. Indiscrimi-nateness here is at least just indiscriminateness; and if this is our total evidence so far of the taste of the man in ques-tion, it is evidence of lack of taste, the lack in one field at least, of that discrimination without which any developed æsthetic experience, and so any significant reliable asthetic judgment, is a flat impossibility. These simple sense pleasures of taste furnish an example of the meaning of esthetic judgment and of the essential function of discrimination even at this level of natural experience. Clearly enough, however, the world is not a cake to eat or a measure to be danced, and if esthetic possibilities are to be realized at all fully, we must find most of our asthetic satisfaction not in truant excursions from bus!-ness, but in the forms and surroundings of our main activities and tools, graciousness or even physical grace in daily human relations and transactions, and colors and forms and 40 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT sounds that are not intolerably unpleasant and chaotic in factory-buildings, streets, traffic, and office-furniture, as well as in public monuments and parks and school-houses and gardens, where asthetic concern is normally, if vaguely and too often unsuccessfully, taken into account. The active city of our practically busy lives is after all more upon us and about us than our suburbs, where we sometimes dream or play a little before we go to sleep. Nor are such sthetic matters altogether neglected in modern practice. If the voice of the telephone operator is monotonous and her intonation and enunciation bad, her modes of speech on duty are at least defined and formalized with an eye to a standard ambiguously called service or cour-tesy. Advertising itself has found that individual taste and smart color and design have an "appeal." Obvious and crude and undistinguished as bill-boards and posters may be, it would seem that a public demand for "artistic" ones is a turn in the direction of attention to the actually appearing surface of the world on which our eyes must dwell if they are not fixed altogether on dreams of future success or a heavenly rest. Once attention is directly focussed on appearances as such, it may not be out of the question to go further than these appearances as they are, to a demand for very different ones-involving even the absence of billboards for the sake of a landscape naturally pleasant to look at and infinitely more absorbing in its subtleties of line and form and color. Even the most blatant of our magazines makes a half-hearted separation of what we have bought to read from what advertisers pay to have us look at, with a respect for appearances that somehow refuses to be completely effaced by the most thoroughly commercialized press that the world has ever known. 4I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT With useful paraphernalia this negative solution is not possible. Means of transportation and office fixtures are not likely to vanish. No one but an irrational and irresponsibly romantic visionary supposes that we ourselves want or ought to want the classic beauties of the age of Pericles, with the accompanying lack of most of what makes our lives significant in our own modern world. What does move in the direction of improving the surface of this world for our contemplation, is evidenced in the fulfilment of such asthetic demands as those of neatness, cleanliness, polished surfaces, finished and efficient apparatus of all sorts, such apparatus as happens to be useful or to be thought useful for our practical everyday purposes. Not that usefulness itself is beauty. A telephone would work just as well in a less immaculately smooth black casing; the instruments on an automobile dashboard would be as convenient in less symmetrical arrangement and without ornament; rough edges and red lead would allow a train of Pullman coaches to cover the same long miles in the same short time. But once any useful article reaches a stage of clearly defined and limited pur-pose, and is an adapted mechanism not immediately in need of improvement, the lavish attention to perfection of functioning naturally plays also on appearances. The machinery of a brewery may be painted ornamentally and even floridly because the gaze resting on it can then more fully enjoy not merely the grandeur of its physical proportions and the economy of its intricate arrangement, but the very externals of painted supports that keep it in place. The whole, being an object of the greatest solicitude and pride, receives the attention to detail of appearance that is always bestowed upon objects of fond contemplation, though usefulness is not one whit increased, and vast care and labor may be expended, not 42 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT only in the original decoration, but in keeping the paint fresh and the brass polished. We are always told that such expenditure is merely in the interest of "good business"; but if that is even true, it is only because sthetic appearance is felt to count with the general public and so to be indirectly valuable to hard-headed business-men themselves. But one cannot always credit this explanation. Instead, one places these supposed paragons of efficiency among the gullible and esthetically demanding general public where like the rest of us they are very much at home. Such æsthetic efforts may be quite futile, of course, for they may fail to give satisfaction in themselves and so be not only otiose but actually offensive. Moreover, in decorating the useful in the most superficial and obvious sense, attention may be more and more concentrated on the merely useful, or the merely comfortable, in such uses and comforts as are themselves irrelevant to any mature rational living. And to decorate and perfect means— office-files, say —which absorb the whole lives of individuals for no purpose of their own and for no even plausibly just or humane purpose at all, is to add in ornamentation and in perfection of form an external appearance rightly taken as the visible insult added to the fundamental economic and human in-jury. Such perfection and ingenuity in form, and such decoration, may easily direct attention away from better forms and more felicitous decorative opportunities, and so substitute the lesser for the greater happiness and loveliness possible, or it may fail of its intent altogether and, being either unsatisfactory in itself or inappropriate and hence irrational in its occasions, be in the end actually offensive or even disastrous. But the natural inclination to dwell in perception on use- 43 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ful equipment, or the means of industrial art in general, is not only unavoidably and always present in men, but the root of all finer art, either in ornamentation merely, or in the positive creation of new forms and objects for sensuous gratification in discriminating perception. A reasonable order of living and of society would bend its energies towards making the surface of its own practical active world satisfactory to the perception that must in any case dwell on it for most of its waking hours. If the forms of human relation and the interactions of individuals also partook of such grace and satisfactoriness to the discriminating view, society would be living a more rational life in a more rationally controlled environment. Such a life would also be more nearly beautiful, and as happy, one may suppose, as the power of man over himself and nature allows. Death and disease and pain and risk would not vanish; but as funerals themselves have long been occasions for solemn and tender memorial rites, or even for social pleasure, pain would be suffered and risks run and exhausting toil endured, only as incidental or as fully integral to satisfactions important to those con-cerned. The ends in view would color and light these evils with some semblance of human happiness and beauty. Men would still err and follow false gods, but at least they would live liberally so far as their gods were of their own choice, their forms satisfying to men's vision, and thus beautiful in men's eyes. Such forms would beautify men's whole world, not by suggesting to them what it might be were it another world, but by offering them beauty as its actually present and apparent surface. 44 Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers in:sent 3 of 1,164 Prall judgment 95 kac attac Sun, Jun 2, 10:00 AM (1 day ago) to Stefan CHAPTER V THE ELEMENTS OF ESTHETIC SURFACE IN GENERAL 1. Esthetic elements that lack intrinsic order, and composition in nature. 2. Elements defined in an intrinsic order as the condition of human composition. 3. The orders intrinsic to elements of sound, color, and spatial form. § I DISCRIMINATINg perception focussed upon an object as it appears directly to sense, without ulterior interest to direct that perception inward to an understanding of the actual forces or underlying structure giving rise to this appear-ance, or forward to the purposes to which the object may be turned or the events its presence and movement may presage, or outward to its relations in the general structure and the moving flux-such free attentive activity may fairly be said to mark the situation in which beauty is felt. It is the occurrence of such activity that makes possible the records put down in what we have called asthetic judgments. Only the red that has really caught our attention fully, and upon which that attention has actually rested, is more than merely red-bright or glaring or hard or stirring, or lovely and rich and glowing, or fresh and clear and happy, or harsh or muddy or dull or distressing, ugly or beautiful in any one of a thousand determinate and specific meanings of those words. 57 t.e. Nor eco-senistic" ESTHETIC JUDGMENT But though these variations are indefinitely great in num-ber, they are after all limited, as appearing upon the asthetic surface of our world, by the limitations of the variations in that surface itself. There is a limited range of hues to see, a limited range of sounds to hear, and even a limit to the dimensions of shapes perceived or imagined. Not that the number of possible variations in color, for example, is the number of the possible beauties of color, for the beauty of color is not simply its specific hue or shade or tint or intensity or saturation, but that specific color as upon an object, and not merely as distinguished there by vision, or noted in passing or for further reference as the color it appears to be, but also as appreciated, as felt to be delightful or the reverse to the perceiving subject. And this is plainly indi-cated, this relational character of the situation in which the beauty of sense elements is present, a relation involving feel-ing, in the long list of typical words used in describing such elements. As we pass from the perceptually discriminated quality, taken as sensed, to the intuited beauty immediately felt, we pass from terms like bright and clear and red, to warmly red, pleasantly bright, charmingly clear, or to attractive or lovely or fascinating. As the asthetic nature of the judgment is more and more unambiguously expressive of beauty as against ugliness, the terms used to describe it more and more definitely assert the relation to the perceiving subject which is attracted or interested or fascinated by it, or who finds it lovely as he loves it. Not that all qualities are not found in a relation to a subject who finds them, but that strictly asthetic qualities involve not merely this finding, but such quality as is found, such quality as is perhaps only constituted at all, when the feelings of the subject are in- 58 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT volved in its relation to the object. But the range of possibilities for delightful or ugly color, for example, bears some relation to the range of possible variations intrinsic to color as perceived; and if we are to know what we mean when we assert that colors are beautiful or ugly, we should know first a little about color itself. So of the other elements of sensuous content; so of all the materials of zsthetic experience, sounds and shapes, textures and lines, and as it would also seem, so of tastes and smells and various recognizable kinds of bodily feelings which have distinctive character of their own. But if as-thetic character is properly limited to the object of atten-tion, which takes on as directly apparent to sense its own specific beauty, felt in intuition but felt as a quality of itself, it is clear enough that fully appreciable beauty must be that of objects upon which this beauty actually shines as their own nature when we perceive them. Now we do perceive fruits, for example, as clearly upon the palate as upon the retina, although as the rationalists would say, not so dis-tinctly; clearly, in that the taste is present as what it seems to be, indistinctly, in that what it seems to be, what it appears as, is not in its own essential nature rationally transparent, self-explanatory, native to mind as understandable by in-tellect. We are using the distinction within a field where historical rationalism did not make it, but the distinction itself, as we do make it, is exactly parallel, and worth putting into these old terms to show how troublesome, though in the end fruitless, this kind of distinction has been for all thinking. In our example, the exquisite aroma and taste of rich, ripe strawberries, marked by the palate and the organs of smell, are qualities exactly parallel in perception to their visual qualities, their specific form and color and texture as 59 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT discriminated by the eye. And there is no doubt either that strawberries or foaming milk, or cabbages, for that matter, have clearly characteristic savour. But these sense qualities, subtle and specific and characteristic and objective as they are, seem to lack just the possibility of giving such fully satisfying asthetic experience as is given by colors and shapes and sounds. It is not that they are unworthy because they are so close to our bodies. The palate is no more internal than the ear, and the taste of strawberries is no more a function of the human body than their color or their shape. It would be a very determined esoteric theorist indeed who should deny that the fragrance of roses or gardens or orchards or perfumes was not merely not part of their visual beauty but not part of their beauty at all, even as its richness. And it is not their intimate connection with our vital bodily processes and motions that makes tastes less characteristically zsthetic than sounds or colors or shapes. Part of the appreciation of form itself, as in jars or vases, is without question incipient motions or motor tendencies in our own bodies, and the beauty of the morning is in part the freshness of our vital functioning as well as of our perceptive faculties. We cannot rule out the specific character of tastes and of bodily feelings and of smells from the materials of genuine asthetic experience on any clear ground. Certainly the fact that we usually consume what we taste but not what we see or hear does not furnish such a ground; for we do not need to consume and absorb it in order to taste it, though, as with tobacco or incense, we sometimes appreciate its savour best by passing the smoke of its destruction intimately over the organs by which we apprehend it. Such distillations of beauty are common enough even with roses or lavender, with 60 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the resin of pines or the oil of bays. It is only accident, then, that bodily consumption is the means to the full asthetic flavor of objects, and this without any relation, either, to biological needs or interests. Appetite is not hunger, of course, and even appetite need not precede enjoyment except as a tendency or possibility or natural disposition of the human body and its organs, scarcely different on principle from the disposition of the eyes to see or the ears to hear. Moreover, we could be nourished by our food perfectly well, though our senses were anæsthetized. And in any case the perception of tastes or odors is never as such the devouring of them. We devour the substance not the quality. And the smell of boiled cabbage, as of blooming roses, is a distinctly discriminated and easily remembered quality, eternally a quality to delight in or be offended by, were all the cabbages in the world consumed, and all the roses dead forever. Nor does the transitoriness of smells and tastes in their occurrence rule them out as materials of asthetic pleasure. Nothing is more transitory than sound. And what is more transitory than beautiful expressions upon human faces, or than beautiful young human bodies themselves? But the fact remains that we do not say of the taste of even the most subtly blended salad or the most delicately favored ice that it is beautiful. Hence it is clear that smells and tastes and vital feelings are not the materials of beauty in the sense that colors are, or sounds or forms, or even textures, for they are obviously not the contents of typical æsthetic judgments. If they are not to be ruled out on grounds of their nearness to the body, or their destruction by consumption, which is contemporaneous with and sometimes necessary to the very act of perception, or because of their 6 I Dubiovs ESTHETIC JUDGMENT transitoriness of occurrence, or because they are associated in our minds with fulfilling biological needs, or because of any lack of objectivity or specificity of quality, we must find some other ground for the obvious fact that though they occur in delighted perception, though attention may be focussed on them, as specific qualities directly apprehended in sense experience, they are not usually pronounced beautiful, do not become the content of asthetic judgments, and thus apparently are not the characteristic materials of the sthetic experience that such judgments record. Now this ground is not far to seek, and when we stop to notice just what it is, it will offer us three points of clarification for general asthetic theory. In the first place, smells and odors are unquestionably and emphatically sensuously delightful, and so far are elements of asthetic experience, however elementary. In the second place much of the beauty of nature is made up of just such elementary sensuous materials, which also enter into complex natural beauties just as truly as other elementary materials, more commonly called beautiful. But in the third place, smells and odors do not in themselves fall into any known or felt natural order or arrangement, nor are their variations defined in and by such an intrinsic natural structure, as the variations in color and sound and shape give rise to in our minds. Hence our grasp of them, while it is esthetic very clearly, since they may be felt as delightful, is the grasp in each case upon just the specific presented non-structural quality, which is as absolutely different, unique, simple, and unrelatable to further elements intrinsically through its own being, as anything could be. One smell does not suggest another related smell close to it in some objective and necessary order of quality or occurrence or procedure, nor does one taste so follow an- 62 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT other. There are apparently more or less compatible and incompatible smells and tastes, but there is no clearly defined order of smells and tastes, or any structure of smells and tastes in which each has its place fixed by its own qualitative being. Our experience of these elements is always of elements properly so-called, but also asthetically elementary, of course. Tastes may be subtly blended, and so may odors. Cooks and perfumers are in their way refined and sensitive artists, as tea-tasters and wine-tasters are expert critical judges. But such art and such criticism have no intelligible, or at least so far discovered, structural or critical principles, simply because the elements they work with have neither intelligible structure nor apparently any discoverable order in variation. It is this lack that rules them out of the characteristically sthetic realm, not any lack of spatial distance from the body, nor of objectivity in themselves as specific characterized ele-ments; nor is it their admitted occurrence in the consumption of the objects of which they are qualities. Their extremely transitory occurrence only marks them as not suitable elements for asthetic structures that are to remain long before us. They do have a degree of distance after all, as great, if measured from our minds, as the distance of any sense qual-ity; and it is the mind or the mind-body, not the body as such to which they are present at all. They have complete and well-defined objective native character, clearly dis-criminable specific natures, often even very subtle and refined and exciting. If they are more fleeting in their occurrence than some other beauties, they are no more fleeting than the colors of sunset, nor than many beautiful forms, and they are just as readily reproducible or more so. No beauty is more than a little lasting, for whatever occurs at ESTHETIC JUDGMENT all, to present us with any quality, also by its very nature passes away. But relations objectively clear in given orders and a defining structure of variation, tastes and odors and bodily feelings do not have, and it is for this reason that we call them not merely the bare materials of beauty-colors and sounds and shapes are also only materials of beauty-but elementary asthetic materials. For they remain merely elements, refusing to become for us, in any kind of intelligible human arts, within relational structures or movements or processes, that is, such composed and complex and elaborated beauties as we build up out of shapes and colors and lines and sounds. Before we turn to these latter it is important to repeat with emphasis the fact that, while taste and smell are not the asthetic senses par excellence, they are capable of asthetic experience merely by virtue of being senses at all. For like all sense presentations, smells and tastes can be pleasant to perception, can be dwelt on in contemplation, have specific and interesting character, recognizable and rememberable and objective. They offer an object, that is, for sustained discriminating attention, and in general they fulfill the conditions necessary for esthetic experience recorded in asthetic judgments. While they remain only elements in such ex-perience, like bodily feelings, and offer no intrinsic structure or formal relations in variation or combination by which they might become the materials of conscious arts of smell and taste, they are still beauties, the elementary materials of certain limited asthetic experiences. They do also enter into higher, that is, less elementary, esthetic experiences, if not of all the arts at least of some representative art, and without forcing themselves upon attention they help compose beauties definitely expressive, the 64 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT recognized elements of which are forms and colors and sounds. Organ tones depend without question, for even their strictly asthetic effect, at least in part on the feelings not due to hearing and ears, but stirred by quite other bodily processes. The beauty of flowers is enriched by fragrance, the beauty of Catholic ceremonials by the odor of incense. Thus while they are only elementary esthetic qualities, they are in exactly the same sense as sounds and shapes the materials of beauty and even of complex structural beauty. While they themselves are but elements, they are materials of more than elementary beauties. So far science and art have discovered in them no order or structural principles by which to compose with them, so that they remain either separately appreciated bare elements, or, if they go to make up beauties apprehended in the main by other senses, they enter as hidden or unconsciously employed constituents, with no apparently necessary relations to or in the structures of such non-elementary, that is composed or complex beauty. Since tastes and smells and vital feelings reveal no principles of ordered variation, it is obvious that the compositions into which they do as a matter of fact enter are cases of natural or representative beauty; for the beauties of art as such, being forms created by man on some principle or other, however vaguely known or crudely followed, require such objectively established relations. Human composing is doing something with elementary materials that are capable of being composed, and elements cannot be put together at all unless in themselves and by their very nature they are capable of sustaining structural relations to one another, relations of contrast, balance, rhythmic sequence, form in gen-eral. These relations must be at least dimly discerned by any artist if he is to use the materials of beauty at all. But 65 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT there is no such system of smells and tastes, and what relations and contrasts we do notice in such matters seem fairly arbitrary and accidental: apples with pork, perhaps, and perhaps not sour wine with sweets; certain blendings of tea and of spices, certain combinations toned into each other with sugar, or toned in general with garlic; but no structure, or any very clear general principles, though the whole matter is in all probability not so formless and accidental as it may seem, as current psychology is beginning to discover. One is indeed tempted to look for articulate principles here as elsewhere, if only to dignify to obstinately verbal minds whole realms of expert activity which seem to them too natural and domestic to be important and interesting, and too illiterate, it may be thought, to have any full moral status in the society of the arts. What we are to point out here is that natural beauty in general is so largely of just this unprincipled sort, whether in its rank, unchaste profusion, or in its natural but unintelligible selection and composition. Nature at some places, at least, and at various times, without men's efforts, assumes lovely aspects, unintelligibly composed and unreasonably fine. In fact much of what men, artists particularly, know of color combination has been learned not out of any knowledge or perception of the orders and structures that color and line and shapes inherently possess by being color and line and shape, but from the purely accidental and familiar success of such combinations as nature has exhibited to them, in rocks under sunlight, birds and flowers against trees and sky, hills beyond running streams, metals or jewels against human flesh, and the thousand other happy accidents of natural beauty. If we do not know enough of perfumes or colors or sounds to compose with all of them at once, this is not to 66 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT say that all these may not in nature go to make up rare beauty, nor that nature may not with impunity paint the lily with its own fragrance and add as integral elements in natural beauties the asthetic materials of the despised senses of smell and taste. If there is a beauty of August nights, or beauty in the rareness of a June day, or the fresh loveliness after rain, if there is ripe and languorous beauty in the mist and mellow fruitfulness of autumn, or a hard, cold beauty of glittering winter frosts, such beauty is not all for the eye and ear, and if we do not ourselves know how to blend smells and tastes with sound and form and color to compose such beauties, we need not foist our limitations upon nature. The saltiness of the breeze is as integral to the beauty of the sea as the flashing of the fish or the sweep of the gulls or the thunder of the surf or the boiling of the foam. If we know no modes of arranging smells or tastes or vital feelings or even noises in works of art, nature does not hesitate to combine the soughing of pines, the fragrance of mountain air, and the* taste of mountain water or its coolness on the skin, with dazzling mountain sunlight and the forms and colors of rocks and forests, to make a beauty intense and thrilling in an unexpected purity and elevation, almost ascetic in its very complexity and richness. The greatest beauties of nature are concrete and full. Nature appears to have no sthetic prejudices against any sort of elementary asthetic materials, nor to lack insight into the principles of their combination in the greatest variety. Only human limitations may miss some of these elements and human insight fail to recognize any principles of structure or form to hold them so firmly together and make them often so transcendently beautiful. But what happens in nature is not, of course, art, and an 67 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT artist must work with materials that have relations, degrees of qualitative difference, established orders of variation, structural principles of combination. While we must be careful to include in the materials of beauty sense elements of all sorts, since all the senses, by virtue of being senses, may take such pleasure in their specific objects as is in all rigor to be called asthetic pleasure, we must admit that these elements of smell and taste remain mere elements, except where natural occurrences happen to combine them, and through familiarity sometimes to sanctify the combination to men and to art, on no principles intelligible or available to human beings, but as some of the richest of natural or of representative beauties. As sthetic materials they remain for us elementary in the simple sense of being elements, specifically zsthetic in quality, but still merely elements, not amenable to composition through intrinsically established orders. § 2 For less elementary asthetic experience the materials are sound and shapes and color and line. The simple distinction that marks these materials is that they present objective structural orders intrinsic to their qualitative variation, through which we have control over them to build them into the complex formal beauties characteristic of the human arts and no longer the beauties of elements alone or of merely accidental natural combinations. If nature loves tastes and smells and vital feelings as well as she does colors and sounds and shapes, we may be ready enough to appreciate the beauty both of her materials and of her composi-tions; but in our own human compositions we are limited to such materials as order and arrange themselves by their own intrinsic nature. And to know even a little of humanly made 68 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT beauties or even of natural ones involving these intrinsically ordered elements, we must know their order and their formal variation, and learn from this the possibilities they furnish, not for mere fortuitous, if often felicitous, combina-tions, but for composition in which the principles of such order and form have been consciously employed or at least intuitively discerned. The essential nature of these orders or structural princi-ples, which are intrinsic to the materials as such, which lie embedded in the very nature of color or sound or shape and line, vary of course with the varying materials, since it is just the defining nature of the material that is its falling into that sort of order that it has, that unique kind of relation that establishes the place of any one given determinate color or sound or shape in the range of colors or sounds, or the structural possibilities of lines and shapes and masses. It is clear that what is peculiar to color, for example, is not any quality that sounds can have; what is peculiar to sound is impossible to color; and spatial form as such is simply spa-tial, not colored or resonant. Thus no intrinsic order or structure of colors can be the order intrinsic to sounds or shapes, much less to smells or tastes or muscular imagery. There are also, of course, orders common to several ma-terials. Clearly enough, sounds occur and in occurring involve temporal sequence; and if they occur in throats, they involve the feelings of muscular coördinations and activities besides. Clearly enough, also, colors are found in shapes, along lines, and in general in spatial order. What we must look for here is that peculiar order in color which is not temporal, and for that order in shapes that is uniquely spa-tial. Time orders we shall find common to the occurrence of any color, any sound, any shape, and so, available for 69 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT composing with them and making structures out of them, but not intrinsic to them and their nature in the sense in which the order of hue is intrinsic to color, the order of pitch intrinsic to sound, and geometrical structure intrinsic to line and shape. While all this directs us to these intrinsic orders as funda-mental, it indicates clearly enough that still more fundamental factor in all esthetic experience, a factor in all occurrence and therefore in all experience of form or color or sound, in all the experience to be had in an existing —that is, temporally occurring-world. This most fundamental fact of order and arrangement is of course rhythm, and rhythm, as we shall see, is applicable to composition with any materials whatever. But that which rhythmically occurs is in itself esthetic material, and, though sound embodies it more obviously than line or shape-for even space is temporal in all motion-shapes, too, may be rhythmical, though not unless their spatial nature defines them as what moves rhythmically or progresses in a pattern. Rhythm is all-pervasive in its application, since all there is in the world moves to its own peculiar measure, rocks and trees as well as waves of sand or of ocean, or drum-beats or dances or songs, or laboring bodies or machines themselves. But only perceptible rhythm is asthetic, and for perception motion on too great or too small a scale is rest. To complicate matters even here, however, perception and feeling, occurring as they do in time, have their own rates, and these may introduce rhythm into movements or spatial structure where it would not otherwise be felt. But it will be easier to grasp both the nature and the significance of this possibly all-pervasive and absolutely-even metaphysically, perhaps-fundamental character of asthetic experience and 70 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT of all objects of such experience, all manifestations in beauty, after we have surveyed those intrinsically present orders of the very materials of beauty that manifest rhythms so vari-ously, faintly or clearly, directly or indirectly, making rhythm sometimes a primary, and sometimes scarcely even a secondary, consideration. § 3 Before we pass to a detailed account of these intrinsic and unique orders in the very materials of beauty, we may here mention them briefly and then leave this general account to turn to more specific description of the separate kinds of æsthetic material in their peculiarities, their possibilities of variation on the one hand and of combination and composition on the other. It is clear at once that in color the intrinsic variation, peculiar and unique, is what we call difference in hue, so that absence of color in the rich, lively meaning of the word means absence of hue. We contrast colored surface, colored walls, colored toys, colored glasses, colored light, with white or black or gray primarily, not with absence of all visual sensation. The colors of the rainbow are what we mean by colors, the breaking of the white radiance into the discriminably different hues from red to violet. Colors vary in other ways, of course, but it is variation in hue, and combinations and contrasts of hue, that are intrinsic to color and nowhere else to be found. This is what is sometimes called the specificity of sensa tion. It is the fact that color, being color, being the specific hue that it is in any case, is just uniquely its own quality for vision; and if we apply loosely the term color to musical sounds, or mental states of depression or the reverse, or if we speak of the colors of tones or the toning of color, we go 7I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT beyond what we mean by color itself, to apply terms not in their specific literal senses, but either by analogy, and often vaguely and with resulting confusion as well as the suggestiveness intended, or else by letting these terms color and tone carry as their meaning the principles of order and variation common to both but not uniquely present in either. For color or sound may vary also not in specific hue or pitch but in intensity, for example, although even here the specific intensity is in the one case brightness or darkness, in the other, loudness or softness, and these are not directly but only indirectly or even only analogously comparable. In sound it is clear enough that pitch, differences in pitch or combinations of pitch, is the uniquely ordering quality. Sounds may vary in intensity too, as we just noted, as colors also may; but as color has no pitch, so sound has no hue, and nowhere but in the asthetic materials called sounds do we find an intrinsic order of pitch established. We may use abstract terms such as value in its technical meaning for painters, and say that as color-value is higher or lower, so pitches are higher and lower; but here the confusion of the parallel is obvious and the work mostly of words. What we mean by high in pitch depends entirely on the meaning of pitch itself, which simply is this specific way in which sounds differ from each other more or less, and in which colors do not, the way in which a high note is above a lower note, not the way in which a high color value is above a lower one of the same or another hue. For this last is a difference in what is usually, but after all ambiguously, called saturation, a way of differing peculiar to color not to pitch; so that while there is an analogy between higher and lower color value and louder and softer sounds, there is an equally good analogy, perhaps a better one, between higher and lower color-value 72 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT and differences in timbre, the difference, for example, between brass and strings, and only a rather faint analogy between pitch differences and differences in color-values. Even these analogies find little but abstract words to base themselves upon, words which refer to abstracted aspects of what in reality are full concrete qualities, the abstraction being sometimes useful enough to make a comparison, and forceful and enlightening enough as indicating in both fields genuine structural possibilities, but as applied to the materials themselves and their specific intrinsic orders established by their unique qualitative specificity with which we are all so familiar, only analogies, which, since there is no common principle involved, no identity of these two structural modes of variation, but only the fact that in both cases the variations are ordered, lead almost inevitably to confusion and often to actual error. When we come to lines and space-forms, the intrinsically ordering feature is harder to name, but is after all clear enough except that it is two-fold. We have two principles, which we may call that of simple extension or extendedness itself-shape perhaps is the best term-and that of geometrical order, which permits what we call different perspectives of the same spatial configuration, such different perspectives being often not merely geometrically correlated but apparent to vision as the same. While the geometrical identity may remain, however, a change in perspective may result in such great changes in the spatial appearance that for vision there is no identity recognizable, but only a difference. It will be necessary to explain the two principles and difterentiate them not only from each other but from other meanings suggested by the terms we seem forced to employ. But mathematics is, in its strictly geometrical, non-analytical methods, at least 73 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT in part visually intuitive, and we have therefore to seek the intrinsic orders of the asthetic materials of spatial form not only in obvious appearances but in the mathematical nature of spatial order. So far as we can give any clear account of all this, it is to be deferred to a later chapter. For the present we may be content with illustrations that suggest the difficulties. A shift in perspective makes the circular elliptical, the vertical horizontal, and so on. But also the eye sometimes sees the elliptical as circular, sometimes not. Thus the character of shapes and lines may or may not vary while the strictly geometrical order remains the same, as a mathematically defined conic section may in limiting cases be a line or a point, and still possess all its geometrical order and the corresponding properties. So too lines or surfaces or solids lose none of their mathematically ordered properties by being revolved through angles or referred to a new system of coördinates or moved to greater distances or projected upon planes or solids at various angles. But for sthetic perception such shifts are often all-important. A circle is one shape, an ellipse another. A group of horizontal parallels is one appearance, a group of vertical parallels another. Shapes and directions and sizes are absolute for our sight and not to be confounded with one another simply because geometrically they may be mere transformations in reference not affecting intrinsic mathematical order or structure. In fact spatial form itself is one of the striking illustrations that any beauty is absolutely its unique self only in relation to the perceiving subject, his spatial orientation and habits in general, and his space location in particular. But for such a subject, so constituted and placed, the spatial characters of objects and their visible beauty are what they are 74 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT uniquely and absolutely. Objects are of one specific size and shape and proportion, they lie in one direction, and the lines themselves have the direction they have and no other. Obviously the unique and intrinsic ordering quality and structural principles of spatial form are a complex and difi-cult matter, but we have at least seen that they are present, and their uniqueness is plain. Colors have as hues neither shape nor direction but only hue, sounds may move in space and time, but only sounds have pitch, and pitch itself has neither dimensions nor shape nor direction, nor is even duration of sound its actual intrinsic quality. Thus we have marked and distinguished from one another these three orders of variation, each intrinsic to its own realm. We may now go on to treat these three different kinds of differently ordered sthetic materials separately and in greater detail. 75 CHAPTER VI THE ESTHETIC MATERIALS OF SOUND I. The vital significance of elements of sound. 2. The orders intrinsic to tones: pitch, timbre, loudness. § I No doubt the most obvious characteristic of the surface of our world is color, and it is often the arts of color and of spatial forms and masses that we mean when we speak of art as distinguished from poetry and music. But if we use the word more broadly, it includes not only painting and sculpture, but music and poetry as well. Still more broadly, art is everything produced artificially, as we say, that is, by the operation of men upon the materials of the world, consciously undertaken for any purpose—not only painting and sculpture and architecture, or even these and music and dancing and poetry, but also the great field of the industrial arts. Here too, as well as in the natural world itself, as contrasted with these arts of men, we find the very nature of all surface experience to be color and shape and spatial relations. But for all this, it still seems simpler and more useful for understanding asthetic experience to begin with the elements of this surface that come to our ears instead of our eyes; and this for several reasons. In the first place, sound is for us in many cases the primal mark of life and even of actuality. If motion is still more elementary, motion is not so much the surface of our world 76 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT as its permeating inner being, and our own inner being, the very heart of human vitality and existence. Motion is rather the substance and soul of nature than its appearance. And when motion is manifest to sense, it is in changes of surface appearances that we are aware of motion as within, as the active principle of natural life. Now since asthetic experience is, as we have seen, rather the experience of the appearing surface of the world than the perception of its inner structure and relations, the intuition of permanent qualities in forms, retained by mind as they appear, these static forms, being, as it were, taken from their transitory occurrences and made the possession of memory and imagination after they have once struck upon the senses in direct and immediate intuition, it is these appearances and not motion as such that is directly sensed. Motion itself is known rather than sensed, and it is known not as the surface but as the underlying actuality that manifests itself to sense only indirectly in appearances, subject always to change, but capable of being held before the mind in their permanent, that is, eternally identical natures. Now for human experience, sounds seem to be even closer to motion in their nature than colors. A painted ship upon a painted ocean is the very symbol of the unreal, though it is not lacking in color or shape or space relations. And such a painted scene is dead. It is silent. We speak of the silence of death to mark its most salient and imperious feature, its absolute finality, its inhuman distance and separation- still as death, silent as the grave. If motion of some special sort is life, sound is its mark and sign. Vitality always sounds: the babbling brook, the roaring surf, the whispering breeze, the calls and cries and songs of beasts and birds, the speech of men. So that it is at least not merely arbitrary to begin an 77 千 s'se trun"! ESTHETIC JUDGMENT account of the elements of sthetic experience not with colors and shapes but with sounds themselves. And there is another reason for so doing. Sounds are the elements of those arts rising from the purely spontaneous performances of human beings, music and poetry. Whatever the origin of language, sounds from human throats must have expressed from the beginning the same unmistakable emotions that we always recognize in the joyful barking of a dog or the comfortable purring of a cat or the happy squeals of human infants or the equally unmistakable cries of fear or pain from suffering animals or sorrowing human beings. Unlike colors, the very elements of sound are not only the immediately apparent content or object of intuition, but always directly expressive, whether as spontaneous cries or as the elements of music. Color is of course : expressive too; but while, for example, red is vaguely warm; or rich and green is cool and thin, sharp, high-pitched tones; • are directly exciting and rolling low ones directly ominous. Sound is, as unequivocally as any asthetic element could be, expressive of significant feeling even without being composed into structures. And sound, instead of mainly imitating or representing beauties found in nature and expressive of moods and feelings, may almost be said to be these moods and feelings, to be the loves and hates and fears and joys it carries to our ears. For these emotions themselves are in substance complex systems of bodily vibrations in us, and sound somehow carries in itself directly to the ear the very vibrations of living feeling. There is, of course, one still more fundamentally expressive art, dancing. But, as contemplated, as asthetically enjoyed from without, dancing has a content not merely of rhythm but of colors and forms in space. It is not in its ele- 78 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT mentary nature a content sui generis. And if dancing embodies rhythm and motion more obviously than any other art, still on the one hand rhythm is of the formal nature of all arts as well as of dancing, and on the other hand, dancing is never the mere rhythmic elements themselves, but the rhythm appearing through other elementary materials of beauty, color and shape and space relations. The rhythm of dancing is after all manifested in moving shapes; it is in an order of time, and such temporal order, as we have already seen, is applicable to, if not necessarily involved in, all of the arts, certainly not least so in the arts of sound. In another sense too, the arts of sound are closer to us than the arts of color. For the instruments of sound are first of all our own bodies. The human voice is limited in range, but within its range it is a perfect instrument, capable of the infinite variations of pitch involved in passing from one end of its range to the other. Thus, while there are no absolute grounds for calling sounds more primary or more fundamental elements of esthetic experience than any other elements, there is some justification for treating sound first among asthetic materials on the ground of its being the very mark of vital life in a sense in which color and form are not, of its being spontaneously and natively produced in ourselves, and of its being, even as elementary material, always expressive of feeling and emotion. If dancing is a more purely rhythmical art than music, and so closer to expressing that most fundamental characteristic of asthetic objects and activities in general, rhythm itself, dancing as an art involves more senses than that of the feeling of temporally patterned mo-tion; in its appreciation, it involves the perception of changes in visual appearances, whereas sound is heard without being 79 (78), is mennixg ESTHETIC JUDGMENT seen. And while dances are of course structures, sound elements are still more highly esthetic than dance elements, since they are, through their intrinsic defining order, more capable of differentiation in an ordered range, and so more clearly and fully felt as related to one another in heard agreement and disagreement and sequence. It is on this account that they are capable of being built up into the indefinitely elaborate but always fully defined structures of musical art which employ and even tax the fullest human capacities. We are interested here, however, not in any possible primacy of sound as elementary sthetic material, but in the intrinsic order of this asthetic material, the materials of heard beauty, beauty that comes to the ear. And sound has the advantage for us of requiring no other materials of sense to be itself manifest in beauty. While colors are always upon surfaces and shapes, sounds come directly to our ears as pure sounds, unmixed either with the materials of beauty from the other senses, or with the meanings which, as in colored surfaces, we read into sthetic appearances, directing us away from these appearances themselves to the natural objects we recognize, and so to that whole world of further interests and relations that is involved in our knowledge of the world. Sounds are, as we actually have them in the arts of sound, pure, unentangled with representing anything beyond themselves, and yet so intrinsically ordered by their own nature as to be capable of an infinite variety in specific detail and an infinite variety of composed structures, all for the ear alone, all made of elements of one sense realm. It was sound that Augustine used to reveal the meaning of creation out of nothing; the word that was with God was a sound, and it was the sounding word that made intelligible 80 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the creation of an ordered world out of the chaos of sheer nothingness. As we go on to an account of this order intrinsic to the very nature of sounds, and these possibilities of structure inherent in the realm of the audible materials of beauty, we must not forget, however, as we have just noted, that even as elementary materials, sounds are always directly ex-pressive. If in music we may become absorbed in tremendous structures, themselves expressive, in their dynamic relations, of both subtlety and volume quite beyond the power of words to express or characterize with any degree of determinateness, so that single elements are no longer felt by themselves but only as transitive connections and relations in a whole that demands all our attention and absorbs all our conscious feeling, it is still true that the very elements themselves never lose their expressive power, stirring ancient fears and hopes that are no longer parts of our habitually recognized or even consciously felt world. If we are to confine ourselves just now to sound as merely one of the kinds of beautiful material, we need not lose sight of the fact that this material itself carries within it an emotional content of unknown depths, and feelings appropriate to the ancient dominion of nature over all her creatures. Our main purpose here, however, is to mark out the elements of sound as intrinsically ordered by their own nature, and this is in itself a sufficiently complex matter. § 2 First of all we must notice that in nature as we hear it, few of the experiences of sound we get are unmixed clear tones. Noises rather than tones come to us from waves on the shore, wind in the trees, thunder-storms in the clouds. 8 I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT Even insects and animals make more noise than music. And in our modern world we are enveloped in a ceaseless and confused din from which it would be very difficult to extract intrinsic principles of order. Tones, then, not noises, are the æsthetic materials of sound that we can best use and know. Nature and industry resound, and our world is surfaced and enveloped with noises that may or may not strike happily upon our ears, that may or may not go to make up natural or accidental concrete beauties. But beauties that are composed of sounds by human beings are made of chosen tones, and it is tones that musical art employs in all its main works and all its formidable and comprehensible structures. We must not forget that music is only a very small part of audible beauty; but the beauties offered us in nature's noises as well as her tones, combined on no principles intelligible to us, furnish sthetic experience to be had merely by attention to the finished concrete situation, for which no conscious training fits us to apprehend it quickly and surely; and there are no guides for taste and no principles of structure here for us to notice and make use of in building beauties ourselves and in understanding our appreciation of beauties built by others. Tones then are our proper subject-matter, and among tones, as we have already seen, the principle of discrimination and so of differences in an order, is the continuous range of pitch. This principle may be very simply stated. Of any tone it may be said that it lies between other tones in an order of pitch running through a one-dimensional series from end to end. Pitch is a continuous qualitative stretch, from that of huge organ pipes to the last distinguishable notes of the piccolo or fife, from the bass notes of Russian choir-singers to the shrill whistle of a school-boy, from the 82 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT bottom of a fire-siren to the top. The words we use for these extremes are high and low, but we must remember that we use them after all somewhat figuratively, as ultimately we use all words. Height is spatial and so is depth, and it is something of an accident, perhaps, that high and low are our most nearly literal description of variations and extremes of pitch. To children beginning the study of music the terms have often to be explained in this application. High and low are so regularly used in this sense, however, that they cause no misunderstanding, and in any case they are the sole words we have for the purpose. The facts are simply range or sequence of pitch in such order that any one pitch lies between others and is defined as the pitch it is, and in terms of pitch, relatively to these others. Fortunately for definiteness, the mechanical production of tones is a process involving measurable numbers of vibrations, and we can for convenience name any determinate pitch with reference to the number of vibrations per second of the body that emits it. Thus we may make instruments to produce tones within a given range by choosing material bodies whose rates of vibration we know. And men knew comparatively little of the means of the controlled production of sounds in given orders upon instruments until physics had taught us in terms of vibrations per second what sizes and shapes of material bodies to construct. But it was not the mechanical means of producing sound that gave us music, and much less is it a knowledge of vibration rates that arranges pitches as higher or lower. For that, all we need is ears to listen to tones of voice. That men's voices are lower in pitch than women's is a fact observable by the crudest ear, and music began, we may suppose, as vocal. In vocal tones, too, the terms high and low are es- 83 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT pecially intelligible. For when we produce them, it is those from lower regions that we call low and those from high in our heads that we call high. And perhaps it is also true that all high sounds seem to come from higher spatial regions than low ones. Thunder itself, though it originates in the clouds, comes to us as from the trembling earth beneath and all about us, and it is not entirely figurative to say that sounds from heights are high and sounds from depths are low. One more point before we turn to our proper subject here. While we hear sounds with our ears, there is no doubt that our vocal organs themselves play a great part in discriminating them as higher and lower. The coördination of ear and throat through the brain we know very little about, but a very slight psychological investigation, even a purely be-havioristic one, is enough to inform most of us positively that vocal organs and their connections play a very large part in sthetic discrimination in the realm of the audible surface of the experienced world. Even if there is no conscious feeling from the throat, the mere fact that a heard pitch can be reproduced by the voice indicates a coördination of great refinement, and how much this inner or even unconscious relation of throat and ear has to do with distinguishing one pitch from another, no one seems to be in a position to say with any degree of assurance. As we have already seen, the specific peculiarity of sound as elementary sensuous content, aside from its simply being sound, and not color or shape, is that any pitch, by being the pitch it is, is discriminably different from every other pitch in an absolute order of higher and lower. A given simple pure tone must be a specific pitch, with no movement in it of course, but in an ordered range. through which, as in a 84 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT siren, we pass from lower to higher or higher to lower with a sense of perfect continuity. There are no leaps in the range, one sound simply appearing to rise or fall into another by an unbroken gradation. If we stop at any given point in the range, we feel the pitch to be either higher or lower than the one we started with. And any pitch passed through in the course of the rising or falling is between the two extremities in the order native to any continuous one-dimen-sional extensive magnitude. Thus specific pitches, like points on a line, are at various distances from one another; and for the purposes of construction, we may choose a number of these pitches at certain intervals, neglect the intermediate ones, and confine ourselves to arrangements in those we have chosen. Since these remain fixed, we may also name them and so be able to indicate in these names the intervals which we are to employ. But since these pitches themselves have no relations except that of being first, sec-ond, third, and so on, among those we have chosen, there are no settled points to begin at or conclude with, and no special relations or tendencies calling for movement from any given one to any other one. Nor is there any fixed point at the bottom or the top except as defined by the lowest or highest note we can discriminate, nor could the number of intermediate notes be decided upon except according to the degree of discrimination of our ears, which varies enormously from one person to another. If my ear is crude either by nature or through lack of training, I shall fail to distinguish a note as higher than another, which to a more delicate ear lies at some distance from it with several notes between. Thus the order of betweenness which gives the possibility for distinguishing elements as higher or lower, neither offers us any one set of discrete pitches at regular intervals from each 85 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT other, nor any focal points to begin with or pass through or rest upon. And, as we shall find, it is not pure pitch itself that offers us these further ordering principles. It is to the mechanical accidents, or rather the natural constitution of the physical instruments of sound production, that we must turn for such principles. When any pitch is actually sounded, it is by virtue of a vi-bration, transmitted through air-waves, set up in physical bodies, whether columns of air themselves, or human tissues, or stretched strings, or other resonant material-wood or metal or whatever it may be. And the sounds we ordinarily hear, produced, as they always are, by physical means, are never one pure pitch, because bodies, unfortunately for the simplicity of theory, vibrate variously themselves and set up various vibrations all at once in contiguous things. It is about vibration itself, then, that we need more information before we find the principle of order we are now seek-ing. Physical bodies simply have their own vibration rates, rates at which they insist upon oscillating, if they oscillate at all. As a taut gut string always vibrates at the same rate when we pluck it, so huge balanced rocks, weighing many tons, may be set in motion by the pygmy strength of a man, provided the impetus is given in time to the native vibration rate. The fact is familiar to us all in the pendulum, upon whose regularity we rely more firmly than upon our own words or upon our friends. A pendulum of given length, if it swings at all, swings at its own rate, so many oscillations per minute or per second, until it ceases to oscillate at all. If the clock runs down, the oscillations become less in spatial magnitude, but their number per minute remains the same. Any one who has "pumped" a rope swing knows this phenomenon too well to need any other example; the swing 86 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT has its own timing, its own regular rhythm, and one's efforts can be exerted to increase or diminish the height to which it rises at either end of its arc, but they are useless and fruitless unless they fit its own native rate of oscillation, and while we may set a swing in motion or stop it, we can do nothing to change the number of times per minute or per hour that it rises and falls. Now the sounds our ears can distinguish are produced by vibrations that are fairly rapid, and instruments producing tones must therefore be bodies capable of being set into rapid vibration, at least sixteen or so per second. It is rather small-sized objects that vibrate at such rates, so that fortunately we can handle and control such objects and even arrange several of them close together, and so in quick succession produce a variety of pitches at will. Moreover, the rate of vibration of bodies is inversely proportional to their magni-tude; a stretched string twice as long as another of the same character vibrates half as fast. And when we set the longer string to vibrating, it vibrates not only throughout its length and as a whole, at its native rate, but also in its halves. That is, the halves vibrate at the native rate belonging to their size and length and weight, the length of half the whole string which is vibrating also as a whole. Thus when a body vibrates rapidly enough as a whole to give an audible pitch, its halves are also vibrating less strongly to give another audible pitch, which merges in the main pitch heard and helps give it what we shall later come upon as timbre or quality. But for the present we need notice only that when we hear a sound of given pitch produced by any sort of vibrating body, we are also in almost all cases hearing at least one other pitch, which seems to us simply the fullness or richness or characteristic quality of the sound of the former. If we take 87 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT a separate string, half as long as our first, which vibrates therefore twice as fast as it, instead of its giving us a new note higher than the first, this new note is really part of the original note of the longer string and sounds to us like the same note only a little thinner and higher up. We name this second note the octave of the first. If we pass along a range of sounds from low to high, beginning with the note of our original string, we shall come, then, among these higher notes, to that one produced by the half-length string, and this will sound indeed higher; but since it was all in the sound of the lower note, since it was indeed a part of the sound of that note, it will give us the sense of familiarity. We shall recognize in it the sound we heard before and call it the same note an octave higher. At least in the development of music in western Europe this is what has happened, and the physical conditions of the production of tone seem very simply to make it what we call a natural happening, especially when we consider that even in very early music men's and women's voices, trying to sing the same tune, met with just these conditions. Here then we have the new principle of order we have been looking for. Once we pick out a note of any particular pitch in the whole one-dimensional range of pitches, the continuous stretch or line of pitch variation from low to high, this note recurs again and again as we go up the stretch. If we name the first note by a letter, A, the second note will be another A, perhaps a little a. And since the same holds as we mount higher, we shall have the whole stretch marked off by our ear as from A to a, to a', to a", and so on. What was one long uninterrupted single line or stretch of an infinite number of pitches, becomes thus naturally, and simply as striking upon our ears from the physical bodies that pro- 88 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT duce it, a recurring short stretch, from A to a, from a to á, from a to a", , until we reach the end of our powers of dis- tinguishing sounds at all, because the vibration rates are of such frequency that our ears do not catch them as tones. And we must notice that although it is the physical production of sound that makes this phenomenon clear to our minds, it is simply our ears, attending closely to the audible surface of our world, that make out for us the recurring short stretch from one A to another, as lying along the one whole stretch of all the pitches, these recurring short stretches occupying it completely and continuously, and dividing it conveniently and naturally. The octave, which names the interval from any given pitch to that pitch which is produced by a vibration rate twice as fast, serves to divide the whole range of pitches as tens divide the number series for us, and with a comparable effect, not giving any new relations in the whole series; for the one intrinsic relation in pitches, as in numbers, is that any one pitch follows its predecessor and is followed by the succeeding pitch. But the range is now punctuated for us into recurring intervals; it is divided into stretches all alike in length and in possibilities for further division. Instead of having a mere unbroken stretch of always higher sounds in one long line from the lowest to the highest tones discernible, we have the periodic recurrence of a short series of pitches, each series a single octave. It is the further division and order within the octave that gives us the basis of all those structures that are built of tones, a starting point, a resting place, and characteristic transitions through determinate intervals. But we have not given any account of this division, the marking of the intervals between one A and the next, the choosing of a scale of discrete notes; and this process varies with the ears and feel- 89 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ings of peoples and times and places. It is clear enough, however, that whatever intermediate points we may choose to stop at and select and name between A and a, may be found again and repeated from a to á, from a to a", , and so all the way up or down. It is also clear that since the variation upward from A to a seems continuous to our ears, we might choose a very large number of intermediate stopping places, and make a scale of many, many tones. In fact we might arbitrarily divide the so-called octave, the interval or stretch from one A to another, into two or three or four or seven or ten or twelve, or twelve hundred equal divisions, and name them all. What has actually been done in western music, however, is to choose seven steps of different lengths by which we move by pronounced intervals from one end to the other. If we call the note we begin with, say la, our first step, the next la will be our eighth step, to be called first again if we go further up. It is this quite special, but in many ways natural and effective arrangement, that makes octave, eighth, that is, the name for the interval from A to a in our account, or for the first a above any other a, of which this higher note itself is called the octave. In the paragraph above, a is thus the octave of A, a of a, a" of á. In careful scientific accounts of sound, the twelve hundred divisions are used, one hundred so-called cents to each of twelve equal divisions. But since it is the ratio of vibration rates, not numbers of vibrations arithmetically added, that corresponds to heard distances of pitches from each other, this method of division uses logarithmic calculations, and is too complicated to be made out in a few words. If we have good ears, we distinguish many more than the seven different pitches from A to a, however. Even for familiar tunes we must distinguish twelve pitches before the fundamental recurs, 90 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT and musically trained or natively gifted ears distinguish so-called commas, some fifty odd in the octave. When we actually define the seven steps, and so indicate the relations of pitches to each other in the familiar diatonic scale, we have, of course, gone beyond an account of the intrinsically ordered variations of tone, to that of a specific musical combination, beyond the material elements of auditory beauty to a defined relational structure, dependent for its richness and its stability and power on the native possibilities of tone-relations, but distinctly a work of art. If this structure is so fundamental in music as to be felt as part of its elementary defining form in western countries, it is after all elementary in the art of music, not elementary as being the auditory material of beauty, of which it is constituted, as itself a complex and specific and even idiosyncratic whole of tonal relations, the familiar major scale or, with modifica-tions, the various minor scales. What we have further to notice here is two other sorts of variation in sound, one of them subtle and characteristic, the other neither subtle nor quite in the same sense characteristic. Sounds vary not only in pitch but also in what is called qual-ity. But this is a confusing term, since pitch itself is obviously one sort of quality. A less ambiguous term is timbre. And sounds also vary, as all sense materials do, in intensity, which, in this realm, is accurately and familiarly designated by the terms loudness and softness. When we mean by quality of tone neither pitch nor degree of loudness but the distinguishing character of, say, the human voice as contrasted with piano tones, or the characteristic quality of a violin tone as contrasted with that of a flute or a whistle, which is sounding the same pitch with an equal degree of loudness, we need a word other than 9I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT quality; for loudness and pitch are qualities too. In the realm of tone this special sort of variation is called variation in timbre. Whether timbre has been completely accounted for or not in scientific analysis, it is at least intimately wrapped up in the occurrence of overtones, and these we must stop to notice. Examples of sounds rich in overtones or partials, as they are also called, are in the first place likely to be lower sounds in general, since even the first overtone of any note is an octave above, and hence for very high notes the overtones are not distinguishable or even present in any sense to audition. The higher we go the fewer overtones there are, and timbre in very high notes is difficult to distinguish—harmonics on a violin almost whis-tle, and very high soprano notes sound hardly more vocal than the notes of a flute or even a triangle. Single notes well above the human vocal range are all very much more alike on different instruments than lower notes on these different instruments, which have clearly distinctive timbre, discernible by the least trained or gifted ears or even unmusical ears. Even such comparatively like sounds as those of tympani and tom-toms, when they are so low that the pitch is not accurately discriminated except by a very good ear, differ very markedly to the most ordinary ear in timbre itself. The denotation of the term is clear enough, then; we can all tell the difference between sounds from a trombone and those from a 'cello, we can all distinguish pianos from violins even on a gramophone, or any of these from a human voice, within a large part of the range where we can distinguish tones at all. But we are interested here not only in qualitative differences, but in the fact that such differences establish for us intrinsic principles of order, of contrast and relation, out of which we may build genuine struc- 92 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT tures. For genuine structures are such as are held together first of all by an order or form native, and therefore ap-plicable, to the elements that go to make them up. Now the one intrinsic characteristic order in tones is pitch, and while we may have various timbres at the same pitch, timbre itself is apparently in the main a matter of pitch combinations. If we stop to listen repeatedly to the rich quality of a low note on the piano, we soon notice that within this single note there is not only the fundamental low pitch that marks its place in the whole range, but various qualities like high notes produced by metal on metal, and it seems to be the simple fact that fractional vibration amply explains the effect. If a long string, vibrating as a whole, is also vibrating in its parts, we hear a tone made up not of one pitch but of many, blended no doubt partly physically outside our ears, but also by the elaborate mechanism of the ear itself, which allows us by sufficient attention to distinguish these various higher pitches within the fundamental pitch as actually the specific higher pitches that they are. Less training of the ear, or less sensitiveness, fails to distinguish the pitches as such; but even the ordinary untrained ear never fails to give us in sensation the specific character or timbre, and a very dull ear indeed can tell a violin from a piano on most occasions, even when just a single tone is sounded. Nor does the highly trained musically expert ear miss the timbre in distinguishing the overtones, any more than the epicure misses the exact flavor of his salad by distinguishing clearly in its taste the specific flavors of which the composite flavor is made up. If the garlic is a suspicion only, and the sugar a heightening of other flavors, there is still the recognizable garlic, the recognizable sweetness, as well as the recognizable subtle whole. And so of over- 93 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT 7 tones. They may be heard as distinguishable higher pitches, and rare ears with much training and attention have distinguished them up to the sixteenth or so in the high and brilliant ringing fullness of men's bass voices. But for the expert listener, as for ordinary ears, the specific quality remains as the characteristic timbre of the instrument producing the tone. Just which overtones are sounded, and with what varying degrees of intensity in various musical instruments, has been pretty fully investigated; but all we need to notice here is that since timbre is at least very largely a matter of over-tones, and overtones are specific pitches, there are ordered relations in the realm of timbre itself, making it possible to compose musical structures which have within them obvious or subtle contrasts and combinations of timbre as well as of pitches considered simply. The third possibility of variation in sound itself is that of intensity-loudness and softness. And since degrees of loudness and softness lie in one single range from silence to deafening intensity, which finally becomes painful instead of merely very loud, here is another principle of structure to serve the purposes of balance, contrast, climax, and form in general. Every tone we hear is complex; it has pitch and timbre, And a degree of loudness. In all three ways it is intrinsically differentiated from and related to other tones, of other pitch, or another degree of loudness, or of different timbre. And since it is not only kinds of instruments that vary in timbre, but almost any two particular instruments of the same kind or any two voices, neither a chorus nor a group of stringed instruments, much less an orchestra, of course, is simply bigger and louder than a single voice or a single 94 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT instrument. Not only is the range of pitch increased, as well as the range of intensity, but the variations and com-_binations of timbre are indefinitely multiplied. Music proper is not due merely to these intrinsic orders of variation in tonal elements, but it does depend for its peculiar nature, its characteristic appeal through the ear to the appreciating mind, on just these ordered elementary ma-terials. While its own character, in even the simplest mel-ody, includes more than these, without them and their beauty as elements and as sensuous material, it would not be the art of sound at all. 95 Gmail kac attac Prall judgment 177 kac attac Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 3:20 PM To: Stefan Kac CHAPTER VIII THE ESTHETIC MATERIALS OF SPACE 1. Practical prejudices and spatial wisdom. 2. Platonic fallacies, moral and intellectual. 3. The fallacy of independent objectivity illustrated in Hogarth. 4. Mathematical character and intuited shape. 5. Dimensionality as the type of order intrinsic to elements of spatial form: length, area, volume. 6. Spatial character as order in general. § I We have already noticed that the materials of beauty include more than color and sound, that especially in what we may call natural compositions, those occurring in the world accidentally, as we say, tastes and smells and vital feelings, as well as the imagery of all the senses, constitute materials of beauty both as separate elementary sense beauties and as component parts of beautiful structures, occurring naturally and directly or arranged artificially, and presented to sense. But of all of these asthetic materials, besides sound and color, only spatial shape and relation offers, in our present state of acquaintance with the surface of our world, the intrinsically ordered character that allows us to distinguish its specific sorts of variation and the principles on which spatial elements may be conjoined to form genuine structures, which are at the same time at least in part comprehensibly made up of elements in an order. But we can hardly approach this subject quite directly and I I6 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT without prejudice; for our earliest formal training directs our attention to the rigid requirements of spatial forms in our practical world of activity. A square room has only four corners. A quart measure will hold only two pints of milk. The maximum area that can be enclosed by a string or a fence of given length is the circular space of which that length is the circumference. What lies to the north cannot be seen by looking south. Right-angled triangles are so absolutely dependable, as to the ratios of the lengths of their sides to each other, that they help measure not only fields and city lots and the heights of mountains, but the sizes and distances of the sun, moon, and stars. With much of this geometrical rigor and finality attached to our conceptions of lines and shapes and angles in our constant dealings with them, it is a little hard to turn to the appearances of these as actually presented to the unprejudiced eye, and to see what is more or less immediately there for asthetic contemplation. In the first place, we do not so much see as judge of these shapes and distances and spatial relations and directions. We see spots or areas of color beside other colored patches, and our mind rather than our eye draws a boundary-line between them or a boundary line around one of them. What is clearly enough given to immediate vision, though we sometimes do and sometimes do not drop our practical habits to look and see—and the one fact is as important to sthetics as the other, of course-is simply the contrasting colored surfaces. Modern painters have realized this, as ancient painters no doubt also discerned it without erecting it into a first principle of their art, and have been able to produce by color masses alone beautifully vivid effects, in which the shapes are read in by us as we read shapes and lines and sizes into the natural objects about us. Nor is shape given by color alone II7 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT or always by actually drawn lines in pictures or in the mind seeing them. Shape is appreciated as well by touch and by muscular activity. And shape and distance and even direction are as clearly matters of muscular sensation as they are also matters of vision and sometimes even of hearing. § 2 Besides these prejudices of our early and practical learn-ing, which is itself so important for all of our working activities and which therefore cannot be neglected in our con-siderations, since perhaps it is never discarded even in as-thetic contemplation; besides the complication introduced into our appreciation of line and shape and space relations in general, as directly present to intuition, by the use of so many senses at once instead of the use of one sense only— touch and sight and muscular imagery and the immediate impression of distance due to subtleties of color and outline as well as to familiar experiences of locomotion— there have been introduced into our general notions of spatial shapes and relations ideas based upon theory itself, sometimes elaborate and confusing, sometimes clearly mistaken, and even tinged sometimes with ethical and political conceptions and ideals. Plato, in his moral and intellectual enthusiasm, definitely felt that geometrical shapes and relations and abstract mathematical forms were purer and more beautiful than mere sense objects, full of color and sensuous richness but subject constantly to change. And this was partly because to Plato true beauty, being of the mind, not of the senses, was necessarily to be appreciated intellectually. In his view of the scale of value, we rise from the many beautiful sensuously rich objects to their sheer forms, then on to pure mathe- I I 8 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT matical form itself, which only the reason can grasp, and then to that pure Platonic and altogether mythical abstrac-tion, still held to by some philosophers as the sole concrete asthetic object, the Idea of Beauty. If the lover and the artist had most hope of heaven in Plato's opinion, it was not because of their love of actual beauty and their devotion to it, but because this love and devotion in them was an intimation of immortality. That is, to speak more flatly and simply, because the eye that dwells lovingly on a concrete particular beautiful object is in Plato's theory the eye of the unconscious lover of the Idea of the Beautiful and through the Beautiful of the Good, which really attracts this discerning eye by its beneficent divinity, a divine reality somehow hidden behind or within the false sensuous appearance. Devotion to the appearance itself, what we should call actual esthetic appreciation, seemed to Plato good only so far as it annulled itself and thus led the soul on to cast out all love of mere transitory objects and their appearance to fleshly senses, and to rise to the mystical discernment of true Beauty itself, which means not our asthetic surface beauty but Plato's rationally comprehended Forms, not even geometrical shapes, but pure dialectical form itself. Taken at his word, Plato thus despised actual familiar esthetic experience as a professional swimmer might despise water-wings, a help perhaps to a weak beginner, their use at best the sign of an inner desire to swim, but the very negation of swimming itself, and, if adhered to for long, its effective prevention. At any rate, in Plato's mythical ladder of values it is easy to see that purely formal geometrical beauties are at least a step above the mixed concreteness of sensuously satisfying colored objects, and Plato leaves no doubt in our minds that he did rank abstract geometrical shapes higher than the full- I I9 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT textured actual surfaces of beautiful objects of sense per-ception. There are two resultant and connected mistakes here, both of which have passed into common human prejudice on the subject. And these survive quite cut off from, or at least in addition to, Plato's own primary, if mistaken, doctrine of Ideas, which after all, though it is still held in many minds as deeply but somewhat vaguely significant in various ways, is no longer an asthetic doctrine seriously accepted. The two prejudices, as still current, are mere floating notions with no anchor in even this consistently elaborated and honestly believed, if quite false, groundwork of Platonic metaphysics. The two mistakes are closely connected, but perhaps fairly distinguishable from each other, and often separately adhered to. One is simply the notion that the degree of beauty in spatial shape and arrangement is measured by the absence of any filling, of color chiefly, although texture is almost as important perhaps, though less emphasized because it is less fully within our clear knowledge. That is, spatial beauty, to be pure, must be purely formal in the sense that this form is to be the abstracted shape itself instead of this shape as of and upon the colored and perhaps richly and subtly textured concrete surface area or felt volume. So we may be told that the highest asthetic appreciation is the mathematician's, an error easy to make plausible by using the term purity instead of emptiness or thinness, in the same way in which ignorance is so often called innocence, and so lauded as virtue when it should be merely tolerated, or actually condemned, or as quickly as may be removed. Or a special asthetic response, whether empathy or not, may be supposed to be called up in great intensity, even when the volume of sense stimulation is lessened, as if the senses were I20 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT not the very names for our avenues of communication with the surface of our world, so that all the presumption is in favor of a volume and intensity of reaction in direct proportion to the fullness and variety of the sensory responses, up to the point where the mind is oppressed or distracted, as in mere barbaric din and display. This insistence on the purity instead of the amount and richness of quality lies very close to the old self-contradicting thesis of asceticism, that the highest and noblest pleasure is after all excruciating pain, or the greatest good the suffering of the greatest evil. This mistake is not so popular in the morals of our day; but, through a judicious use of terms, abetted by a traditional and far from ignoble idealism, it is still easily thrust upon us in the field of asthetic judgment. For in asthetics, we have not so fully taken our bearings with modern and efficient instruments, and it is only through science, based on a more adequate acquaintance with the natural world, that we come to view our own life as a mere incident in the larger world about us, however specially significant an incident it is bound to seem to our human selves. The second mistake is still more commonly made, although perhaps only in part, and at least not so uncomprisingly, as Plato made it. Following his general thesis as to grades of beauty as grades of reality and also of value in general measured in terms of pure rational comprehensibleness, Plato found the familiar geometrical figures, the circle particu-arly, to be eminently beautiful. We are no longer taught that geometrical regularity and harmony, or simple sym-metry, is the most beautiful spatial arrangement; but, as Plato did, we are very likely to think that a circle is a more rational figure than a complicated curve or a zig-zag line. In other words, we forget what Plato perhaps never realized, I2I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT that any one spatial form is as rigorously mathematical and geometrical as any other. The only variation in this respect is in our degrees of knowledge and ignorance. If geometry deals with space, an ideal and fully adequate geometry must have within its range all possible spatial forms and relations. Hence triangles and circles are, so to speak, not more but less rational than irregular figures, with their high degree of intellectual content. And even on his own ground of rationality as beauty, Plato must be reversed. The more irregular the figure and the more difficult it is to follow, the higher its pure logical and mathematical content must stand in his scale of intellectuality and value. If the subtlety and irregularity go beyond our ordinary grasp, the figure is no less determinate for that, and no less an object for intellectual appreciation of a high order. If its sthetic charm is lost in a maze of lines and spacings utterly bewildering to even the trained eye, it is clear that the criterion we must and always do naturally apply to space as sthetic, is the criterion not of intellectual fullness or complexity, but of the senses. Here, as elsewhere, moderate simplicity is necessary if we are to intuit relations and shapes at all, instead of a great blur of confused masses and lines, and moderate complexity, if the object in its spatial character is to interest us. Some degree of immediately felt order is necessary, not because we like formal order as such so much as because without some degree of such order we have no sufficiently defined object to look at, much less to appreciate in its specific character and its internal detail. We literally cannot see a sufficiently complex space configuration even of a sort that we could, with enough mathematics, rationally comprehend. But we certainly intuit spatial arrangements as somehow ordered and arranged, when we do not at all fully or conI 22 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT sciously comprehend their order and arrangement with our intellect. As artists have used marvellously successful color combinations through instinctive gift and without offering us any theory of the intrinsic order of their colors, so the compositions of draughtsmen and painters have far outrun our comprehension, much further our formal theories, of the intrinsic order in shape and distance relations, and depth and balance of masses, and contrast and connection through lines. So we come back to the necessity we found in the material elements of color and sound, of distinguishing what little we can as to the intrinsic ordering principles native to shape and space relations in general, the principles by virtue of which in combinations we have not mere blurred inextricabil-ities of lines and shapes, but, however loosely and however vaguely grasped, genuinely composed and coherent struc-tures. § 3 But we must first notice one other point. While divinity as somehow intimated through lower beauties to sense was a favorite idea from Plato's time to the nineteenth century, with Plotinus and St. Thomas and Hegel all espousing and expounding it in various systematic metaphysical contexts, the eighteenth century set up another prejudice with regard to the nature and beauty of spatial forms, which is met with in most men even now as the outstanding opposed and perhaps contradictory doctrine. It is not the beauty of spirit somehow intimated in sense materials that the eighteenth century saw, but characteristically, in its hard and common sense enlightenment, an objective choice of this or that line or curve or proportion, natural or even accidental forms, though also mathematically definite, lying ready at hand to be adopted for the artist's use and arranged in drawings 123 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT or buildings to please good taste, much as the various patterns in a foundry offer us varying moulds for more or less ornamental brass door-knobs, or key-escutcheons, or hinges, or electric-light fixtures, to fit the current fashions in such accessories. And here again the error is fairly striking, though it is not quite so easy to make it out convincingly in its downright erroneousness, because it is of course not all error. One typical example will perhaps suffice, and if before citing it we remind ourselves that the error in question is simply the notion that beauty is entirely independent of a mind that intuits it, instead of being constituted in an occurrence as a qualty of an object only—so far as we know, at least—when that object is being perceived and felt as beautiful by a human being or at least a conscious organic crea-ture, we may find the example to be given more enlightening for our general grasp of esthetic theory. Hogarth, like Leonardo da Vinci before him, was wont to classify and enumerate and note for future use the varieties of shape and line that he came across. As Leonardo listed ten types of nose, or, as seen from the front, twelve, so Hogarth, not content merely with the varieties of lines, decided upon the most beautiful one, as if neither spectator nor context were fundamentally determinant of all beauties as definitely as the physical object presented, and as if the materials of beauty were a sort of stock in trade. Thus objectively Hogarth could divide all lines into the straight and the curved, and then by combining the convex and the concave in various degrees decide upon a compound curved line of the greatest beauty. Aside from the fact that his line is only the line most acceptable to his own eye, his further error in asthetic principle is clear enough. For it is plain that for our actual visual experience there is a difference 124 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT between one straight line and another at least as important as the difference between curved and straight lines. A vertical line has one visual character, a horizontal line quite another, as the words vertical and horizontal indicate in the first place, and as the enormous difference between Gothic architecture with its preponderance of verticals, and Roman architecture with its preponderance of horizontal spread, fully enough emphasize. Now this difference between vertical and hori-zontal, while it is clearly enough made out, is a difference in the relation of the bodily position and conformation of the observer to what he is seeing, not a difference, in Hogarth's eighteenth century sense, between the objective spatial forms in question. The point is simply that we cannot afford to neglect, in our account of the intrinsic esthetic nature of spatial forms and relations, the matter of the human point of view, a point of view determined by the size and structure of human bodies and the specific nature of their modes of sensation, especially, of course, the physical, spatial peculiarities of human vision, bi-focal, chromatic vision, that is, from a point five feet and a half from the ground. Thus the size of objects as compared to the size of the human body is fundamentally important to their specific asthetic character. And so, also, all the space-relations and spatial characteristics of objects, for sthetics, must be considered with this human point of view in mind, if we are to understand at all the variations and combinations that affect us as felicitous in spatial structures. Thus, not only must we free our minds of our purely practical prejudices about spatial objects, or at least take these prejudices into proper account, if we are to see things clearly as presented to sense; not only must we avoid false notions of purity or spirituality of form as the greatest for- 125 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT mal beauty, and the equally false notion that perfectly and easily understood, namely geometrically simple and even elementary configurations, are the only rationally ordered ones and so the only ones that minds can fully appreciate; but we must also keep in mind the fact that the asthetic character of spatial shapes and relations and harmonies is in an order involving the physical and spatial peculiarities of men, so that no purely objective mathematically defining order more than partly determines the intrinsic asthetic structure in space that we have to consider in works of art or nature presented to vision and intuited as beautiful. §4 But if the logical or mathematical natures of spatial objects are not their full spatial natures as seen and enjoyed through the human eyes of human bodies, neither are these mathematical properties of spatial forms and relations to be neglected in asthetic theory. They are not only grasped intellectually; they are also in part directly discerned in vision, and they are clearly the beginning of any understanding knowledge of the asthetic character of these objects of our visual and spatial appreciation in general. Modern psychological investigation in two general directions, has thrown some light upon our appreciation of the beauty of shape and spatial character in the theory of Einfuehlung, or in the more developed current theory where what was called Einfuehlung comes to be a much more general so-called empathic response. But in this general form, such response is what we have already made out as the human side of the feeling of delight in specified and discriminated objective character, and important and fundamental as this is, it is rather what conditions beauty in its occurrence than 126 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT what we feel as objective beauty. In a second direction psychology has made much of the attempt to discern, by long series of experiments, a normal preference for the division of a line in one ratio rather than another, or for rectangles whose sides bear one proportional relation to each other over rectangles of other relative proportions. But here again we discover no principle of order intrinsic to shape or space-relations, since one kind of rectangle is as geometrically and visually ordered as another and, as present in complex struc-tures, no doubt also as beautiful as another in varying con-texts. And we can not turn directly to mathematics to discover the intrinsic principles of order in shape and spatial arrange-ment, for, as we have already noticed, we do not usually see mathematical structure, which in its full and precise character as such is of course logically known rather than sensibly intuited. In any case what is given us as one mathematical structure in equations, in the strictly intelligible logical nature of curves and shapes, may be present visually in forms as clearly distinct from each other for sthetic contemplation as circles and ellipses, or straight lines and curves, or points and spheres. Size, too, which is not logically or mathematically absolute, but relative to measuring standards more or less arbitrarily adopted as units, is sthetically absolute as being relative to what for each of us is fixed, namely the size of our own body, and the scope and power of our own movements. However useful to us the strictly mathematical analysis of spatial forms and relations may be for a basis in esthetic theory, we must take as our fully applicable principles the standards of sense perception itself, through which we may, with proper respect to logical and mathematical guidance so far as that is available, discern 127 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the intrinsic order within purely spatial sensuous asthetic materials of beauty. Even here we must abstract to some degree; for it is clear that spatial materials, as we have been calling these elements of beauty, are not so plausibly material elements as sound and color are; they are often seen and felt as structure or form itself. There is no absolutely clear line to mark off material elements from formal ones, for of course no elements are purely material and quite formless. And now that we have come to shapes and space relations, it becomes obvious that these elements themselves cannot appear to us except as structural. Spatial forms cannot be intuited directly upon visual appearances except as the forms of colored surfaces and objects, never the bare forms themselves. But obviously enough these bare forms are distinguishable and important, as is illustrated in every black and white reproduction of colored originals, as well as in any design in lines and shapes which remains the same in proportion, size, and spatial characteristics in general, regardless of its possible or actual application to materials of varied color and texture, in which it may appear as one contributory element of structure in single concrete visual characters vastly differing in æsthetic effect. And it is equally clear that particular lines and shapes and patterns may approximate the status of material elements in composite wholes almost as obviously and theoretically as plausibly as color or sound elements do. No concrete case of actual beauty is merely elements or merely structure, and we shall see later that even structures concretely holding esthetic elements together do not constitute fully beautiful objects, since there is always a still further aspect involved. For analytical purposes, then, we seem to be well within 128 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT our rights in treating spatial forms as material elements of beautiful structures, since we have also emphasized their formal structural nature itself, and since without analysis any understanding whatever, as distinguished from just esthetic appreciation, as had and felt, and so in this more elementary sense realized and known, is out of the ques-tion. Esthetic theory is a matter, that is, of analytical understanding as against familiar acquaintance with what is to be analyzed. Any objection to a treatment of spatial character as material would be unreasonable, so long as this treatment is conscious of the abstraction involved, and finds such abstraction necessary to an understanding of the mode in which, in the concrete objects of asthetic appreciation, the elements treated separately cohere, as aspects of the beauty we are trying, so far as may be, to understand. Our whole view may be quite erroneous, of course; but only some better analysis, some other chain of abstractions in discourse, can improve upon it. § 5 This more or less abstract asthetic material of shapes and lines of given character is clearly seen to have some kind and degree of intrinsic order, even if we can not be content with mathematics as the complete elucidation of that order in the strictly sthetic aspect of its nature. For vision and imagination there are lines and areas and volumes, which are on the one hand three distinctive concrete kinds of magnitude differing from each other in their primary character as directly in-tuited, and on the other hand related to one another by the fact of dimensionality and the order intrinsic to extension as such. Thus lines and areas may be considered distinct elementary materials for spatial composition, to be related in I29 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT structures in unique ways, suitable to their peculiar char-acters; and within each kind only certain types of relation are possible. Lines used as lines and seen as lines give direction only, never flat or curved surface or expanse, as areas do, nor depth and fullness, as volumes do. And plane shapes fit each other or not, and vary in the degree of difference from and congruity with each other, in strictly specific ways not possible to lines or volumes. There are numbers of empirical technical theories of de-sign, based on various special notions of balance, symmetry, and proportion, and these notions are all derived from intrinsic and specifically spatial character. As matters of artistic technique no such theories are to be too lightly considered. Their value, in fact, is very great in application, and particularly in early practical training in the arts. But they are usually theories, not of the ordering principles to be found in spatial form and arrangement as such, but as to what is the most acceptable order in special cases of combining spatial materialS. Thus they are theories of design, not accounts of the elementary spatial materials and the intrinsic possibilities of order within the primary nature of these materials. Our question here is rather directed to asking what in visual experience of extension itself corresponds to pitch in auditory experience, and the answer has been given roughly above in the word dimension. Indeed, if we notice the kinds of order intrinsic to sounds and colors, we find that we are likely to use spatial terms to make these orders clear. In spatial form itself the same terms are applicable more lit-erally. Lines have a structure in which points are fixed as lying between other points, and every point of a line has its own necessary place, which defines it. This seems too obvious to mention, but it is worth noticing that this determi-I 30 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT nate order of points in a direction is what allows intersection of one line by another at a given angle, or tangency of a line to a curve, or the specific spatial relation of one curve to another. And in areas, where we have two dimensions and the fact of areal spread, the possibilities, while no less defi-nite, are infinitely great in a new order, where we see not mere lines and directions, but shapes of extended and bounded areas. In volume we have depth added to flat or curved extended area, as well as the specific feeling of volume or bulk or solidity itself; and the complications of the possible ordered configurations, all purely spatial, are so great as to baffle us when they go beyond the simplest geometrical figures and their modes of intersection in points and lines and planes and curved surfaces. While natural objects, especially human bodies, hands, feet, throats, noses, ears, exhibit subtleties of relation and juxtaposition among lines and surfaces and solids, the actu ally established orders here are obviously far beyond mathematically accurate exposition for most of us, and it would be absurd to suppose that these elaborate, intricate beauties, definitely felt of course and very highly prized in the greatest detail by eyes that have dwelt long and familiarly on their infinite subtleties—it would be absurd to say that we know on what principles of order, and in exactly what mode of application of these principles, such natural or copied spatially composed beauties have been constructed. No doubt too, if we were animals of another shape, other solid forms and surfaces and lines would be those called supremely beau-tiful; and it is significant in another direction that among human features eyes are so universally and traditionally ap-preciated, eyes of which the shape is comparatively easy to see fairly completely and in fairly complete detail. The I}I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT nate order of points in a direction is what allows intersection of one line by another at a given angle, or tangency of a line to a curve, or the specific spatial relation of one curve to another. And in areas, where we have two dimensions and the fact of areal spread, the possibilities, while no less defi-nite, are infinitely great in a new order, where we see not mere lines and directions, but shapes of extended and bounded areas. In volume we have depth added to flat or curved extended area, as well as the specific feeling of volume or bulk or solidity itself; and the complications of the possible ordered configurations, all purely spatial, are so great as to baffle us when they go beyond the simplest geometrical figures and their modes of intersection in points and lines and planes and curved surfaces. While natural objects, especially human bodies, hands, feet, throats, noses, ears, exhibit subtleties of relation and juxtaposition among lines and surfaces and solids, the actually established orders here are obviously far beyond mathematically accurate exposition for most of us, and it would be absurd to suppose that these elaborate, intricate beauties, definitely felt of course and very highly prized in the greatest detail by eyes that have dwelt long and familiarly on their infinite subtleties—it would be absurd to say that we know on what principles of order, and in exactly what mode of application of these principles, such natural or copied spatially composed beauties have been constructed. No doubt too, if we were animals of another shape, other solid forms and surfaces and lines would be those called supremely beau-tiful; and it is significant in another direction that among human features eyes are so universally and traditionally ap-preciated, eyes of which the shape is comparatively easy to see fairly completely and in fairly complete detail. The I3I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT old difference of opinion as to the superiority of the female form over the male, indicates again that asthetic apprecia-tion, even in sculpture, is only to a very slight degree a matter of purely spatial elements and their composition in spatial structures. What is peculiar to spatial shapes as elements for structural compositions is clearly enough the order involved in dimensionality, a simple order of betweenness in a constant or constantly varying direction in straight and curved lines, a two dimensional order in plane or curved areas as asthet-ically viewed, and a tri-dimensional order in solid volumes. The possibilities here are obviously very great, especially when we remember that spatial elements of all three orders may be combined with one another in a single structure. It is natural that analytical accounts of works of art have picked out elementary geometrical forms as constituting the order or form of a given picture or statue; but the rash absurdity here involved is palpable, and we hardly need to be warned against it, once we have noticed the subtle possibilities of variation involved, and the infinite detail in any adequate analysis of the complete spatial forms in all their specific character and fullness, which is so clearly what is characteristic and differentiating about them. A triangular composition may be entirely unsuccessful, and it should be clear that the approximation to triangularity in the main color masses of many famous pictures has as little to do with their concrete artistic structural value as the narrow rectangular shape of a coffin or even a wrapped mummy has to do with the structural beauty of the human body whose outlines it so neatly encloses. Some general form any specific form must of course approximate, but to confuse the complex specific form which is perhaps beautiful, with the simple approxima- 132 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT tions given by triangles, or suggested by theories of dynamic symmetry in terms of simple geometrical proportions, is the adoption of such a royal road to beauty as no intelligent mind could very well travel on the way to an adequate theory of the sthetics of space. Beauties are always specific, and their analysis in terms of general concepts is fruitless, if those general terms are taken to name the specific features given to discriminating perception as the genuine elements in a genuine and always, if beautiful at all, uniquely beautiful structure. But this is not to say that simple geometrical shapes have no beauty, nor that Hogarth's line is not graceful. As in all sensuous fields, the elaborate composed beauties of form depend very largely for their own beauty on beautiful sensuous elements. The materials of beauty are no less truly beautiful for being mere materials or elements, but only less complexly beautiful. And too great complexity simply falls apart for actual vision, and so offers no one single beautiful object of attention. Nowhere is this more apparent than in spatial compositions, and this accounts perhaps for the tendency to analyze such compositions in terms of the simple forms which are the merest approximations to the actual form presented, and which would fail completely to distinguish the specific character of any one composition by virtue of which alone it is of precisely the form it is, and so either beautiful or not. The rejection of this obvious fact is akin to the sort of plot analysis that thinks to describe a plot adequately as triangular, as if triangularity here were not a commonplace of subject matter to be used in any one of a thousand different and even unique plots, ranging from the cheaply obvious to the most subtly convincing and expressive. I33 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT § 6 Our results after all this discussion must seem very meagre. What we have found as the intrinsic ordering property of spatial forms is simply spatiality-continu-ous one-dimensional order in lines, a two-dimensional order in areas, a three-dimensional order in volumes or solids. But if this seems a small result in words, it is perhaps because the very meaning of order itself is so largely thought of in spatial terms. To get things into shape, as we say, just is getting them into intelligible or practically useful order. Once we reduce any subject matter to a linear scale, we seem to have an ordered account of it, and spatial forms themselves are the very diagrams which reduce all knowledge to comprehensibility; even time, if we are in any way to retain unambiguously our grasp on its nature or our controlled knowledge of its passage, must be spatially indicated on dials and other instruments, and its variation recorded in pictures. Thus mere dimensions, by virtue of being spatially extended, would almost seem to give us all the possibilities of all the kinds of order there are. If it has been thought by many philosophers that space itself is nothing but established order and ordered relations, nothing but the manner or way in which co-existent objects are related to each other, such a view could seem plausible only because being spatial, having shape at all, means being spatially ordered. Thus the intrinsic kind of order to be found in shapes is just the archetype of all order that is visualized in lines and planes and solids, an order as native to a point, which has definite location only by co-ordination in a system, as to a line, where the betweenness of the points establishes relations of greater and less distance and length, I 34 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT or to the most intricate arrangement of the surfaces of solids, where intersections, relative magnitudes, distances, and directions are all determined uniquely in any given case by the very nature of the spatial elements involved. If the order of shapes and space relations is so obvious as to seem nothing but their being spatial elements, that is simply the reverse of the significant fact for asthetics that all spatial compositions are highly complex ordered wholes by virtue of the intrinsically and uniquely ordered nature of the spatial elements themselves. Nothing has length after all but lines, and mere linear dimensionality constitutes a sort of order, not only specific and unique, but at the same time literally infinite in the possibilities it offers for variety and complexity of spatial structures. Those who suggest to us so often that space is abstract and limited, and a mere mechanical conception, seem to have forgotten the specific and unique concreteness of length and area and volume as such, the absolute mystery of that concrete multiplication that turns two lengths into an area or two intersecting lines into an angle, and the literally infinite fullness of variety in ordered concrete spatial struc-tures, made solely of spatial elements, and coherently held together in accordance with those principles so apparently simple at bottom, but adequate to such tremendously complex and exciting wholes, which we find intrinsic to the nature of the very elements themselves. If these possibilities or mysteries are better called the natural face of our spatial world, that is only saying that they are the familiar mysteries, as Santayana has called them, of nature as asthetically viewed, elements and aspects of the character of the spatially beautiful. Our account has been prosaic, and it may seem very far 135 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT from even suggesting the visual beauties we all know, even with the non-spatial elements omitted. The flight of quail on a hillside with the bark of the dog who has startled them, the fresh smell of fog over the green brush, the whirr of wings, the light and color, the vital tone of the body, is a richly concrete beauty only in small part a matter of visual perception at all. But if an account in terms of geometrical lines, curves with defined direction, seems a poor abstrac-tion, of little avail even to name the beauty of such an event, we have only to turn to Leonardo's note-book to see how a gifted perception marks the specific quality of this line of fight, and in recording its character for vision, as knowledge to be treasured, appropriates for his mind and memory one more of those infinitely precious and infinitely varied elements of beauty in which for him the whole world of nature abounded, and which in the structures of his art would build beauties still undreamed, such beauties as the world has marvelled at from his day to ours. Leonardo's observations and sketches, with what they reveal to us of his scientific interests, are indications of many things about himself as well as about science and art. In the esthetics of space they may here emphasize two facts, first of all the infinite importance for such a creative mind of the exact spatial configurations of natural objects and motions of particular sorts; but they remind us still more forcibly that the strict definition of shapes and space-rela-tions in lines and forms, the discriminating and rigorous perception of detail and variety of the asthetic surface of the world, which is the condition of any actual enjoyment of the full objective beauty of that surface as it lies before us in absorbed attention, is also the condition of any adequate knowledge of the world, which after all must appear, in 136 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT order to be known, and must be known through its appear-ance; so that science, as well as art and the appreciation of beauty, demands just this full acquaintance, through intui-tion, with asthetic surface, if science itself is to be adequate, or even alive and significant. I37 CHAPTER IX RHYTHM AS TEMPORAL STRUCTURE 1. Beauty of elements and beauty of structure. 2. Rhythm as imposed temporal order, felt, but not seen or heard. 3. Spatial rhythm as involving real or imagined motion in time. 4. Rhythm a regular recurrence variously indicated to sense and involving rate and patterned division; compound and complex rhythms. 5. The dancer's appreciation of rhythm and the philosopher's. 6. Rhythm in verse less explicit than rhythm in music. 7. Variation, specification, and determinate character of all rhythms; rhythms as elements. § I In most cases of sthetic judgment it is not mere separate sense elements, single notes, specific shades of color, individual lines, or flat or solid shapes, that we call beautiful; but in many cases of course it is just these elements, and it is somewhat doubtful whether any composition could be altogether beautiful as a structural whole were it not composed of elements beautiful in themselves. In any case the beauty of such a structural whole is largely the beauty of its asthetic material. If a tune sung by the high, cracked voice of an old man may give us quite accurately its melody, its full beauty as sung by a rich young voice is quite definitely more than this, and the difference is clearly enough that of the quality of the single sense elements, the tone quality, which, being the quality of these material constituents, is I 38 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT also the tonal quality of the whole. So of color composi-tions. While structure gives us the harmonies and contrasts, these vary in beauty with the beauty of their sthetic ma-terials, the specific qualities of the colors as such, the intrinsic variations of hue and brightness and clearness, by virtue of which the particular contrasts and harmonies are present or even possible. If this is not so clearly the case with spatial elements, it is partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing these as elements from the structure of which they are constitutive parts. But certainly the particular lines and shapes involved may be interesting in themselves and so heighten the interest and beauty of the composition in which they occur. And negatively it is clear, for example, that the badly drawn hand of some one minor figure in a composition may detract from the satisfactoriness of the whole, even though the larger structural relations of the design are not at all obviously affected by this particular element of shape. In a seventeenth century baroque saint of small proportions, carved in wood, we may notice only after some time that one of the hands has been broken off and replaced with a crudely fashioned substitute. Our pleasure in the whole will be distinctly less, for this unfortunate hand is still integral to the whole as one of its real parts; but we shall feel it as only a single unsuccessful element, and the formal structure of the carved saint will remain pretty much intact, instead of being completely ruined as it would be by a distortion of the main outlines or balance of masses. Since all shapes, however, solid or flat, are marked out for vision by boundary lines, and since all lines have direction and order, there is a sense in which spatial elements are all structural or formal, as well as being particular elements. While they are distinct s- I 39 9., ESTHETIC JUDGMENT thetic materials of composition, they are always at the same time in part the structural form of the whole. Only a little less clearly is this true of color and sound elements, however, and of course no one pretends to hold that in an actual composition the structural relations are merely added to the asthetic materials. As actual bricks of clay built into anything, or thrown into a pile by the road, for that matter, necessarily define some shape with specific surface texture, so any asthetic materials merely accumu-lated, define an sthetic form; but as bricks may make Assyrian façades or garden walls, so asthetic materials may be composed into enormously varying formal beauties. In noticing that these sthetic materials themselves are defined in and by an order intrinsic to their own qualitative nature, we have already indicated clearly enough that structure begins in such material elements. But instead of putting all our emphasis on the characteristically structural wholeness of beautiful surfaces or beautiful objects, it was important to notice also the beauty of elements as elements, and the share that this sensuous beauty has in the beauty of the structures. Abstracted from it these structures might be formally conceived as satisfactory in presentation to sense, but through loss of beauty in the asthetic materials they would themselves suffer loss, and in actuality, without these sensuous elements they would of course be nothing at all. + If written music, for example, offers to the technically trained musician the very structure of the beauties he silently hears, so that he is presented with the form and quality of a composition on paper, even this silent music is composed of sensuous elements, sounds which memory and imagination summon at the sight of the appropriate notation. The most gifted composer has a new experience in the actual perform- I40 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ance of his music, in which it takes on its proper sensuous proportions and achieves its full volume and richness and the precise and specific quality that is given to the outer ear, and never in its absolutely full, intricate, subtle tonal quality to the inner ear, the "ear of the mind." To say that one enjoys music just as fully by reading a score as by a performance of it upon instruments is either a mere affectation or else a very doubtful assertion. From it would seem to follow a fortiori that remembering music once heard is as full and satisfying an asthetic experience as the actual hear-ing. And neither of these claims, implied or asserted, can be made in candor, unless one is so intellectually predisposed as to like the mere abstracted or even logical pattern of a thing better than the thing itself. One may of course grasp the abstract form and enjoy doing so more than one enjoys the music, as for that matter a child at the piano may enjoy the workings of his own fingers and muscles under the direction of a notation he is proud to have deciphered, and be exercising no musical feeling, much less appreciating the given piece of music. As such pleasure in muscular skill and mental co-ordination is not to be denied, and not even ruled out of asthetic pleasure, though it is a far commoner enjoyment than that of music, so it is also true enough that abstract patterns are more easily followed and held by some intellects than apprehended directly within a full sensuous tonal content. But to prefer the pattern to the concrete object of intuition is either lack of musical appreciation or else asceticism again. This is the old mistake, not of abstraction for the special subsidiary purposes of knowledge, or of retention through memory, or of practical operation in general, or performance in particular-all of which are obviously rational and justified cases-but of identifying I4I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the abstraction with the concrete whole from which it is drawn. One is then able to fill it indifferently with either the good or the bad, but preferably with the bad, since, if filled with the good, it is the very sensuous content that was to be avoided by the purifying abstraction in the first place. This rigorously formal view ends in mere general terms with the thinnest possible meanings, however broad, pr else in a supposedly elevating and edifying mysticism that abandons reality and life for Platonic ideas, or even for Nirvana. Such a view is more or less plausible in its half-way stages, as when Greek sculpture and architecture are seen uncolored and are then thought to lose their pure nobility by being restored in imagination to their originally colored appearance. A photograph often indicates to certain minds, or perhaps to all of us, by its very abstraction from confusing sensuous elements, beauties which in the concrete we either miss altogether or fail to appreciate fully. But since the Greeks themselves, who created the beauties we recognize, used strong colors extensively, an unprejudiced mind must be willing to admit at least the possibility that richness of sensuous content in general simply adds richness to the most formal structural beauty, instead of contaminating it. And while this is not to say that the mere piling up of sensuous materials, with no dominating coherence of structure, is the greatest beauty, it does remind us that beauty is sensuous in its necessary elementary content, and that any judgment condemning sensuous materials as asthetically base runs the risk of denying to beauty any actual content at all. We have so far been dealing with these material beauties, and we have noted their variety as distinguished in orders intrinsic to their qualitative nature; but these are not the sole orders available as principles of structure. For as per- I42 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ception itself occurs in time and is thus subject to temporal order, so the content of imagination or of sense comes to consciousness in time sequences. Hence temporal order may be imposed on any sense material whatever, though such order is not intrinsic to the qualitative nature of this material in the sense in which the order of pitch is native to sound or the order of hue to color. Moreover, upon color elements both spatial and temporal orders may be imposed. In the order of hues as such orange lies between red and yellow. But on a surface, while orange may be placed beside red or yellow, it may also be placed beside purple or green, so that spatial ordering of color areas is quite another matter than the intrinsic order of colors as differing in a serially ordered qualitative stretch of hues. To spatial elements as such, that is to lines and areas and volumes, of which we have already given some brief account, spatial order is of course native. But the modern color organ, Mr. Wilfrid's Clavilux, reminds us that colors may also be projected upon our vision in a temporal sequence, where again blue may lie between red and yellow as well as between green and purple. Such temporal order, not native to the intrinsic quality of any sort of sensuous elements, but necessary to the very occurrence of any such elements at all, we have so far only mentioned in passing. When we stop to consider it, we come at once upon rhythm, which is sometimes taken to be the very nature of the beautiful in all its aspects, the secret of all asthetics. Whether or not this is so, it is clear enough that rhythm is fundamentally significant in asthetic experi-ence, and therefore in the intuited character of the asthetic surface of our world. Moreover, as we have already indicated in earlier chapters, it is not difficult to see why this is so, nor to say exactly what rhythm is in asthetic experience. I43 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT But there are misunderstandings here both as to terms and as to genuine meanings, as well as difficulties in knowing the facts. Hence the subject demands more than summary statements. § 2 In the first place rhythm is felt rather than seen or heard. A blind man may keep time silently with slight motions of his hands or feet or head; or feel his own pulses within in the measured pattern of their beat. And if we often connect the notion of rhythm with seen movements and heard sounds, we cannot afford to forget that what is seen is not the rhythm itself, but the content that is occurring rhythmically, or in rhythm, and felt to be thus rhythmically occurring. Its actual pattern is present to mind through the body that takes it up, however inwardly and blindly, and makes it apparent through feeling. So of sounds. Their rhythm is felt through listening, or even given to them by the bodily mechanisms that perform the act of hearing at their own given rate, being often free, as they are, to group unaccented regular pulses in their own way at their own natural con-venience. And where the rhythm is introduced by some means into the sounds as produced, this rhythm is what the mind contemplating the sense content becomes aware of in feeling the pattern of these sounds in time. The rhythm has to do with the order and rate and manner of their occurrence to perception, not primarily, or perhaps at all, with the quality of the tones themselves, which is definitely tonal and timeless. A deaf man watching the conductor's baton, may be made to feel the identical rhythm that is felt and distinguished as formal pattern by a blind man listening to the sounds from the instruments of the cochestra. Obvi-ously, then, rhythm is neither sound quality nor color quality, I44 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT but an order established and marked in the occurrence of these. And it must be equally clear that rhythm is not felt as intrinsic spatial quality or shape any more than it is as color or sound. The feeling of a distinguishable patterned rhythm may be introduced or called forth, however, by any sense material that occurs in time. And since nothing whatever occurs except in time, rhythmic possibilities prevail over the whole asthetic surface of the world. Rhythm is always perceived through feeling and distinguished by feeling, by the bodily acceptance or introduction of it to the mind. It can not be distinguished merely by the regularly named senses of sight or hearing or taste or smell or even touch, so far as touch means what receives texture or shape or temperature. It is got by a more generally pervasive sense of touch, which takes up the moving order of what comes to it, though in itself it is blind and deaf, and somehow presents that patterned order to the mind, which recognizes it as the moving structure of occurring sensuous content. But rhythm itself is no more mere feeling than color is merely our sensation of color instead of what is actually apprehended as having its own specific nature, or than sound is merely the activity of the ears or of the mind through the ears, instead of the sounding content heard and recognized and distinguishable as specific qualitative character. What is felt as rhythm is not the activity of feeling, though this is no doubt rhyth-mical, but the rhythmic character of the occurrence of the sensuous content, the specific moving pattern distinguished through feeling. $ 3 Rhythms may be objectively as determinate and compulsory as any other qualitative characteristics. Since they I45 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT are all temporal, however, rhythmic order is, like time, one-dimensional, so far as it is asthetically and directly felt. It is true that modern thought forces us to admit the interrelation of time and space in a more concrete space-time reality or pervasive character of our comprehended universe. But we intuit spatial relations and shapes asthetically as themselves absolute and static, even though in spatial compositions movement may be represented and the rhythm of that movement therefore felt in seeing the representation. But this is not the embodiment of rhythm upon a surface in the sense in which music or marching embodies rhythm directly in its own moving structure. Spatial patterns, too, being after all perceived in time, may be rhythmically perceived, and even consciously so composed as to induce a rhythm into the perception of them; and the rhythm of this perceiving may be— though always, I think, a very subsidiary aspect of the enjoyment of them- still part of what is enjoyed in the spatial form perceived, as in rugs and textiles and mural decoration. Especially in the spacing of the details of façades or great colonnades, and in architectural design in general, where the spatial proportions are large and involve actual physical movements to follow them out with the eye, does it seem necessary to admit that the order involved is in some sense rhythmical. But it is only very slightly so; for the rate of such perception is never clearly or exactly dictated by the spatial form itself, and the rhythm of the perception is not intrinsic to the form perceived in anything like the intimate immediacy in which the strictly static pattern of the seen shapes and relations is intrinsic. Photographs of such architectural wholes reproduce them in their spatial proportions in a way impossible to the reproduction of musical compo-sitions, where a corresponding condensation of the temporal 146 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT proportions by more rapid tempo would destroy completely the distinctive rhythmical effect and all its expressive beauty. If this does not prove that rhythm is literally lacking to spatial composition, it at least reminds us that the sense of the term rhythm as thus applied is quite distinct from its ordinary sense. It seems likely that rhythm is at least not an enlightening term here, since the regularity of strictly spatial relations is in first instance the chief structural as-thetic order of composition involved, and since also rhythm characteristically has to do with literal movement, not with static objects, even though such objects may help define a rhythm in visual experience in which they are presented and may therefore not altogether unreasonably be called rhythmical in this weakened and somewhat vague sense. We may however admit as a needed further use of the term its application to spatial form when it is not the rate or timing of perception that is in question, but the regular recurrence in space of the same or of similar spatially defined units, as in a northern tower that rises in three bell-shaped sections. But the very use of the term recurrence here indicates that it is not strictly spatial character that we are con-sidering, but the repeated occurrence, in a spatial whole, of a particular spatially defined part, and this at regular in-tervals. In other words we are thinking of the specific spatial part or unit as repeatedly occurring. Whole lines or shapes are called rhythmical so far as they are felt thus to be alive and moving through their parts. The same or a like space-form here below comes again above and then still again. This reappearance or recurrence is felt as motion through the form of the whole, and gives the tower what is called its rhythm, just so far as the similarity of spatial parts is felt to punctuate the movement in time. The tower is 147 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT thus rhythmically composed, though its whole strictly spatial character is a static shape. In fact it is only as indicating the non-temporal aspect of occurrence that the term spatial has any genuine meaning peculiar to itself. If this meaning is abstract and omits the aspect of occurrence called temporal, it is no less definitely just this abstract static meaning. And for any unambiguous analysis we need to keep it clear. If shape is to have rhythm literally then it must move actu-ally. Thus the term rhythm applied to our tower is rather the felt suggestion of a rising motion marked as rhythmical by the repetition of the same or similar masses than the accurate description of its strictly spatial character. For this latter must be before us all at one time if we are to see it balanced and patterned in space. Its form as spatial is a static shape, a primarily non-rhythmical and properly geometrical configuration. Jacques Dalcroze, the outstanding apostle of rhythm, as material and form and expression in art, is quoted as calling it the symmetry not the measure of motion. And this clearly indicates, since symmetry is a spatial term, the attempt to include in some sense spatial rhythm, or rather to insist that rhythm in its own nature is spatial as well as temporal. But since motion is what rhythm characterizes in this description, the temporal element is left as fundamental or at least necessary. Moreover, the force of the remark seems to be the contrast of symmetry with measure; and if this is to mean anything at all, since measure cannot be completely denied to rhythm or even to symmetry itself, the insistence is upon the possible subtleties and complexities and variations as being what is important to rhythm, instead of its mere measure or regularity. Since spatial human bodies are what present this movement as seen, symmetry is naturally 148 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT thought of as characteristic. It is patterns in space, literally embodying various subtleties and kinds of symmetry, through which the rhythm is expressed and discerned. But all of this our account of rhythm as strictly temporal allows for, while none of it makes rhythm in its essential nature spatial. Among art critics rhythm is so fashionable a word as to be employed on all occasions and in an enormous variety of conflicting meanings. But its wide use and the actual insistence on the term itself by genuinely appreciative critics as well as artists must at least be reckoned with, especially when they take pains to insist that rhythm is the proper word and introduces the needed meaning in descriptions of plastic art. This is hardly the place for controversial discussion, and we may be content to cite one very distinguished critic, Roger Fry,* and then merely say that even in his strictly theoretical asthetic discussion of the meaning of the term as spatial, he includes such diverse content for it that one cannot very well admit its usefulness for theory, unless inconsistency and even contradiction are worth adopting. And in his actual application of the term in even the most convincing critical appreciation, the meaning varies from sentence to sentence, and one can at best say that it describes what some theorists call empathic response and what we have called the pleasurable response marking beauty in objects for us, a response that is not mere perception, but full of feeling, appropriate and authentic just so far as it follows upon and gives color and resonance and volume to full discriminating apprehension of specific presented qualitative character. *I have cited Mr. Fry not because his inconsistencies seem to me especially bad, but because even in such brilliant and authentic criticism as his the inconsistencies are still present. See, for example, Vision and Design, PP. 33-36, and Transformations, pp. 71, 72. I49 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT In more philosophical attempts to make rhythm out as essentially no less spatial than temporal, success has been verbally achieved, but only, I think, at the expense of clarity. If we define rhythm abstractly and generally as any repetitive division, in the same or a similar manner, of any sort of processes or events, objective or subjective, in time or in space, it looks as if space composition were as integrally rhythmic as temporal composition may be. But in such a definition what makes plausible the co-ordination of spatial and temporal at the end is the inclusion of temporal order as fundamental in the beginning. For any division of processes or events, marked as it may be in spatial or colored or sounding qualitative elements, is, as felt to divide these events, felt as temporal, since events or processes necessarily occur as actually moving through time. The application to concrete cases of any such abstract definition of rhythm becomes useful and enlightening with reference to spatial composition only as it uses terms indicating static spatial relations and shapes. Moreover, it is clear that so far as space comes in at all it is as a content in which a rhythm is embodied by virtue of actual motion involving temporal duration. We are justified, I think, in treating rhythm as fundamentally and literally temporal, rhythmic pattern as temporal order, and rhythmic structure as durational, spread along the single dimension of time. So far as rhythm is asthetically experienced it is not in the same sense spread over the spatial surfaces of the three dimensions of intuited static spatial objects. §4 Regularity in time order, which of course involves for perception recurrence, is evidently much of what we mean by rhythm. That it is not the whole of it will be plain I 50 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT enough. But first of all the way in which regularity of occurrence in time involves regular recurrence needs to be perfectly clear. If time is, as experienced, one-dimensional, every moment being always and only before or after, never beside, another, and if time is not directly experienced as turning backward in its flight but only as moving forward at its own inevitable rate, or perhaps as being the inevitable way in which all life and all existence moves on or disappears from the actual world altogether, recurrence of time itself has no meaning. But what occurs in time occurs at its own rate, as we noticed earlier of the oscillations of physical bodies. Now there is no strictly temporal form or pattern for each oscillation, but only the spatial form of its path. Hence such patterns, marking off time into intervals, cannot themselves be purely temporal. Without experienced variation or change of sense content, time appears not as time at all but either as eternity of form,-Being itself, as philosophers call it,—or as the death and empty oblivion to which a static world would succumb. It is in such considerations that the abstractness of space without time or time without space is so clear. But the simple fact remains that by rhythm we mean the moving temporality, even of spatial forms themselves, when these do actually move before the eyes or in our imaginations, and that we do not mean the spatial patterns as such. These must have their own static and non-rhythmical character, even in order to constitute that which is seen or felt to move, and clearly to constitute visual form and beauty, without such movement and without the rhythm of it. And not only spatial patterns, but sound patterns as well, occur and recur in the one-dimensional, irreversible, temporal flow marked off by pulses or beats, the rate of such beats being part of what we call rhythm. I5 I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT To keep strictly to the one dimension and the one direction of time itself, we must notice that a rhythmic pattern as rhythmic merely, purely as rhythm, that is, and not as sound pattern or shape, can be a pattern at all only as it measures off the felt flow of time. Since this flow is in general experienced as being uniform, the rhythmic pattern is a pattern first of all simply of its own established rate, the marking off to sense of time intervals along the one dimension of their occurrence. But if the occurrences of the sense data experienced are uniformly timed, any one or any two of them, or any group of them, may be felt as the repetition or recurrence of one before, or two before, or of whatever preceding group has been indicated either by our attention or by some intrinsic stress or other emphasis of its own, to give it a beginning and end. A regularly ticking clock is a ready example. It ticks one —one-one—one, or one-two, one-two, one-two, or one-two-three, one-two-three, and so on, as we mark off an interval by one beat or by a number of successive beats, through attention to them as a unit or pattern of sounding content. Even in this simplest case the varieties of rhythm are intrinsically infinite possibilities, although rhythmic intervals marked by five or six or seven or eight or more beats are either hard to feel as distinctly characterized rhythms, as with tive or seven, or such intervals tend to fall apart into sub-intervals filled by groups of two or three. We can also easily distinguish two different rhythms through one inter-val. One clock may clearly be heard to tick twice while another is heard to tick once, or we may tap three to six, or four to two with our two hands, and with very little practice two against three, or three against four, although our attention finds difficulty in discriminating even such numer- I52 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ically simple combinations as five against seven or eight against nine. In such combinations as we do easily grasp, we not only distinguish the two or more rhythms, but also hear them or feel them as a single complex rhythm. Three against two in sounded notes is a specific single rhythmical effect, as is the famous six-in-three measure of Spanish songs, which involves this same two-against-three. For the six beats are by attention heard in two groups of three pulses each or in three groups of two pulses each, either alternately in different parts of the tune, or both at once in a characteristic complex rhythm with which most of us are familiar, whether or not we have happened to notice its analytical structure. Thus different rhythms may be simultaneously felt as one complex rhythmic effect, or they may follow each other and be felt as contrasted in a sort of balance against each other. From these simple examples it is easy to see that in regularity of occurrence recurrence is involved as soon as we punctuate the series of regular impulses and mark them off into groups equal in the time-interval they cover, and so, where we have regularly occurring impulses, into groups of equal numbers of beats at equal time-intervals from one an-other. But the recurrence of the group of beats in the temporal interval depends upon division of the one-dimensional time sequence, and although we can make such groupings quite arbitrarily with the perfectly even ticking of a clock, for example, as auditors we cannot in most characteristic cases of rhythm arbitrarily fix the number of beats in the periodic interval that recurs. That is done independently of us; it is in the given structure of what we are contem-plating. All that is needed to force it upon our attention is some sensuous indication of the point of division of the time-I 53 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT stream, which is otherwise an uninterrupted uniform flow, or else is punctuated merely by the natural pulses of our own attentive activity. This indication of a division may be given in any one, or at once in several, of a great many different ways, all of them being simply modes of emphasis to call attention to the point of division into intervals. It must be clear also that this point is felt both as the end of one interval marked by one group of beats and the beginning of another, and that without the indicating of both its beginning and its end no measure can be marked off. Attention may be summoned for this purpose by any sort of sensuous emphasis, and if the impulses come with perfect regularity, the slightest emphasis on the point of division into intervals is enough to make the grouping clear,—a slightly louder sound, a slightly more extended movement, a definite change in direction of line or motion, a sound of higher or lower pitch, and so on indefinitely to all the possible means, along with regularity of the occurring of the sense elements, for calling attention to a grouping of these. Thus the group recurs. Even with no accent whatever, if the sensuous pattern itself is clearly distinguishable as pattern and is repeated at regular intervals in a continuous temporal movement, attention marks some one point of the repeated pattern as its beginning and comes to feel the rhythm involved as the regular recurrence of this pattern, much as in the parallel case of a Greek key border, though there is no beginning or end of any one part, we see the continuous line as the regular repetition of a unitary spatial pattern. Rhythm is thus seen to consist in its essence in regular recurrence in time. What recurs may also itself be a rhythmic form, as in spatial structures the spatial elements may them- I 54 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT stream, which is otherwise an uninterrupted uniform flow, or else is punctuated merely by the natural pulses of our own attentive activity. This indication of a division may be given in any one, or at once in several, of a great many different ways, all of them being simply modes of emphasis to call attention to the point of division into intervals. It must be clear also that this point is felt both as the end of one interval marked by one group of beats and the beginning of another, and that without the indicating of both its beginning and its end no measure can be marked off. Attention may be summoned for this purpose by any sort of sensuous emphasis, and if the impulses come with perfect regularity, the slightest emphasis on the point of division into intervals is enough to make the grouping clear,—a slightly louder sound, a slightly more extended movement, a definite change in direction of line or motion, a sound of higher or lower pitch, and so on indefinitely to all the possible means, along with regularity of the occurring of the sense elements, for calling attention to a grouping of these. Thus the group recurs. Even with no accent whatever, if the sensuous pattern itself is clearly distinguishable as pattern and is repeated at regular intervals in a continuous temporal movement, attention marks some one point of the repeated pattern as its beginning and comes to feel the rhythm involved as the regular recurrence of this pattern, much as in the parallel case of a Greek key border, though there is no beginning or end of any one part, we see the continuous line as the regular repetition of a unitary spatial pattern. Rhythm is thus seen to consist in its essence in regular recurrence in time. What recurs may also itself be a rhythmic form, as in spatial structures the spatial elements may them- I 54 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT by the length of time-interval marked off as recurrent. For it is this length that determines the slowness or swiftness of the recurrence fundamental to the character of the rhythm. If the recurrent time-interval is short, since rhythm is con-tinuous, the rhythm is correspondingly swift; and a rhythm is completely constituted for apprehension with the distinct indication of the beginning and end of this time interval. The absolutely simple one-one-one is as truly a rhythm, with as clearly defined an asthetic effect, as any rhythm, however complex. The beating of tom-toms may be of exactly this sort, monotonous indeed but extraordinarily effective and even expressive, despite the simplicity of its rhythmic form. And in all very simple cases counting or "beating time" indicates rhythm unambiguously. Even one pronounced at regular intervals defines a rhythm, the recurrence being indicated by the same syllable, itself a defined sensuous sound-pattern, over and over. This same rhythm might be marked by tapping out the same sound regularly and slowly. And if we are to indicate so elementary a rhythm by a spatial pat-tern, a motion in the same direction and of the same visual form at the same location will accomplish our purpose. Rhythm becomes less simple in constitution by marking off further divisions or periods within the fundamental recurring interval. For most of the rhythms we familiarly enjoy, at least one such further division is usual. But the principle remains as simple as before. As time-flow itself can be marked off or divided into more or less quickly recurring intervals, so any of these intervals may be divided again into sub-intervals. Familiar music always has at least this degree of rhythmic elaborateness. The conventional time-signa-tures of musical notation in the form of numerical fractions indicate by the upper figure the number of subsidiary in- 156 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT tervals into which the fundamental interval is divided; and this fundamental interval, appropriately called the measure, is full when that number of equal sub-intervals has been counted off, though often these sub-intervals are grouped together, so that the subdivision is primarily into fewer sub-intervals than the figure indicates. In six-eight time, for example, the fundamental subdivision is into two groups of three which fill the measure in a count of six. But the measure is divided into six not primarily but only seconda-rily, each of the two main subdivisions being itself divided into three. The lower number of the fraction indicates, but only relatively, of course, the duration of each sub-interval in terms of simple fractions of unity, the so-called whole note, so that besides the time-signature we need always a further indication of rate or tempo which is given in a technical term, presto, largo, etc. But the time-signature gives unequivocally the subsidiary rhythmic pattern as being constituted of just so many sub-intervals of time within the fundamental time-interval. Naturally for swift movement we are likely sometimes to use a division into many short sub-intervals as well as to shorten the time of the fundamental interval or measure; but it is only this last that really gives rapidity to the main rhythmical structure of the composition as a whole, since the pulse of very slow tempo may easily be emphasized by a contrast between measures filled with long sustained single notes and equally slow measures divided into a very large number of short notes. If we keep in mind the fact that what we call measure here is as such slow or fast, that it is long or short not in space at all but only in time, we shall be less likely to feel that measure involves mechanizing a rhythm or applying to it static units of spatial extension. I 57 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT The time-signature is in part, as we have just seen, only an indication of convenient units for counting, with reference to the exigencies of musical notation, though of course through convention and association certain time-signatures are fairly required to indicate certain typical rhythms. Waltzes are written in three-four time, though three-one or three-two or three-eight could of course be used. The reverse does not hold, however, for three-four time may be that of a hundred different sorts of composition at almost any tempo. The point of this illustration from musical notation is simply that the rhythm of music is fundamentally a mathematically indicated subdivision of a primary, regularly recurring time-interval, and nothing else, except what is required to indicate to sense-apprehension the division into this specific interval which recurs, and the subdivision of it, either or both of which indications may be given with all possible degrees of intensity. There is the consequent possibility of variation, perhaps not properly called variation in the essential character of the rhythm, but certainly variation in the full concrete manifestation and embodiment of it, so that it may be characterized as what we call very marked and in-sistent, or at the other extreme, where however the recurrence must be somehow marked if we are to have rhythm at at all, what we call smoothly flowing or continuous rhythm. But continuous here is a misleading term. For in one sense all rhythm is strictly continuous, the end of one interval being the beginning necessarily of another if we are to have any completed temporal structure instead of mere frag-ments. But no rhythm has the continuity of the unbroken time-flow itself, for this must be marked off, and in that sense broken, if there is to be the recurrence necessary to any rhythm at all. I 58 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT Rhythms are thus seen to be sensibly indicated and sensibly filled temporal orders which besides having their definite swiftness or slowness, namely, their rate, are subject to variation of as great range as the possible modes of division into sub-intervals of their regularly recurring primary time-in-tervals. And rhythms may also be combined in all these modes. In other words rhythms, as they can be accurately indicated by numbers, so they offer for esthetic effect all the possibilities of number so far as number of divisions, combinations of different numbers of divisions of the same in-terval, or alternating modes of division are available to direct feeling. We can have in the first place a quickly or slowly recurring primary interval, the length of which, being a measure of time, is just this quickness or slowness; and rhythm thus is always relatively fast or relatively slow, has always its specific rate. If the fundamental intervals or measures are themselves grouped into larger temporal units, obviously the whole group may now be taken as the primary division or time-interval, and there is no further principle involved, but only a more slowly moving and more inclusive temporal pattern, not a different sort of pattern. Musical composi-tions, for example, in grouping measures in larger wholes, make the measures themselves sub-divisions of the regularly recurring group of measures, and if this longer group does not recur, it is not itself a rhythm but only a pattern of sound within which rhythm is one of the ordering principles or forms. • In the same way long narrative poems have often the dignity of the slower rhythm of their stanza length, within which the division into lines and feet is felt as a subsidiary rhythm. And stanza form requires very definite emphasis, such as the added rhyming line of Spenserian I 59 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT verse, or very clear-cut sensuous stress of some other sort, to call attention to the divisions into stanzas, if this division is to be marked for the ear, and so give a rhythmic effect at all different from that of an unbroken sequence of lines. Still larger divisions into books or cantos is hardly rhythmical in any sense, since attention can not in sense-apprehension grasp such long units as units, to feel their recurrence. At this point we are ready to consider, as easily intelligible specific modes of rhythmical structure in general, so-called compound and complex rhythms and that special sort of complexity called syncopation. The six-eight measure that we noticed above is typical of compound rhythm, as it is usually called in music, a rhythm very different from that which might be felt in a simple division of the primary interval into six beats not grouped into either two's or three's. But further than this, the fundamental interval or sub-intervals may at the same time or in sequence be divided in two or more different numerical ways, the one not subordinate to the other. Rhythms so constituted are properly called complex as distinguished from compound. Often in music they are called cross rhythms, one of them being apparently felt as conflicting with or crossing the other, because the grouping of the pulses in one is not the further division of the other grouping, but a different subdivision of the primary interval, as in two against three or three against four. Here again the numerical possibilities are literally infinite; but only a very small range of them seems to be accessible to asthetic appreciation and so available for composition, though there is no reason why this range may not be increased in the. further development of music and dancing. Syncopation is that particular sort of crossing or conflict in 160 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT rhythm that is produced by a shift of the accent to what was previously unaccented in the rhythmic pattern. After a main recurrent time interval has been established, the accented beat being clearly felt as marking this division, the accent is suddenly shifted to a point between beats. The established rhythm is thus interrupted, and its accent becomes only co-ordinate or even subordinate to the new accent, or it may be actually suppressed. If the new accent suppresses it completely, however, we shall only have introduced a new point of division, not a new rhythm but the old one over again, beginning at a different point in time. For the rate and the pattern of sub-division remain the same. In order to have the effect of syncopation, therefore, we must either keep up both accents concurrently or else shift the accent back to its old place before we have lost the feeling for that place as establishing the previous rhythm. As in structures in other sensuous fields, when two different rhythmic patterns each fill the same time-interval, not only may they sometimes be distinguished as crossing or con-flicting, but together they have the specific and individual characteristic quality of the particular combination, felt in its complex wholeness as one rhythmic character. Untrained perception feels not the two or more distinct rhythms, but only the one complex effect, as an unanalyzed but more or less definite and special character or quality. But all human beings, practised or unpractised, are susceptible to the effects of specific complex rhythms, the constituent rhythms of which they can not or do not at all clearly distinguish, feeling instead the peculiar excitement appropriate to the complex rhythm taken up by their bodies, but not consciously distinguishing the constituents or recognizing the precise ESTHETIC JUDGMENT rhythmical structure of the composition, though they definitely feel it as characteristic. If, however, a rhythm is to be felt at all, it must, at least in part, and so far as it is distinctly recognized as rhythmic character, be enacted however minutely in the body feeling it; and for full appreciation of its specific nature, the feeling must be of this character presented to apprehension. There must be not merely the sense content of sound or color or spatial form, but also the marking off by attention of the rhythmical pattern itself. This is more emphatically, perhaps exclusively, accomplished through incipient or overt movement of nerve-controlled muscles. Thus for even the perception of rhythm, and much more for its full apprecia-tion, bodily flexibility and nervous control of muscular movement are necessary, whether of sense organs usually so called or of other parts of the body whose motion is brought by nervous activity to apprehension. When rhythm is fully felt and clearly distinguished, such co-ordinated control is not merely experienced within, but tends, with concentration of attention upon the apprehended rhythmic pat-tern, to issue in larger and more fully defined rhythmic motions embodying the pattern externally to vision. That we apprehend the rhythm of music through our feet as well as our ears is a familiar enough fact, but perhaps we are likely not to be so clear that the apprehension of rhythm, through any part of the body trained to flexibility in patterned mo-tion, brings just as accurate an account of this rhythm to consciousness. All of which emphasizes the fact that rhythm as such is felt, not heard or seen, and that this felt rhythm is necessarily that of nervous muscular activity itself, progressing in the given rhythmical pattern, which can thus conceivably be apprehended by mind. 162 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT § 5 The most natural and most adequate experience of the beauty of rhythmic patterns themselves is that of the dancer, who by virtue of his training is susceptible to complex and clearly defined rhythmic character in a fullness not available to those whose bodies can not take on or take up such a patterned movement, because their bodily organization is less subtle and refined in this respect and also less strong and resilient. To notice that the dancer, like other artists, is satisfied with the concrete manifestation in himself, apprehended clearly through feeling, and usually fails, even if he tries, to describe it in words, is only to take account of the fact that rhythm is one of the unique characters of the experienced world which, like all other characters, refuses to be literally translated. Rhythms in music and in seen dancing are familiar enough lay experiences, but certainly far less rich and voluminous, less clear and strongly defined, and less subtly discriminated in their specific variations, than rhythms apprehended through the bodily experiences of dancers themselves. And it is clear enough that while rhythm, to be contemplated, must be the pattern of a sensuous content for ear or eye, or for the feeling of impact, this content itself may be very indifferent, and the rhythm still remain an exciting objective pattern. The art of dancing goes far beyond the rhythms involved. It perfects the visual spatial forms in which the rhythm is embedded and enhances these by color and illumination, as well as also using beauties of representation and mimicry proper, and expressiveness as such. But there may be a fine and engrossing fascination in bare complex rhythmic patterns them-selves, even when the visual or auditory content is almost 163 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT negligible, as is obviously the case when dancers close their eyes, and, to the merest tapping or beating of an accompaniment or to no accompaniment at all, focus their whole attention upon the rhythm felt in the body as a dominating formal, but of course temporal, pattern, which their movements fit into and continuously define in all its elaboration and all its precision. If modern social dances are condemned either as dull and unimaginative, or as merely vehement and intense, or as actually corrupting and loosening moral fibre, the answer is not that we should abandon dancing, but that dancing, like other arts, may be low or high, simple or complex, adequate or inadequate to human capacities. It need not be at its best expressive, even if vividly, of only a very narrow emotional range. Instead of presenting extremely simple structural forms that are primitive in their monotony, or forms that are interesting and exciting, but only as expressive of the most elementary animal impulses in their crudest manifestations, dances may have the subtlest variation and nuance of pat-tern, the most delicate elaboration and refinement, and all this without the least loss of the rigor and the technical finality of the most absolute jazz. The vast spiritual, or moral, or merely human, possibilities of rhythmical movement for the good life were as clear to the Greeks as they are to Havelock Ellis, who has identified art itself, as well as life, with the dance, though no doubt with some lack of literalness. Plato put down music and gymnastics, both essentially rhythmical, as the fundamentals of education. The significance of bodily motion and hence of rhythm is still more emphatically indicated, for any natural outlook upon the world, by Spinoza. As the body is apt to many motions, so, and only so, is the mind apt 164 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT to many thoughts, and knowledge adequate to Nature or to God. Man is neither a mere body nor a mere mind; these are only modes of the one Substance, which in its reality is as truly Man as it is Nature or God. The attributes of Substance are extension and thought, and the primary and pervasive mode of Substance under the attribute of extension is motion. To know our own bodies truly and adequately is to know God. To know their rhythms is to feel the pulse of Nature. But for asthetics these authoritative speculative insights are not enough. We may grant the pervasiveness of rhythmical form and even insist upon its unique and inward vitality, and so upon the necessity of concrete acquaintance with it for any the least adequate realization of our world, but we must also be explicit and analytical. Familiarity with the phenomenon itself is requisite to knowing it, but familiar acquaintance is far from being adequate analytical knowledge. Here careful discrimination must come into play not only to distinguish rhythm itself from its sensuous filling of sounds, or spatial elements, or colors, and from the activity that apprehends it and takes on its patterns, or the mere feeling of motion itself, so much of which is not rhythmical at all, but also to distinguish specific variations and combinations in rhythm and their particular effects. As we have seen, the swiftness or slowness of a rhythm is a rate which can be measured in terms of arbitrary time units. So many pulses per minute, we say. But this rate is in a sense absolutely fast or slow. For units of time, minutes or seconds, bear a determinate relation to the time-rates of human processes, breathing, pulse, and other organic func-tions, which are beyond our conscious control, including interested perception and attention. And these functional 165 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT rates constitute a fixed natural basis for the shortness or the length of time-intervals as felt by us. Hence, once we have given the rate itself and the further division and subdivision of the primary regularly recurring time-interval into pulses, we have a rhythm not only completely defined and numerically precise, but also for human beings absolutely or intrinsically fast or slow, whatever the mode of indicating the divisions, and whatever the sensuous content filling the rhythmic pattern. If, as we have already noticed, this appears to be a very meagre account of what we all think of as rhythm in the arts, we may now proceed to indicate its adequacy, at least in principle, to those familiar rhythmical arts in which subtleties and irregularities are all-important and numerical measures seem a little impertinent. $ 6 So far we have thought mostly in terms of music and dancing, the latter so often associated with the former that illustrations from musical notation apply to both. And it is in music, of course, that notation is most nearly adequate and most explicitly given. The absolute rate is given in the conventional terms applicable to tempo, or still more definitely in metronome markings, which indicate the number of notes of a certain relative time-value to the minute. But the mode of division and subdivision is further defined not only by the time-signature and by bars to mark off measures, but by the notes themselves, each with its relative time-value given by its printed form, and even so spaced as to aid the eye with this further representation of relative lengths of time in the one forward direction in which the music flows, by the one horizontal direction in which the notation is read. The duration of the measure being fixed, and the movement 166 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT being continuous—for of course "rests" fill out intervals just as clearly as notes— a regular recurrence at a definite rate is established, and the rhythm of the music mechanically and unambiguously represented. It is also true, however, that without bar-lines to mark the measures, or even a time-signature, the indication of the rhythmic pattern and rate are given pretty clearly by the patterned sequence of the printed notes. This is quite unmistakably so in highly coherent, that is genuinely composed, music as distinguished from such composition as is little more than improvisation. Even the tempo is suggested by the character of the sequences of notes, so that these alone in their one-dimensional time order may give to a competent musician a rigorous guide to the whole rhythmical structure of the composition. But "competent" is a dubious and fluctuating designation, and the whole point would be scarcely worth making, it it were not that in another most familiarly rhythmic art, where competence is equally rare, our written symbolism omits any specific indication of rhythm except by spacing off lines and groups of lines, and so makes the comparison of verse rhythm with the rhythm of music itself more obviously significant. If for beginners music does not also add this device of arranging the composition in separate lines, it is probably rather on traditional grounds than any other, unless it is just the printing expense; and no doubt verse is not explicitly marked as to rate, much less numerically as to measure and subdivision of measures, because in the first place this would offend traditional taste, but also because previously learned rules of word accent and sentence emphasis and the conventions of reading sentences, of which after all verse as discourse is composed, are more or less correctly sup- 167 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT posed to be primarily applicable. Besides this, elocution has been an art rather of the inculcation of specific "read-ings" than of general principles. Furthermore the content of verse is not, even as directly perceived, mainly tonal or even mainly sound. The sounds of poetry are directly taken as having, or even being, meanings, or as the transparent suggestion of imagery in any or all of the sensuous fields, as well as of emotions and feelings which it refers to and summons only symbolically. Hence to mark off poetry in print, as if it were explicitly rhythmical, patterned sounds, would at once too forcibly emphasize its failings as properly musical composition, and rob it of the appearance of the printed discourse of the human mind, which, though it feels and hears, finds its proudest and most dignified satisfaction in functioning as the strictly knowing intellect. However this may be, if we are to appreciate verse not merely as expressive of the meanings of its words and sentences, but also as an art of sound in which the rhythmic pattern is at least not negligible, it would help the incompe-tentand most of us are certainly to be classed here-and above all the beginner, to have it printed with some indication of its tempo or of its measure. Some contemporary poets have gone so far as to use the familiar musical designations of rate: adagio, andante, and so on, but usually rather to set a mood for association than explicitly to indicate the actual swiftness or slowness of the rhythm of their verse. In general, too, poetry is predominantly expressive art rather than formal art; and since we have not yet made out even the relation of art to asthetic surface, it must be clear that we are not in any position at this point to speak on principle of the effects of poetry as such, or even of the purely asthetic aspects of poetry. Poetry has an audible as-I 68 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT thetic surface, but it is not appreciated as this surface alone, as the very slightly poetic effect of poetry read aloud in an unknown language is enough to convince us. But more than this, even the audible surface of poetry is not pure tone; the intrinsic possibilities of variation established in the nature of pitch play very little part even in the sounding surface of verse, and loudness and softness are much less definitely ordering principles than they are in music. What the two arts have in common for the most part is only rhythmical structure given through auditory content, which content itself involves, and in both cases, feelings from the vocal chords as well as sensations through the ear. It is the difference between the rhythmical structure of music and that of verse that we finally come to as throwing further light upon the nature of rhythm itself. It is this difference that suggests for our account of rhythm here an additional characteristic. This difference is perhaps most clearly named as a difference in degree of explicitness. Verse is of course rhythmical, however subtly and variously, and rhythm necessarily involves a measured timing in the sounds of verse. But the very fact that we have not found it necessary to employ a time-signature or a tempo index, as in music, indicates that the "numbers" of poetry flow without so explicitly noted a regularity, and that the artistic satisfactoriness of verse rhythm is a matter of subtlety and even of felt irregularity. What is really the case here is certainly not fully agreed upon by critics and theorists; but in the light of the nature of rhythm in general, it must be clear that some fundamental felt regularity in recurrence is an absolute necessity, since it is in the nature of rhythm to involve such recur-rence. But the syllables of words in discourse, whether prose or verse, do not lend themselves in English-or in any I69 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT other language, for that matter, though English is even less amenable in this respect than Spanish or Italian—to shortening in time or to a regularity of recurring accent, so easily as do musical tones. Rhythm could be applied from without, simply imposed upon, a series of nonsense syllables. But syllables in words and sentences depend in part, for carrying their very meanings, upon the same sort of variations in pitch and loudness that must be used to mark the purely rhythmical structure of any sound sequence. It is clear therefore that on the one hand the subtle and delicate sound variations native to intelligible oral discourse as such, must be so employed in verse, so arranged and modified to give a sound pattern in a more or less definitely marked rhythm, as not to disregard too violently these primary sound variations without which words and sentences lose their intelligibility. On the other hand, rhythm in the elementary sense of time-pattern in measured inter-vals, if it is to fit intelligible discourse at all, must be variable and subtle enough, along with establishing felt recurrence, not to interfere with such prior demands in the same sensuous realm as give meaning to verse. At least verse rhythms must be free enough of numerically measured regularity not to distort into unrecognizableness the natural linguistic, and hence symbolically significant, time-values and stresses of words and sentences in discourse. It is often said that the rhythms of English poetry are a matter of accent instead of duration of syllables-—literal length of vowels in time-as in Greek and Latin poetry. But this is a badly confused and confusing statement. Apparently what must be meant, is that in the sounding medium of spoken words, the underlying rhythmical pattern, itself purely a matter of division into recurring time-intervals and I 70 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT their subdivisions, is more usually and more characteristically marked in English verse by louder or higher sound, so-called accent that is, at the points of division, than by actually maintaining sounds longer to hold attention and mark structure. Both devices are common in music, and the first of a series of several notes of equal time-value in a figure is often held out quite beyond this value, and the rest of the series then hurried to come within their total allotted time, simply to make clear the beginning of a new or repeated interval in the rhythm. Neither length of particular syllables nor ac-cent, however, constitutes the rhythm itself. They are both only ways in which the sensuous filling is qualitatively varied at critical points to call attention to, or keep attention interested in, a temporal recurrence, which would otherwise be missed or confused or felt as less insistent and dominating. Rhythm as such, being felt recurrence, is always a matter of time-order and time-division, never merely accent or duration of syllables or notes, but their temporally determinate arrangement, marked now in one and now in the other of these ways. As we have already said, the number of devices for making any content take on or reveal the pattern of a series of more or less regularly recurring impulses or intervals is very large. If accent or ictus is one of the simplest of these de-vices, though it is probably never used without others, especially in the case of English verse, that neither turns the rhythm into mere accent, which is manifestly impossible, nor does it in the least rule out other devices, such as introducing pauses empty of syllables to fill time-measures and indicate divisions and achieve continuity, or such as sustaining any one syllable, raising or lowering the pitch of a vowel, stressing in various ways the noises in the consonantal parts of syllable I71 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT sounds, swaying the body as one recites, beating a drum in the fashion of an Arabian devotee to mark the measured progress and the accumulation of his numbers, and so on to all the more subtle and delicate and less easily named means of marking time, the holding of the breath, the timbre of the voice, variations of the slightest sort, or variations of many sorts at once, all to accomplish the same general purpose. What is plain from the comparison of rhythm in music and rhythm in verse, recurrent in temporal pattern as both must be in order to set up any feeling of rhythm at all, is first that verse rhythm is less explicitly, less regularly, and less uniformly marked than rhythm in music. Moreover, in verse the subdivisions of the primary recurrent interval are felt as less regular and less specifically measured, and they are more subtly indicated than in music, where the durations of notes are simple fractions of the measure itself as well as of a unit time-interval of notation, the length of which can be definitely given in fractional parts of a second. Whereas a musical composition, either throughout its whole duration, or throughout large parts of this duration, keeps strictly to this established and measurable rate, so that we can calculate the number of minutes it takes to perform it; a poem varies in the speed of movement in time from idea to idea or from image to image, and the rate of a poem on the whole, while it is obviously an element of its asthetic character, is not so explicitly marked that we feel it necessary to agree upon it. In fact, in literary criticism it is seldom considered. How fundamentally or even absolutely important this general rate is, however, any dramatic reading illustrates. Sec-ondly, then, it follows out of this comparison of verse rhythm and rhythm in musical composition that rhythm it-self, whatever the sensuous filling of its patterns, is subject 172 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT to this further sort of variation, and therefore properly characterized as more or less subtle, more or less regular, more or less marked, or, as we have put it here, more or less explicit. $ 7 Thus our added point on the nature of rhythm is that any given rhythm varies both in swiftness and in numbers, that is in its fundamental rate and in the patterned subdivision of the primary time-interval; that both these variations may and usually do occur constantly in any rhythmical structure in art, and that what we have left as necessary to rhythm itself is the felt recurrence of the primary time-interval, a recurrence sufficiently emphasized to be marked for attention without interrupting the rigorous temporal continuity running through or under the sensuous content of whatever form, but constantly varied both as to its rate and as to its mode of subdivision. The limits of such variation depend, if they are to come within sthetic appreciation at all, upon the proficiency we have, through training or instinctive gift, both to catch a fundamental rhythm itself and to feel the subtleties of its variation as still only modifications of the fundamentally recurring pattern of a single temporally ordered structure, no matter how various in its parts. As the material of music consists more exclusively than that of verse in tone itself, which is the body and filling of its rhythmic character, and as it also depends more obviously upon its rhythmic pattern, music is more explicitly rhythmical than verse. But if verse is less explicitly rhythmical than music, it is no less truly and pervasively rhythmical, for it too is presented only in a temporal continuity where regular recurrence must be discriminable and clearly felt. It is in verse, however, that the variations of rhythm become 173 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT so subtle and so difficult to measure in numbers, and the subtlety and irregularity so characteristic, that it is the consideration of rhythm in verse that establishes our final characterization of rhythm in general. Thus in concrete cases, whether music or dances or poetry, rhythm, like the sensuous material beauties of color and sound and shape, while it is structural order rather than material esthetic content, is fully characterized only as in its specific particular form, its constantly varying discriminated sublety, which is not merely the addition to or decoration upon an underlying recurrence of pattern, but the intrinsic and precise nature of the determinate concrete rhythmical sequence itself as actually pre-sented. To repeat in summary what has taken so many words to make out, there must be for rhythm anywhere, in verse or even in prose, an established measure, the primarily felt time-interval or division; else no recurrence is possible in the continuous temporal progress through the composition, a continuity absolutely required if the composition is not literally to fall apart. But once this recurrence is clearly estab-lished, the variations in rate, in mode of subdivision, and in grouping, though they may be very great, constitute the concrete specific character that defines the particular rhythm itself, gives it its individuality, and makes it the actual formal asthetic nature or essence that it is, and is presented as and felt to be. With recurrence once established in verse, for example, we can hold back our progress to take into the recurring pattern almost any sort of irregularity; an added metrical foot need not at all break the rhythmic flow of the lines. Prose too may take on rhythm by arranging words in phrases and sentences to give the effect of recurrence, though usually in fairly long periods marked by rising and falling inflexion, a I74 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT more or less gradual movement all upward, or all down-ward, with internal accents, or a combination of the upward and downward movement, accomplished by continuous variation of pitch or of loudness in the syllables as they follow, and the whole pattern repeated in approximately identical form and at least in approximately equal durations of time, so as to be discriminated by the ear as a unit. But as any rhythmic pattern is a fundamentally distinguishable identity, whether it appears in prose or in verse, or in music or danc-ing, and as prose is natively burdened with the meaning its sentences carry, while music at the other extreme carries its meaning on its own surface and refers no further to anything symbolized by it, but directly specifies its character in its tonal structure; while speech is fundamentally symbolic, that is, and music is almost directly present to sense itself in its whole asthetic content, so an explicitly felt rhythm in prose, as in any other sensuously apprehended content, tends to emphasize sthetic surface character. Thus the more fully rhythmical prose is, the more it is felt to approximate verse, the form of speech that has traditionally been considered more beautiful upon its surface, that is, more obviously æsthetic. No clear line can be drawn on this ground between verse and prose, except arbitrarily; for rhythm is common to both, and rhythm in either is so subtly modified that the absolutely specific characterization of it fails for either case, much more any definition of the degree of subtlety and irregularity or even vagueness that should mark a clear transition from a free sort of verse to a more or less rhythmical sort of prose. Prose which is actually metrical is far over the line, of course, and usually felt to be trespass-ing, and the extremes are clearly enough marked. On the one hand there is such verse as is highly and explicitly and I75 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT hence metrically rhythmical, and even more or less musical in the strict sense in its use of tone qualities. On the other hand there is the sort of prose that approaches purely intellectual or even logical symbolism, the sensuous content of sound and the temporal order of occurrence of this content becoming negligible as the ideal of transparent lucidity is approached. Rhythm, even in its least explicit forms, thus involves felt recurrence in time of a sensuous pattern at a fundamentally regular rate, no matter what the variations, so long as they do not interfere with essential continuity and with recognition of recurrence. Rhythm may be compound or complex, but it may also be simple, and so perfectly regular as to be mechanically marked and numerically measured. If it is one of the fundamental principles of structure, it is after all only one sort of structure, the order of the moving temporality of things, not the intrinsic qualitative orders native to sensuous content as such, nor spatial order. Finally, while rhythm is primarily an order, and an order of structure in time, it is often, as rhythmical pattern, an elementary component or material out of which more elaborate rhythms are composed and into which they may be analyzed. Thus it is on the border between the sensuous materials of beauty and the beauty of structure, and we may appropriately proceed from our account of rhythm to the meaning of beautiful form in general as distinguished from material sensuous beauty, and so to the relation which asthetic surface bears to the nature of art. This procedure is not to suggest that beauty itself can be separated into matter and form; for the very materials of sensuous beauty are discriminated and defined in an order intrinsic to their qualitative nature, and the most fundamental non-intrinsic principle of ordered struc- 176 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ture itself, namely rhythm, may also, as particular pattern, enter into structural compositions as sensuous material, capable of being felt and enjoyed in manifestations so elementary and so beautiful in separation from their context, as to be comparable to single color variations or single tones, or single elements of shape. I77 Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers in:sent 4 of 1,170 Prall judgment 218 kac attac Sat, Jun 8, 8:19 PM (3 days ago) to Stefan CHAPTER X ART AND ESTHETIC SURFACE 1. Arts as more than their sensuous content and more than their strictly asthetic surface. 2. Artistic value not identical with asthetic value: the point illustrated in the failure of classifications of the arts. 3. The varying degrees in which perfection of sthetic surface constitutes artistic perfection. 4. The arts necessarily defined in part by technique as applied to specific media. 5. Expression as primary purpose the differentia of the so-called fine arts. § I THE sthetic judgments of our illustrations so far have been distinguished from such judgments as give factual information of one kind or another by their immediate sensuous content. That is to say, when we look for their meaning we find that they are records of the surface aspects of the world, as this surface is spread out for attentive discrimination of its details and its specific character, which we contemplate with the direct satisfaction derived from such contempla-tion. This surface, taken easily into view in sense experi-ence, may be very elementary, as when we sniff the air like a dog and, not unlike a dog perhaps, feel the freshness of it. Or we may discriminate the saltiness of a sea breeze, the scent of pines, the perfume of lavender or heliotrope in a summer garden, enjoyed with no thought of the source of the odor and no interest, for the moment, in the garden itself, or in the pine trees, or the sea. And this breath of 178 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT fresh-smelling air may be enjoyed without our having had any previous experience of the odor it carries, without any recognition, any sense of familiarity, that is, with the nature -much less the name-of the quality immediately present. Say that we are suddenly transported on some still, dark night to a strange land and that we get not even a first view of this new country, but only a breath of its dark sweetness to enjoy and to dwell upon, until daylight reveal its character in the recognizable forms of masses and distances and colors. Of course, so elementary a material beauty as this perfume of the air is anything but simple in its origins and causes. It is conditioned by the elaborate chemistry of na-ture, which has operated through long evolutionary cycles to produce in climate and vegetation just that fragrance of the still darkness that is now our asthetic object. But the fragrance remains a unitary quality, a single sense element of loveliness, a material beauty appreciated by the untrained and inexpert nostrils of the novice from the distance as clearly and distinctly as by an indigenous expert, who recognizes it by a familiar name. It is appreciated, too, as just the specific odor it is, an odor which may always be revived by memory, so that its vivid definiteness, recurring even years later, will carry one back to that romantic night of which it may remain the single reliable and life-long witness and evidence, as a whiff of ether carries one suddenly to an operating-room, the scene of a long-forgotten childhood agony. Such simple elements of material beauty apparently gain by the extreme definiteness possible to their occurrence as distinct or even separated sensuous elements, a vivid pleasurableness for discriminating attention that would almost seem to outweigh beauties of fully delineated structural adequacy whose hold on the mind itself, as clear- I79 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT cut forms, is surer, and, except in exigent immediacy and vivacity, infinitely greater. But it would be an oddly romantic life that would in the fashion suggested by our example of a vividly pleasant odor set about following Pater's famous suggestion that for real living we bend our energies to crowding into the little interval of our mortal years as many passionate pulsations as possible. If only dogs and children find their intensest natural happiness in a minute observation of the elements of the world's sensuous surface, and if none of us may suck the honey of the world in momentary bliss like Ariel, it is perhaps because neither fairies nor dogs nor yet children are the patterns of adult human appreciation of beauty. If the fragrance of a flower is sweet, the complex full beauty of a garden is, if not sweeter, at least a more enduring and voluminous sweetness for a mind that can do more than smell, for eyes that see its lights and shadows, the patterns and proportions of its masses of green, the fitness of its growth to the buildings it encloses or adorns, the structural lines of its borders and paths, the contrasting and blending colors of its beds of blossoms, its slopes and vistas and expanses of level lawn, the line of its wall against the sky, and the moving shadows of its foliage upon the texture of the wall. But a garden may be too richly and complexly composed—nature's intricacies confounding human apprehension with her multiplied profusions—to be appreciated easily as a single beautiful and completely coherent whole, too full of sounds and scents and changing lights and shadows, of intricate, delicate forms and colors, of subtle perspectives and arrange-ments, for human minds to do more than choose details to contemplate, or love it all in a kind of homely and familiar wonder at its variety and sweetness and at the inexhaustible 180 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT subtleties of composition it presents even to the eye alone. A building within it, made by human hands and designed by human faculties upon a plan conceived by a human mind, working in comprehensible spatial forms, while it may be less absorbing to the senses, allows a human mind to rest upon it with perhaps a less immediately passionate response, but with a steady comprehending appreciation of a structural fitness that is more easily grasped and more naturally called beautiful than the most vivid and ravishing odor or color or sound that the garden affords, or even than the garden itself, with all its charm. The poet whose friend was to pray to be all nose to be enraptured by a divine perfume was after all as much of a wit as a poet, and his verses of invitation to this pleasure, in the perfection of their rich and full brevity, their polished ele-gance, the directness of their expression of warm friendliness and of an ironically pathetic human love of the comforts and delicacies of good living on an empty purse, were far more to his normal and permanent taste than the perfume he was offering. The same mind that could contemplate a human being praying to be all nose for a divine odor, found his own ampler satisfaction in the beauties of the least æsthetic of all the arts, poetry itself, where, though the sounding surface is for the ears, the whole meaning and life of the lines is an ordered structure for the imagination and the intellect. The arts, especially the fine arts, have sometimes a surface more asthetically rich and satisfying, even if sometimes less vivid and arresting, than any mere separate sense elements or casually occurring or partly designed natural beau-ties; but this surface is not the central life and significance of the arts any more than it is the life and meaning of nature. I8 I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT And no sthetic theory is even plausible that fails to notice that the arts themselves are directed human activities, operations and processes of creating, not mere asthetic surfaces, and that like other human activities, all of which, so far as they are occupied with forming external matter, the arts ultimately comprise,-their origin, their purpose, and their definition are to be sought not in the realm of æsthetics itself, but in the wider, deeper, and more engrossing realm of human wants in general, human purposes, and human satisfactions. AEsthetic pleasure is always pleasure in an object immediately present to sense, and whether that object is an elementary material beauty, a sensuous content, a single sound, a vivid odor, a bright color, whether it is a combination of all these offered us in nature, or whether it is a highly artificial object produced by an elaborate technical process, makes no difference to its being rigorously asthetic. But for most of our experience, surface immediacy is not even an accurate designation; through our ranging memories, the processes of our minds discover in the presented surfaces of objects much that is not there for sense-apprehension; and a perfect asthetic innocence of vision is hard, perhaps impossible of achievement, for an adult mind. We miss even the blue of shadows in our habit of seeing them as dark places in our way. Being intent upon the practical significance of objects, we see not their precise shapes or colors or textures, not their surfaces, that is, but their uses and mean-ings, or their place in nature under a vague image or a familiar feeling, or even nothing but a class-name. A concept roughly framing them for our knowledge within a scientific scheme of things is perhaps all that their appearance calls forth from us in response to their actually individual 182 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT and specifically differentiated appearance. And this appearance we are willing to call beautiful often only by virtue of the association of the word beautiful, as applied to a beauty once actually felt upon a surface freshly seen in younger and less sophisticated experience, with the name we then learned for the object, now only verbally acknowledged as beautiful. At least, if it is not merely verbal, the judgment as at present pronounced is not actually esthetic; for it is simply the recognition of an object as being of a sort which the word beautiful fits. To say that roses are beautiful is often merely parallel to saying that they have thorns, both pronouncements being mere repetitions of learned phrases or remembered verbal records of forgotten sights and feelings, pieces of a dead sort of knowledge or else of a practically useful symbolism, the meaning of which is not only not of the kind that an asthetic judgment has as content, but either lies totally beyond the purely symbolic content as what this content refers to, or is altogether absent, the mere form of words left being a surviving habitual response in vocal form, but no more a judgment than any other habitual physical response, a point which was suggested at the beginning of our account of esthetic judgment in general. What we are to notice now is a further distinction, that which marks the difference between the meaning and content of strictly and genuinely asthetic judgments in general and the meaning and content of assertions attributing value to the structural human compositions of the arts. And our conclusions may be stated at once in anticipation of the concrete illustrations which are to make the distinction intelligible and acceptable. First of all, the value we attribute to works of art is often not primarily asthetic at all, and to admit this point is neither 183 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT an aspersion cast on asthetic value, nor does it involve any confusion as to the nature or function of fine art. Secondly, the various arts differ very greatly as to the proportion of their value that is strictly asthetic, music being almost purely asthetic in essence, poetry very slightly so. The various conventional classifications of the arts emphasize this point, and for asthetic theory in general such classifications and their different or even contradictory basic principles are therefore of considerable importance. Again, the fine arts are first of all, for any intelligent grasp of them, arts, and only secondarily fine. That is, they are specific operative processes, directed to intended ends, and conditioned by various special and often highly complex techniques, which in turn determine in part the very nature and definition of the objects of these arts themselves. For sthetics, then, it is only prudent to notice the primary meaning of art as such, and so to see just how far the fineness of the fine arts depends upon directed technique rather than upon the sthetic surface of what are regularly called objects of art,— statues, fine furniture, designed buildings, songs and dances and symphonies and operas, poems and plays and pageants, paintings and drawings, tapestries and rugs and fine fabrics. And lastly, as we find that the surface is sensuous and composed of the elementary material beauties we have already con-sidered, in structures themselves apparent to sense in direct perception, but more fully beautiful and more usually and characteristically called beautiful than the bare material ele-ments, so we shall discover that both sensuous elements and structural forms are by their very nature expressive. It is only as works of art give specification-not linguistic names or any other sort of symbols merely, but actual present determination for direct sense perception-to human feelings, I 84 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT emotions, desires, and satisfactions, embodied in the sensuous surface and felt upon it as being its character and quality— only so do they share in the nature of actual concrete works of fine art. These four points can be made out most clearly by illustrative examples from the various arts, but first of all we must stop to notice what art itself means as the term applies broadly to the useful or industrial arts of civilized or of primitive life, as well as to the fine arts, where asthetic surface becomes so important. § 2 As contrasted with the works of nature, works of art are man-made; instead of just happening to come about in the natural course of events, they are brought about by conscious processes employed to modify and combine materials given in nature, to produce other materials or manufactured arti-cles, which without these processes might never come into existence at all, as savages, instead of always throwing stones at their enemies or their prey, come to use one stone to chip another into a shape more eftective for throwing or for strik-ing. Indian arrow-heads are only pieces of flint, but they are human artifacts, objects produced by the art of chipping and shaping stones into pointed tips appropriate to embedding themselves in flesh. And if in modern industrial arts the very preparation of materials and of tools is itself a long process, involving whole industries, the completion of these preparatory processes being a condition of the manufacture of other tools or utensils or objects of use or luxury, all these arts are one in that materials are worked upon by human beings and so modified in form as to result in something intended and desired by men for given purposes. The process 185 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT is too familiar to need illustration in a world so absorbed and dominated by it in one form or another, and we need only mention it to remind ourselves that the human arts, producing their works from materials and objects given to us by nature, do so by operating upon these materials and objects in such wise as to meet practical exigencies and fulfil more or less clearly defined intentions in objects of specific forms and natures. The value of the products of the human arts is then to be measured in terms of the fitness of these products for accomplishing all the various specific human purposes they are intended to serve, and the surface of the products as it lies before discriminating perception is largely irrelevant to this primary value. What we have said of primitive art and what we all know of manufacturing operations and their products makes it very clear, however, that the more nearly we perfect such products, the more widely they are em-ployed, the more familiarly they occur in daily life, the more frequently they are to be seen and handled, the more ubiquitous they have come to be in our surroundings, the more surely do we insist that they be smoothed down so as not to offend the senses, varied in the direction of forms satisfactory to contemplate in themselves, or even ornamented with color or design. Hammers and anvils may be merely of neat and fitting shapes, and horse-shoes merely well fashioned and well attached; but saddles and bridles must be of finely finished leather, and they may also be ornamented with carved design or with precious metals. Even in the kitchen the pots and pans and knives and forks must be in traditionally neat shapes and properly scoured; but the ware for the dining table must be more than this, and as it enters into the processes of domestic life more nearly at their I 86 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT culmination, where they are dwelt upon and repeated not as mere means but in a consummation to be realized and enjoyed, it must be not only inoffensive to perception but an element of grace or ornament. But even the table silver must still serve its proper pur-poses, the handles not out of proportion to be conveniently used, the spoons for soup not so small as those for coffee, the plates deep enough for vegetables or gravy. So that the transgression of human standards of convenience in size alone would spoil our pleasure in the perception of the ob-jects. For these are recognized as serving purposes, performing functions, and an impossibly large spoon becomes monstrous and ugly on the table as the most perfectly bred Waltea's silky-coated dog would appear monstrous and ugly to a "categories 11 mother coming upon it in the place of the baby she had left ? asleep in its cradle. These illustrations can not of course prove the very general principle that the value of objects, even when they are objects of fine art, is not primarily felt to lie in their asthetic surface; but they will suggest so many other obvious illustrations that there is little need of stressing the point further. A public building is not judged as we judge the model of it on exhibition, though the latter may give us a clear idea of its asthetic character. The model is not intrinsically important, and even its own intrinsic beauty of aspect is a very slight sort of beauty, no matter how ex-quisite, as compared with that of the building itself in its full proportions, where the entrances admit human beings and the spaces provide them with convenient room for carrying on human activities. Nor does our mind always keep these two aspects distinct. Part of the felt esthetic value of a dwelling is its privacy, and hence the actual presentation to sense of the beauty of 187 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT privacy, privacy which is not literally sensuous surface seen, not as such the space relations for perception, or the colors or designs before the eyes, but the quality of fitness to satisfy a human want, to give a human satisfaction, revealed upon an æsthetic surface to the eyes belonging to a human mind acquainted with houses and their uses and their characteristic appearance. If we were to limit the word beauty to the literally asthetic surface of which in preceding chapters we have sketched the elements, much of what we naturally take to be the beauty of works of art would be lost, the privacy of dwellings, the appropriate size of dinner plates, the tapering or flattening of handles to be held in human hands, the spacing of door-ways and windows, the sizes of rugs and their closely woven texture of durable knots, the steep slopes of roofs for snow and rain or the flatness of roofs for the enjoyment of tropical nights. The fitness of all these objects for their purpose is clearly not itself the sthetic satisfac-toriness of their surface for the barest sense appreciation; for usefulness is not surface beauty. But as all art is seen as under the aspect of its function, houses to live in, knives to cut with, chairs to sit on; and as even nature is humanized and made intelligible to minds in animal bodies that are fit to move swiftly and easily, and bodily organs fit to function properly, so the values of all things are felt in terms of the names of the satisfactions or functions or purposes that they are intended to effect, and we cannot easily, and do not naturally, abstract the surface from the object even for contemplative appreciation. What we ought to do in such matters has of course scarcely even an intelligible meaning, and certainly no relevance to our discussion, since we are interested here in felt value, recognized and recorded in vital, not merely verbal, judg- I 88 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ments. Our point is simply that the primary value of works of fine art, as of all the works of all the arts, is felt and hence judged not solely as the satisfactoriness for contemplation of the asthetic surface itself. And this is not in the least to deny that the surface as such, and quite apart from recognition or knowledge of the object or its function, may be beau-tiful; it is in just those cases, in fact, where the object itself is highly prized as a work of art, the product, that is, of operations and processes in the service of a recognized end, that an elaborately beautiful esthetic surface seems most appropriate and calls forth the most deeply felt response, a response distinctly lessened in the fulness of its satis-factoriness, if the surface in ornament or elaboration blurs or conceals the function of the object or its purposeful struc-ture, or if the object by its size becomes monstrous and re-pulsive, or minute and merely delicate or charming. Miniatures may of course be exquisite, as well as accurate likenesses, but we all judge them as lesser works of art than portraits to a human scale; and if heroic figures so rarely succeed in being beautiful, it may be because, dominating or adorning great plazas or avenues or approaches as they often do, their majesty and power, even their intended or effective sublimity, is not quite properly that of those human bodies they so often represent in exaggerated anatomies. Bodies must be of mortal proportions to be human at all and to be felt as functioning in human ways, and a man made divine by size alone, is after all likely to be only a monstrous god. On the other hand, such features either of manufactured objects or of natural animals as are esthetically satistying in the strict sense, lend themselves to emphasis in increased size or by ornamentation, as large eyes are beauties because eyes themselves are beautiful in color and shape and texture, 189 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT or a sword-guard, being for practice and performance appropriately of metal, which can be carved or set with precious stones, and also performing as it does a crucially important function in the play and even the wearing of a sword, may well be itself transformed into an asthetic surface of striking beauty for the eye, only to add this further richness to the beauty of the sword as a whole, without blurring the sword-shape or detracting from its distinctive total character. The principle we have been illustrating is that the value of works of art is not felt and judged merely as the asthetic value of their surface, that their very beauty is felt to be greater as they themselves fulfil more perfectly a function or purpose acknowledged in the names we give them. It will be objected at once that our illustrations are of a very narrow range, mostly, in fact, from mere crafts or from minor arts or from architecture, where there may be some doubt as to whether the fine arts have even been considered; so we must go on at once to our second point and consider the varying degrees to which, in different kinds of art, the æsthetic surface proper constitutes the value or at least the beauty of objects. And here the traditional classifications of the arts will throw some light on the subject. These classifications have been made on various principles, and it will be seen at once that it has not always been the nature of the asthetic surface in question that has been used as a basis. From our own account of the kinds of sensuous elements entering into this surface, the classification into visual and auditory arts is seen to be an essentially zsthetic one. But on such a basis, which groups music with poetry, and painting and sculpture with architecture, the classifica-tion, as indicating the natures of the arts themselves, is very unsatisfactory. If we must include dancing, for example, or I 90 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the theatre arts, including drama, the division into visual and auditory fails completely. And while poetry comes to our ears in a rhythmical auditory medium, most of its vital content comes in images from the other senses and all of it in language carrying meanings, in a conventional symbolism, that is, instead of appearing as an immediately appreciated specification to the ear of feeling or emotion. The actual sounds are, more often than not, when felt purely as sounds, utterly irrelevant to the meanings they refer to. These meanings they carry by virtue of a linguistic concatenation of syllables, bound down both separately, and in words and phrases and sentences, to current usage, determined primarily by traditional agreement as to symbolic reference, and this for the purpose of communicating and expressing ideas and emotions, and only secondarily subject to standards of euphony or even of rhythm itself. And if architecture, sculpture, and painting, and carving and etching and draw-ing, are all for vision, all to be discerned as lines and surfaces and solids by the eye, as arts they perform such different functions that an architect may succeed, may even be something of a genius as a designer of buildings and bridges or parks and cities, and yet have little acquaintance with even the media, much less the specific processes and the specialized skill, that are essential to a painter or a sculptor, and little sympathy or feeling for finished works of plastic or graphic art. The asthetic surface in all these arts is obviously visual; the arts themselves differ, as being modelling or painting or drawing or planning and designing buildings for given uses. So we have other classifications not based on the nature of the sensuous elements of the surface content, but upon the purposes in view in making the objects or upon the processes used. There are the arts of carving, etching, drawing, paint- I9I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ing, the arts of verse and prose, the arts of rug-weaving and basket-making, of singing and dancing, all the thousand ways in which men employ special processes, special tools, and special media for making or doing particular sorts of things. Such a classification is almost useless, however, because instead of classifying it merely lists or names the arts, each separately, by the name of the technical means and the specific medium employed, or of the end in view. Then there is the division into the representative arts and the directly expressive, a classification that has no place for architecture at all, and one that falsifies the nature of painting and sculpture only a little more obviously than it falsifies the nature of music and poetry. For though most of the point of painting and sculpture is obviously lost if we leave out the strictly asthetic surface and think only of copying models, it is almost equally obvious that music and poetry may use direct imitative representation in some of their effects. Spatial and temporal arts may be distinguished, but here again we have the same weaknesses and discrepancies of classification as in the case of visual and auditory as a division, with some slight modifications; for what is in space may move also rhythmically in time, and the classification is neither inclusive of all the arts nor does it draw any clear line between one and another except in a few cases. If we turn to graphic and plastic as against linguistic, we have difficulties again, too evident to need illustration, and it would seem that none of the ordinary classifications is especially illuminating, except in drawing attention to the full nature of the various arts by its very inadequacy. If some of them have a genuine basis in the kind of sense elements mainly involved in certain arts and so characterizing these and grouping them together, or in the types of structure I92 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT available for certain sensuous media as contrasted with the kinds of structural order available for other sensuous media, the list we always come back to is quite clearly not determined on these sthetic principles and not a classification at all in any rigorous sense. That is, the recognized and familiarly differing arts do not differ solely or even primarily according to the sthetic character of their elements or even of their structure, but more fundamentally in the purposes for which their objects are created or the modes and tools and media of such creation. Characteristic media and technique help at least as much to define the specific character of any art as does the nature of the sensuous elements or that of the structural principles mainly involved. But in defining particular arts they still fail to classify the arts in general, and as we shall see later, any classification fails in the end for the simple reason that beauties are not things and therefore do not fall into classes of things. $ 3 It is clear, however, that for some of the arts a classification on strictly sthetic principles more adequately indicates the character of the art itself than for others. Thus the art of sound, the auditory art, the temporal art par excellence, is music; and so far as poetry is classed as an auditory art, an art of sound, an art of temporal structure, we actually speak of its musical qualities. It is obviously in music proper that a completely satisfactory sthetic auditory surface is perfect art. But this is not at all the case with poetry. Not even the beauty of poetry is mainly auditory; for poetry, being intelligible language after all, intends to function as all language functions, not merely to produce an zsthetically satisfying surface for the ear, subtle and important as that 193 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT sounding surface is in heightening its value and even in defining it as verse, and absorbing as this surface is to some artists, whose practice tries to make patterned syllables the whole content of poetic art. If it is sweet syllables that poetry discourses, poetry is still symbolic linguistic discourse; its syllables carry meaning and reference. Between these extremes lie the other arts. It has become fashionable in modern discussion and criticism to discount entirely from the value of drawings and paintings and sculpture their representative intent; but how false this is to the nature of the graphic and plastic arts, both with respect to their origin and with respect to the nature of their asthetic effect, is too palpable to need more, to reveal its falseness, than a little attention to the meaning of such a subtraction made in the interest of esthetic purism, and to the concrete works of the recognized masters and models of this esoteric cult. So far as the cult is merely stressing the fact that the rigorously esthetic content of such works of art is strictly a matter of spatial shapes and relations and structural form, of color combinations and of texture, it is not to be disregarded, much less condemned, as our previous discussion must have shown. It is only its exclusion of everything but asthetic surface in terms of structural and sensuous elements and their intrinsic expressiveness that is false. For abstractly and obviously it is clear enough that even when the most enlightened artist, working for purely asthetic effect in terms of sensuous and formal beauty of surface, uses familiar natural forms, no matter how modified or even distorted, as in the manner of so-called primitivism, these forms are those given in nature and necessarily recognized as such by any innocent eyes that I94 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT see them on canvas or in marble. And in adhering to even the faintest resemblance to forms familiar in nature, an artist is using not merely the recognizable principles of design and color combination, but also forms or types that occur naturally and inexplicably, and hence in accordance with no known asthetic principles, no principles that the artist could possibly be acquainted with, since they have not become explicit to men's knowledge. In other words, whether representation is his aim or not, and no matter how little conscious he may be of it, no matter how fully his asthetic conscience may have freed him from such childish obligations, he is using in his design itself forms in shape and color that have been given him by nature to ap-propriate; and no one, if the artist has really appropriated these in his work, can be required not to recognize them as the representations that they are. What, after all, either of sensuous elements or structural forms, is to be found even in the imagination of a genius that has not been given him through nature? Not that he merely copies what faces him —a flat impossibility in any full literal sense but that all the form and content at his disposal has been offered him in the life, and on nature's surface, whether it now issues directly from his own imagination or not. And if he uses not the barest sensuous elements only, but actually seen forms, human bodies, tree trunks, rocks, leaves, vine-stems, shadows, and textures of walls or floors or fabrics, he is in doing so representing these forms, which other eyes will recognize and take pleasure in as the forms they know and enjoy in nature, or in ordinary practical living. The beauty of his composition will not lie in the exactitude of the representa-tion, and it may lie very little even in the represented ele- I95 UGH. ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ments he employs, but to say that none of the artistic value of his work is representative is thoughtless and exaggerated or else plainly fatuous. But more than this. For human beings, as Aristotle noted, imitation or representation is itself a delight, infantile per-haps, but no less truly delightful for that. And to attempt to free art of some of its delight, in order to keep it purely asthetic, is a new kind of fanatical asceticism no more to be respected as reasonable or sane than more ancient and familiar kinds, though we must remember that any such ascetic cult is likely to indicate some genuinely significant motive towards the achievement of value and its proper appre-ciation, as we have seen that the present striving for purely formal significance certainly does. Both the rigorous use of naturally occurring shapes and even types, and the effect upon appreciating eyes of the recognition of represented forms and colored surfaces, is plain in the works of Cézanne, who is so regularly approved or even worshipped by the votaries of this asthetically purist cult, a cult by which Cézanne himself was little troubled, being as he was a painter, not an advocate. In his water-colors, for example, he sometimes represents trees and foliage. True, he does not represent details that the eye can not even discern at its normal distance from such objects, in an attempt to copy all the features of a tree. What he does represent, however, not with lines, but with color masses in his own patiently achieved mastery of a rare technique, is three-dimensional solid trunks of trees, with green branches visibly, and either lightly or heavily, hanging upon them. And this is not purely abstract design at all, but the representation of one specific beauty, clearly felt and grasped, a beauty after all of familiar objects and scenes, but made strange and lovely and vivid because 196 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT here a gifted eye has taken it away from the distracting details of context in which for most eyes it is effectively befogged and lost as beauty. Moreover, the great distinction of this painter, as is often forgotten even by other painters in their praise of him, is that the gifted hand, practised in an original and effective technique, has been able by an almost direct representation of the artist's equally rare vision, to communicate to even the layman's eye, by the use of color masses alone, the special beauty that was not only discovered by the artist but given by him to the rest of men. It is this new skill of his that is so often the real cause of the reverence he is paid by other artists and by discerning critics, a skill not so interesting to the rest of the world except in its achieved results. Here again technique forces itself upon us as of the very defining nature not only of the arts, but of their asthetically felt char-acter, and we shall turn in a moment to a fuller account of this. For the present we are noticing only that visual arts, instead of being merely beautiful as seen surfaces of color and form, gain much of their character and their felt value from being partly representative and thus approaching the linguistic, symbolic nature of poetry in one direction as well as the sthetic purity of music in the other. It is not only that the recognized imitation or representation of natural objects or forms or even types gives immediately felt pleasure which is not the strict asthetic pleasure of the surface content of color combination and spatial structure alone, but that the details of line and shape, the fine shadings and arrangements of colors are themselves largely derivative from surfaces offered in nature to the artist's eye, their beauty as elements being therefore rather natural than artistic, and lying in their meaning or reference as much as in their in- 197 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT trinsic asthetic form. If they are felt as beautiful, who is so informed as to know that this beauty is not partly a matter of habit, and that they are not so felt because practice in habits of perception has taught us to grasp such elements easily as wholes or parts, and hence to be able to dwell on them with satisfaction when an artist represents them to us, whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether aware of their natural sources or not, when he employs them as the materials or the structural forms of his compositions? If one is unconvinced by all this simple direct feeling, or by the works of the most admired masters of the enemies of representation as an integral and important aspect of the beauty of the plastic and the graphic arts, one is faced with other problems to solve. If one is to support the doctrine of pure design as total artistic value, one must give an account of portraiture, for example. Portraiture is representative by definition, but surely it is still an art. Portraits are not mere abstract designs in shape and color, no matter how consciously and intentionally and successfully they may be designed for direct asthetic effect. It is true that they are not photographs either, and that they usually fail as portraits if they try to be just that, much more if they succeed in it. But if an artist employs a sufficiently subtle camera instead of paint and brushes, there is no possible a priori reason why this tool, the function of which as a tool is representation, should not some day be part of the technical paraphernalia of the fine arts. There is nothing intrinsically spiritual in charcoal and paint-brushes, palettes and stretched canvases, red-lead and ochre and oil, to make them superior to lenses and shutters and gelatine-coated films. And there is no reason in the nature of things why subjects before a camera may not have expended upon them the whole power and skill 198 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT of a great artist, or why, for the preservation of his vision of them, a camera of sufficient delicacy and contrivance might not be the best means. That photographers are commoner than artists is perfectly true; that photographs often neither select nor arrange their subjects so as to reproduce on their flat surfaces the beautiful aspects of nature and life that only a gifted mind either sees or imagines or selects for seeing, is only to say that often photographs are not works of art. But in any eulogistic sense most paintings and drawings also fail to be works of art. And to suppose that the degree of mechanical complication of tools prevents their full domination and control by a great artist is to overestimate tools and to underestimate artists. Paint-brushes and pencils are mecha-nisms, and canvas and paint are as artificially manufactured as films or other photographic supplies. For art the question is to use them as means to artistic ends, and since representation is one of these, the camera and photography in general can certainly not be ruled out on any known principles of æsthetics, unless, of course, one makes the false assumption that the perfection of photography consists in literal copying regardless of what it copies, which is absurdly to identify that which constitutes the mechanical perfection of a tool with what constitutes the successful use of it for a given purpose. At least it must be admitted that in sculpture and painting, whether or not one allows the camera as a proper artist's tool, representation of what an artist finds significant or beautiful in a human being, whether general appearance, or grace, or subtle modellings, or indications of character or wisdom or personality, or costume worn with style, or exquisite texture of skin, or distinction of feature, or nobility of bearing, or degeneration, or despair,— adequate representation of such aspects as the artist discerns and finds satisfying to contem- I99 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT plate is a great part of his art as a portrait painter or modeller; and there is not yet a school of critics to refuse acknowledgment of such success in representation as being artistic success. In portraiture both painting and sculpture achieve their ends in representation, and this effectiveness in representation, instead of sensuous and structural beauty solely, counts as artistic value. One or two other difficulties in the way of denying the artistic value of representation ought to be mentioned here, perhaps, to reassure the doubtful. If design in color and shape were the whole of the beauty of painting, why should the projected moving patterns of the color-organ not give us the same kind of effect that we get from the graphic arts themselves? The movement is a difference, of course; but even arrested, these color projections have a very different sort of effect from that of paintings. And no one is likely to insist that patterned textiles or rugs, with velvet or silken texture, give us the same sort of effect as paintings. It is not a question of which is finer; that depends on the particular objects, and certainly a fine rug may be infinitely more beautiful than many a commonplace painting on canvas. Our point is that the asthetic surface, including texture, design, and color, is not the whole and often is not even the most essential constituent of the value of paintings, whereas in works of pure design and color it is. And rugs themselves, if they are particularly distinguished, do not succeed in being fine rugs merely through the sthetic surface of their sensuous and structural beauty. To the eye of the artist weaver, while design and color are of the greatest importance, the whole takes on value also from the fineness and regularity of the warp and woof, the closeness of the texture of knots, and the quality of the dyes. And the designs, while they are 200 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT not quite linguistic in symbolic reference-though some-times, of course, actual lettered texts form parts of them— are full of religious and mystical indications, and hence almost like poetry in their imaginative suggestiveness and the significant character of their appearance. For one who finds the only value of the graphic and the plastic arts in their asthetic surface, or, as is often said, in their pure design, the very great differences, in their characteristic successful effects, among designs projected from a color-organ on a white screen, designs in paint on canvas, designs in rugs and tapestries and textiles, and designs copied from nature by the lens of a camera, must be accounted for in the terms of textures, lines, shapes, space-relations, and colors; and to carry out such a view would give strangely repugnant conclusions in the face of familiar experiences. No artist draws lines more subtle or more moving or more powerful than those a camera may copy from nature, or from the artist's own work; no design in pigment on canvas is altogether impossible for tapestry; and for pure design itself, with no representative element at all, the color-organ is far richer than many great paintings, with which no one would even compare its effects as artistic achievement. These suggestions may be enough to make it clear that asthetic surface is not the vital whole of the beauty of even objects of fine art, much less their complete nature and sig-nificance, and further that the arts vary greatly in the degree to which their artistic value is constituted by, or related to, the sensuous and formal aspects of their strictly æsthetic character. If we list the arts roughly as music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture, our second main contention in the present chapter is now fairly clear, viz., that in the apprecia- 20I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT tion of the fine arts, while objects of some of these arts are valued in direct proportion to the value for immediate intuition of their asthetic surfaces, objects of most of them are not. The degree to which artistic value gains or loses with gain or loss of beauty of asthetic surface varies from one art to another. In music perfection of the sounding surface is perfection of the music. In poetry, the sounding surface, important as it is, is only a comparatively slight, though essential, aspect of the beauty of even the verse as such. The other arts lie somewhere between these two extremes. Architecture, considered as esthetic surface, as seen masses of color and shape, has the perfection only of its visual content and structure; and it will be granted that these do not name or even suggest its full character, much less its specifically architectural beauty and perfection. In the plastic arts, and in painting and drawing, representation, which is not mere sensuous surface or the structural design of this sur-face, plays so important a rôle that here again the esthetic surface is only a part of the success or perfection of these arts, though fitness to human uses is not, as it is in architec-ture, an important or even relevant consideration. And while the art of poetry makes no demands like those of architecture and is only to a very slight degree directly representative even of sounds-onomatopœia is of course the extreme case of this, though certainly not the only case—poetry is engaged in employing a linguistic, referential medium, and its perfection and success lie in such control of this medium as succeeds in making meanings themselves beautiful, so that the sthetic surface of the verse as audible sensuous content plays a distinctly minor, though no doubt absolutely essen-tial, rôle. 202 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT § 4 And poetry is as good an illustration as we could find of our third main contention here, namely, that both the arts themselves and particular works of art, are defined in terms of their technique, which, sharing in their essential nature, is also in part their very beauty for appreciation and enjoy-ment, not merely the condition or means of their production, but definitive of their form and structure and nature, and therefore a main term in the situation in which their beauty is manifest to the other main term conditioning the occurrence of beauty, that is, a human mind in contemplation of its æsthetic object. This has been suggested already, and a few examples will make it clear. But the point can be made out easily enough on general grounds, so far as it is simply the principle that the defining nature of the various arts is in part a matter of technique; for the arts are naturally enough defined, even as a matter of correct usage recorded in dictionaries, altogether in terms of certain sorts of operations upon certain objects or materials directed by certain aims, always conceived as the production of finished objects or materials of certain forms or structures, which not only serve present pur-poses, but define and preserve for man's knowledge and for his civilized life the technical functions and processes which these objects externalize and embody. And as the industrial arts thus preserve useful techniques, so of the fine arts. Without the actual physical violins and bows of the Cremona masters of the early eighteenth century to serve both as instruments and as models for other instruments, the technique of producing music from stringed contrivances could not 203 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT have developed as it did, nor could the actual musical literature of the next two centuries have taken the forms we now have in the great musical classics. Or consider the art of poetry as a technique. If language is confined to the medium of words in intelligible discourse, then so far as poetry is intelligible at all, it is an art depending for its structure and its significance upon the purely technical control of this linguistic medium: upon breadth and accuracy of vocabulary, an expert acquaintance with the subtle possibilities of phrasing and sentence structure, with the means of achieving lucidity and unity in composition. And since these basic requirements of all intelligible discourse are not enough to give the special auditory character of verse, the composer of poetry must also have an ear not only instinctively fine and even gifted, but acquainted, through long practice and intense attention to the sound qualities of language, with the possibilities for such rhythmical arrangements as will not destroy the significance or offend the fundamental conventions upon which the intelligibility of discourse in words rests. The poet's ears must be attuned by reading and practice not only to the specific denotative shades of meaning, the emotional connotations and associated images of words and phrases, and even whole contexts, but to all the specifically auditory or even musical effects possible to syllables as such, rhyme and assonance, and various other felt agreements and harmonies, contrasts and stresses through sensuous means, without which verse fails of its achievement as a content for the ear in a rhythmical continuity. Since we all learn the mechanical, technical uniformities of pronouncing words and phrases, and of spelling and punctuation and sentence structure, by a long process in early life, 204 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT and since we are all taught to read and thus given some acquaintance with linguistic technique as practised by our for-bears, so that this technique becomes available largely without consciously directed formal technical training or effort in the habitual talking and writing and reading of every day of our lives for years, we are likely to forget that the technique itself is one of the most difficult and elaborate of any of the arts. The same amount of training in music or painting would make us all equally at home in those arts, and we should not need to learn scale-structure and musical phrasing and the ordinary notation and forms of musical composition late in life as a special sort of "art education," and so fail to appropriate it all as habitual, and think for example of singing from printed music as a rather exceptional, special, or even esoteric accomplishment. On the other hand language, which is so universally practised in forms of a high degree of structural elaboration, with subtleties of inflection and phrasing learned in infancy, enters with all this complexity into the most ordinary conversations of every day. Hence it becomes stereotyped to such an extent that even slight variations in the interest of brevity, emphasis, accuracy, delicacy of meaning, and those further variations and modifications of accent, order, and arrangement that mark verse as beautiful to the ear, are likely to seem false or offensive. The poet must have not only linguistic skill and a fine ear to control his technical medium to his ends, but such genuine and necessary and powerfully felt significant content to convey, that this modifies and supports the medium that carries it to the ear, to a degree that makes the verse sheer creation of new words and phrases and structures in a new beauty. It is only at this point that we come upon great poetry itself. But however 205 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT striking and significant, however ravishing or rhythmical, however immediate and compulsive, however lucid and stirring poetry may be, its very character as art is felt as the special nature of the medium itself, the poet's technique becoming externalized in the verse he writes as its effective artistic character and point, as well as its specific individual quality and beauty. No general statement either as to the auditory surface of poetry or as to its significant content can do more than barely suggest the part that technique plays both in the creation and in the finished form and defining nature of poetry as an art. The numberless works on composition and verse forms and literary criticism are taken up very largely with just this matter. But leaving all the detail aside, it must be clear that if we sometimes forget the all-important and portentously elaborate technique of poetry as entering into its felt quality as art, it can only be because so much of technical linguistic equipment is the common and habitually employed possession of all men who can speak or read or write, that poets seem only to be refining a little on natural processes, instead of carrying on into a sort of magic region, and further developing, or newly creating, a highly technical artificial process such as distinguishes any art as art. Thus we have noticed both the sense in which the art of poetry may be defined in terms of its technique, and also the sense in which this technique constitutes in part the specific value of any poetical composition, in being directly felt as its particular nature. And since this technique itself is not concerned merely with sensuous and formal esthetic surface, but with symbolic linguistic elements that have their significance in what they refer to, namely images and feelings and emotions and events and objects, denoted or suggested 206 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT forcefully or delicately, it must be clear that the beauty of great poetry is only to a slight degree the beauty of its sensuous and formal surface for the ear, unless of course we are to confine the word beauty to sensuous and formal asthetic quality. Such a narrowing of the meaning of beauty will appear still more unwarranted when we turn to the beauty of expression as such, which is the value neither of sensuous s-thetic surface nor that of technical artistic perfection of achievement. In fact, at the present point in our discussion we are almost in a position to see that, whereas the arts in general are fundamentally types of technical operation, eventuating in objects or works of art so-called, in the fine arts two further elements are involved. For in the fine arts, as distinguished from the industrial arts or arts as any directed process of giving definite form or constitution to materials, physical bodies or merely sensuous elements-in the fine arts asthetic satisfactoriness of the appearing surface is a necessary condition of artistic success, though not a suficient one, since, as we have just seen, the rôle it plays varies in importance with the various arts. And besides achieving esthetic surface, the fine arts are invariably ex-pressive. In just what sense we shall make out at the end of the present chapter. But before doing so we should perhaps illustrate in arts other than poetry our present point as to the defining function of technique in the arts in general. Nowhere has technical virtuosity been more abused either by brilliant performers who give their whole powers to exhibiting it or by critics who sometimes mistake it for virtue and sometimes condemn it as the worst of all vices, than in music. Violinists, pianists, vocalists are often simply extensions or embodiments of their instrument, adding the needed 207 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT motive-power for actual performance, and training their bodies into a marvellous integration in the mechanical process which this instrument, natural or artificial, is capable of carrying out. Their total ambition lies in exploiting its possibilities, whether by composing for it, or performing upon it, or both; and they may find it convenient in the interest of a smooth and elaborate perfection of instrumental operation not only to neglect or suppress the expressive significance of a composition, but even to abandon any but the most obvious elements of the asthetic auditory surface, in a brilliant swiftness and power of execution that is a marvel of highly efficient, if artistically fruitless or empty, operation. But if the dangers and offensiveness of virtuosity are so thoroughly appreciated by those who love the arts and their beauties, the indispensableness of a mastery of technique is, especially by the more tender lovers of beauty in the arts, whether of sensuous surface or of expressive significance, only too likely to be scorned in an ignorance not always quite ingenuous. For one who really rules out technique as such, rules out all artistic operation, whether creative in the highest sense or merely decorative or even trifling. One can not make or compose anything whatever of any sort without going through the process of doing so. As spirit is revealed only in bodies, so beauty can appear only upon the objects or events of the physical world, and any beauty of art, not merely of nature, must supervene upon actual operations, which being operations at all are therefore, as practised in any given way whatever, particular techniques, crude or re-fined, swift or slow, efficient or inefficient, good or bad. To say that all technique as such is bad for true art is pure nonsense, since art occurs at all only by virtue of the technique which is its creation. There is no need of stressing 208 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT further the obvious generalities that technical virtuosity is not the whole of art, and may even destroy the beauty of its asthetic surface and ruin the specific character of its ex-pression, and that technique is a necessary condition of the existence of all works of art, and therefore of all the objects of all the fine arts. What we need to do here is to give cases in point. Take singing, an art so close to nature that its technical equipment and its execution as a practised art might almost seem alien to its own native quality, that of the spirit bursting forth in a song which is its own natural gladness or sorrow, uncontaminated by instrumental mechanisms, and immediately expressive without the intervention of the technical traditions of musical training or the forms of musical art. How asthetically successful such spontaneous art is, may be heard in the raucous screams or brazen shouts of children at play, or infants in distress, in the cries of men and women suddenly overtaken by danger or great good fortune, adults in the grip of a sudden accident or unconsciously venting their feelings of exultation or excitement at a ball-game or a prize-fight. There is expressiveness here no doubt in all its primal force, but not art with its asthetically satisfying surface for sense. Even the technique of college yells is more truly art than unconscious and spontaneous shouting. If expression takes on a form here that actually falsifies and blurs the emotions in conventionalizing their expression in the simplest sort of form, this is not an argument against technical form itself, which of course to be adequate to any genuine human feeling, must be subtle and rich and varied enough to be in some suggestive relation to the emotions it embodies and formalizes for perception from without. And as to the necessity for physical apparatus in art, it must 209 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT be clear that vocal organs of some sort are an absolute condition of singing at all, and vocal organs that are powerful and flexible, a condition of singing effectively in large rooms, and with a sufficient range of pitch to embody the patterns in pitch that are music. Accuracy of intonation and flexibility may be in large part acquired, no doubt; but without vocal organs of the proper dimensions to produce sounds of sufficient loudness to be heard with instruments, one can not be a concert singer, no matter how genuinely one's spirit may long to externalize itself in the sound patterns of vocal music. Furthermore, without vocal organs of certain specific shapes, the sounds of one's voice must simply fail to be pleasant to any ear. The most natural of the arts thus requires very definitely conditioned physical paraphernalia to be beautiful in even the simplest beauty. And it must be equally obvious that to one without either extraordinary gifts or extensive training of auditory perception, none of the more complex reaches of musical expression are even possible of apprehension, much less of full appreciation or of creation. Without full and familiar acquaintance with the technique of an art, it is the merest pretense that pronounces any judgment whatever on the works of that art; for such judgment is meaningless except as a record of genuine experience, and one actually does not experience any work of art unless one is sufficiently practised in its technique to discriminate its structural and sensuous surface as of the specific nature embodied by that technique in a given application of it. One who actually fails to distinguish minor thirds from majors, or the various melodic intervals from each other-not that he must know their names, of course, but that he must recognize their specific sounds—can not possibly discriminate 2IO ESTHETIC JUDGMENT either the melodic or the harmonic patterns of music that he hears. He does not in fact hear the actual music at all, but is perhaps vaguely pleased or bored by a confused sensuous experience, which no doubt sets up much non-auditory feeling and imagery and even ideation. To the ear trained to listen, and to hear the actual technical structure presented, neither the confusion nor the irrelevant feeling and imagery and ideas are present. For this ear takes in an actually and objectively defined structure of sound, and this sensuous structural content itself demands full and active powers of attention which are absorbed in discriminating its details in their coherent connection, and so in receiving from it its own specification of feeling and emotion, which is not merely relevant but specifically and uniquely and unambiguously expressive. There is no "interpretation" of music as such, except just that minutely specified feeling and emotion that is summoned and sustained by sounds in definite succession and combination, striking upon an ear capable of hearing them when it listens. And the complexity of these musical forms and patterns and movements is so great that a thorough grasp of the intellectually comprehensible technique of musical notation and musical form, to be gained only by a training more or less parallel to linguistic training in its own field, is an almost indispensable condition of hearing them as the sound structures that they are. Thus the technical musical forms are themselves what the mind hears through the ear, and they define even the auditory æsthetic surface enjoyed as beautiful. But music is doubly technical in that the art requires not only sound structures as such but the instruments that produce these sounds. And the specific beauty of piano music, for example, while it is in part the timbre of the instrument 2II ESTHETIC JUDGMENT itself, also varies and defines itself in the operations of performing it. Thus a smooth, heavy, rapid legato passage is not a sensuous content for the ear alone, but for one who has mastered, or tried to master, the technique which produces such a passage, also the revelation through the specific sound qualities, a revelation upon the asthetic surface itself, of that specific skill in performance. The performer's muscular mastery is thus heard through sounds by the ear of any body or mind whose own arms and fingers possess it and so recognize it in its functioning. And this is equally true of the plastic arts. Swiftness of stroke, subtlety of line, a very small number of brush movements to give the exact effect of hair on a head or expression on a face, modelling that makes depths and shadows and high-lights and beautiful textures, come to the eye as not only the sensuous elements of color and shape and line, but also as the skill and expertness of the technique of the art that exhibits its specific nature and beauty. In architecture, where we all respect a particular technique to the point of making architect the name of a respectable professional calling, its practice compensated in substantial and more or less standardized fees, technical expertness, with which most of us who are not architects are not familiarly acquainted, since we are not professionally trained, is so fundamentally important that we are at least somewhat reticent in our judgments of anything but mere surface appearance or actual social convenience and fitness. We feel clearly the presence in buildings of a structural technique of stresses and strains and sub-masses and inner proportions, which leaves us rather wondering and admiring vaguely, and acknowledging our lack of such acquaintance with the art as would allow us to see its true virtues or defects in 212 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT what is presented to our untutored eyes. There can hardly be any doubt, however, that part of the architectural success of a high tower is felt, on our seeing it, to be the technical achievement of its stability on its foundations, a stability which is also outwardly expressed. And part of the beauty of a bridge is the technical achievement that allows us to walk over the waters in a security realized as the product of the skill that is expressed in its very form. Not that the formal sensuous structure of lines and masses for the eye alone is negligible in the least, but that it is enriched for discriminating perception not only by salient ornament and accent but by the felt skill of the technical architectural con-struction. § 5 If what produces the actuality of works of art, what brings them into being as objective structures, as well as lending them much of their specific differentiating beauties, is tech-nique, what gives vitality and interest to their beauty is still another aspect of them, intimately bound up with their conceived aims and purposes for human minds-their expres-siveness. A work of art may have a lovely sensuous as-thetic surface as form and structure for direct intuition, and reveal in this structure the technical nature of the processes that have produced it; but if it is a work of the human spirit, a work of art functions also in expressing that spirit's feelings and emotions of desire and satisfaction. The beauty of poetry is clearly dependent for its depth and power on this function that it performs. But this expressive functioning does not take place through linguistic symbolism alone, which is common to verse and the least artistic prose dis-course, but also through its whole artistic character, including its strictly asthetic surface, which by means of sounds and 213 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT rhythms is a verbal and auditory specification of the exact emotional effect that it embodies and thus expresses. And the vitality and life of art and of its sthetic surface depend almost wholly upon this expressiveness. If the "significant form" of modern critics has any mean-ing, this is it. That is, the form of the object or the composition carries by its arrangement and order, its subtleties and complexities of balance, rhythm, harmony, contrast, by all the specific variation and combination of the elements of its particular sensuous medium achieved in any given case, the precise specification, for discriminating attention, of human feeling, so far as human feeling is capable of specification in sensuous form at all. For of course language as such is not rich enough in formal possibilities, nor accurate and detailed enough in variations of denotation, to be able always to name human feelings unambiguously, or otherwise to indicate them. Language as such is not adequate to the infinite fluctuations of their volume and intensity and scope or of subtle and delicate nuance, or to their variety, running from high hope to despair, from passionate love to hate, with all the possible combinations and mixtures. Much more nearly accurate in expression is poetry, with its vastly greater range and detail in specific shades of meaning, accomplished by its greater tonal and rhythmical possibilities. And of all the arts, perhaps music is in the matter of emotional expressiveness the deepest and richest, of the widest range and greatest power, as well as the most flexible and most delicately precise. But supremacies in one direction or another are not our concern, and they vary no doubt enormously from one person to another. What we need to notice, and what requires the greatest emphasis, is the precise sense in which art is ex- 214 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT pressive at all, and, for a first example, the sense in which music is expressive, not of course through the words of a song or the dramatic action of an opera, nor through representation of bird calls or thunderstorms; for none of these is determined in form and structure by the intrinsic possibilities of patterns made of variations and combinations, varying also in degrees of loudness and quality of timbre, of sounds of distinct pitch, the patterns spread out rhythmically in temporal order. If music is itself expressive, without any symbolic aid from words or any associated natural sounds that it imitates, or any accompanying significant bodily movements or gestures, then it is because through an arrangement of sounds as such express meaning and significance can come to the mind. To any one who has ever listened fully to music and heard it, any passage of any composition furnishes a perfectly adequate illustration. If the general character of what is expressed in light, rapid runs on the piano is at least not a specification through sound of funeral gloom, so any case of any specific figure, as in a definite tempo and rhythm itself, and in a definite musical context, is the much more accurate rendering, as we say badly but suggestively, of the meaning of the music. The passage expresses that which it does express simply by specifying, to the alert and listening mind, that precise, sensuous, rhyth-mical, auditory pattern that is directly received as the nature or pattern of a human feeling or emotion, now clearly defined in sound through the ear to the mind. No one who has not listened and heard can be presented in words with such unique and specified expression. Music can not be translated. It is never just fear or hope or exultation or love, but that precise sensuous structure of passion given in the sounding medium. As music may be solemn or 215 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT gay, or rhapsodic or triumphant, so obviously enough any particular music expresses in its own particular degree, and in its absolutely determinate pattern and fullness, just that precise, determinate feeling that is externalized in its determinate form and filling of sound. Beauty of expression in general is not our present concern, however. We are only indicating at this point that fine art, in order to be such at all, is expressive, and the case of music is one of the most obvious examples of this. If a composer has no emotions to express, no vital feelings to externalize in sound, the best that he can do is to repeat more or less conventional or banal patterns, and though these may well have a smooth and even charming surface, like a violin concerto by Spohr, they remain rather esthetic tricks and trifles than significant art, no matter how learned the musician, or how conventionally perfect his technique. For of music, as of poetry, it is always a fresh creation of form, a transmutation of the medium, that is required, if the resulting structure is to be vital or significant, if it is not to remain dead and empty sound, specifying to the ear nothing of felt significance, failing, that is, to be genuinely expressive. Music expresses the will and the passions of human beings, feelings and emotions being its burden in a variety and precision not possible to words. Poetry expresses, though never so precisely nor with such fine and still distinct degrees of variation or nuance, a much wider range of interests and ideas, which can be denoted by words, or summoned by the musical qualities of verse, or suggested in imagery for all the senses. So color and shape and rhythm as such have also their expressiveness, not only through representation, but again, like music, in those particular sensuous kinds of specification that they are capable of, 216 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT namely, those of design and color and texture and rhythmic pattern. If the line of a hill may seem noble and strong and rest-ful, not even pure design is inexpressive, though just how and why certain masses and shapes and configurations become significant no one has fully explained. Certain it is that the color-organ itself, even as at present constituted, stirs us to unexpected depths; and drawings and paintings and sculpture externalize to our view yearnings and mean-ings, and seem somehow to make immediately present to sense the attributes and ideas, and even the fundamental significance, of the universe and of human destiny. It is not safe to say much more, if there is more that could be said. But that the arts express deeply and broadly, but always determinately and uniquely, the very point of life, that they are the most precisely drawn lineaments of men's souls that we know, can not of course be questioned. To despise them totally, or to deny their expressive significance, is sheer brutality or ignorance. But especially in intellectual persons there is a tendency to minimize their precision and uniqueness of specification in expression. And this will not be overcome, of course, until men cultivate accuracy and skill in sensuous perception itself, and sound technical training in at least one of the particular arts, instead of feeding their souls so exclusively upon those ranges of experience that can be recorded in the linguistic symbolism of ordinary prose. A still further limitation or degeneracy of mind is that which deals in these linguistic symbols alone, failing to recognize through them those ultimate sensuous data or essences, to refer to which they were invented, and which are themselves the only targets that the shafts of discourse can actually hit. 217 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT In the consideration of beauty of expression, which has so far been mentioned only to define the arts and so to distinguish their nature, their function, and their beauty from that one aspect of them which is their asthetic surface we reach an essential aspect of their fineness. Possession of æsthetic surface is the condition of their being of the nature of fine art; but this surface is not definitive of the nature or function of art in general, which is more adequately made out in terms of a technique. The technique is applied to a medium for the satisfaction of men's wants, and the creative products of technique become fine art as their asthetic surface becomes satisfying to contemplation, and they themselves expressive through this surface. We turn now from the beauty of material sensuous elements and the beauty of the forms and structures into which these elements may be built, from such beauties achieved either in nature or by technical artistic creation, to the beauty of expressiveness itself. 218 Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers in:sent 2 of 1,170 Prall judgment 270 kac attac Mon, Jun 10, 9:50 AM (1 day ago) to Stefan CHAPTER XI EXPRESSION IN THE FINE ARTS 1. Summary outline of preceding considerations; two meanings of asthetic distinguished and justified. 2. The expressiveness of language and expression in poetry. 3. Expression in music through primary and secondary tech-niques. 4. Expression in painting and in sculpture. 5• Expression in architecture. § I BEFoRe we embark upon the difficult subject of the beauty of expressiveness, or beauty as expression, or, still more strictly, the aspect of beauty that is constituted of the expressiveness of works of fine art, it is best perhaps to put our preceding statements into some degree of order in brief compass. We began by noticing that the zsthetic judgment, this or that is beautiful, records first of all the pleasant experience of contemplating the surface of our world simply for itself as the object before us, and, in thus discriminating the specific content present to our minds through the senses, finding its determinate beauties lying before us to enjoy. We also found that such beauties vary not only as content for ear or eye or taste or smell or feeling itself, but that in the sensuous content for ear or eye there are intrinsic qualitative orders, a serial range of pitches, a serial range of hues, defining the variations of the content and revealing principles of structure native to that content itself. We found further that, though in nature the asthetic surface may be coherent 219 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT to a degree and offer us, so to speak, naturally composed sensuous structures, these composed wholes are made in part of elements in the nature of which men have so far failed to discover any intrinsic ordering principles, so that human composing, while it may take over such naturally occurring forms and designs as interest it, must depend primarily upon principles of structure intrinsically present in the sensuous elements as such. And since men have before them the surface of the world for perception most vividly in the necessary tools and activities that are the means of living at all in nature, we noticed that it is upon such tools and such activities that beauty of surface is most naturally wel-come, and comes to be sought and achieved in the fine arts of spatial form. But in the achievement of beauty, in the composing of beautiful surfaces, not only do we use the intrinsic orders embedded in the very nature of the sensuous elements, but also a temporal order, which, since any sense content to be present at all, must occur, and since time gives order to occurrences, is applicable to all contents, and, as felt through them, takes on a rhythm of occurrence, which is specially characteristic of such asthetic surfaces as necessarily take an appreciable duration of time to deploy themselves before the senses, the surfaces experienced in music, dancing, acting, and poetry. But here we have come upon the other main group of the fine arts, for when we compose consciously in either spatial or temporal structures or orders, we are artists. In the preceding chapter we noticed how beauty of asthetic surface, while it does not define the arts as such and varies in the degree to which it is a measure of their perfection, is characteristic of all the arts called fine, though even the fine arts achieve success not merely as fulfilling intentions to produce beautiful 220 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT asthetic surfaces, but also as consciously directed technical operations. If the technique fails to produce fitting objects, these objects, however asthetically satisfying the sensuous filling and structural form of their surface may be, fail to satisfy us or call forth unalloyed appreciation, fall short, that is, in beauty itself. But since fitness to use or conformity to familiar type is not beauty itself, it is clear that in the fine arts our aim is no longer merely practical. Since they are arts, technique, that is, applied to fulfilling intentions, some aim they must have after all, else no rational being would practise them. And since, as we have seen, the enjoyment of beauty is disinterested, this aim, so far as it can be esthetically fulfilled, must be consummated upon an as-thetic surface, even though the beauty of that surface is not the whole aim. If, however, we are to keep clear the distinctive natures of the various arts— and this, as we have seen, can not be done in terms solely of the character of the zs-thetic surface-we must find their definitions in the aim of their specific techniques. Thus apparently we must find this aim at once sthetic and non-asthetic, and we seem to be in a dilemma. But this difficulty is largely verbal and should be removed at once, for genuine differences in opinion and theory will give us trouble enough without adding the unnecessary confusions of ambiguous terminology. We have used asthetic judgment as meaning a judgment recording in first instance discriminated surface beauties as present to sense, and there is of course warrant for this in philosophical usage growing out of an employment of the term in its etymological signification. Asthetic in this sense applies to what is present directly in intuition through the senses, and this is fairly indicated as sensuous surface, without regard to the beauty of such surface. But as we do 22I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT characteristically find beauty here, and as in fact such surfaces are for intuition always either pleasurable or offensive, beautiful or ugly, the term asthetic, as in the phrase asthetic judgment, has been applied to all judgments pronouncing things beautiful in any determinate way, as attractive, charm-ing, pleasing, for example, or as still more fully determinate and more accurately specified, not in language alone, but by the definite indication of an object pointed out in the field of perception by gesture, as having the uniquely beautiful character in question, an absolutely determinate and clearly delineated beautiful nature or quality. Hence we have used æsthetic judgment as a title for inquiries into the meaning of all such judgments of beauty or ugliness. It is clear then that strictly surface beauty is not the full beauty of works of the fine arts or even of nature, since the surface of such objects is felt as revealing more and deeper beauty than that of this immediately present sensuous surface which is strictly called asthetic. While this is not so plain in music, it is obvious enough in the other arts, and in music too at least the full analytical description of its specific beauties involves elements not merely sensuous or æsthetic in the narrower sense. Although it would be difficult if not impossible to keep to either of these meanings of the term asthetic exclusively, our account so far has kept the term mainly to its thinner surface application, and until we came to the considerations of the preceding chapter, the inclusive sense of the term, as covering the whole subject matter of the beautiful was used only now and then, and without involving serious confusions. Even now when we have made out the sense in which beauty is not mere asthetic sur-face, as is noticeably the case in the fine arts, which nevertheless must possess asthetic surface in the narrow meaning, 222 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT we shall not try to rule out sthetic in its wider and deeper application. And this for the simple reason, noted previously in passing, that the bare sensuous surface, though it may be theoretically distinguished with perfect clarity— and the distinction is one of great importance-as that content which is immediately present to sense in a surface form or structure, is never present to sense alone. For senses are the avenues of intuition and perception, and it is the mind or the spirit to which any sensuous content must be present if it is to be present at all. That is, intuition and perception are single processes, involving both sense organs and the mind that uses these organs, and though we may speak of the bare sensuous surface present in intuition, this surface reveals to the mind or spirit that intuits it more than any merely sensuous elements in a unity of form. The surface, that is, must have a degree of depth to be seen or felt at all, and out of its depths comes much of what it exhibits as beauty. It is thus clear that even as applied to the surface, the word asthetic must include this surface quality as far down as it goes without being lost in such strictly intellectual con-structions, and the grasp of such relations, as are not fully revealed upon it and hence not felt as its intrinsic objective quality, present to the mind through the avenues of sense. Where exactly this line is to be drawn we have no science to tell us. It remains for our present state of knowledge, and perhaps it must always remain, a boundary varying with the degree of the perspicacity of our sensuous perception and with a hundred other factors of training and endowment. But the two meanings of asthetic, the thinner and the thicker, are not contradictory; if beauty is only skin-deep, that little depth may embody freshness or worn pallor, resilience or flaccidity, strength or weakness, vitality or the weariest ex- 223 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT haustion, youth or age, health or sickness, life or death. So the asthetic surface holds up to view in its very form and content not only the sensuous elements as such in a structural coherence, but all that they or their structural form may summon of varied imagery immediately associated with them by the mind, all that they may reveal as technical perfection consummated in their form and texture, all that they may signify of ideas, through these elements and forms taken as transparent symbols, and all that they may express by direct and detailed specification, in sensuous media, of the passions, desires, and objective satisfactions of men. If the asthetic surface is as such and at its thinnest only a sensuous delight, at its thickest and deepest it is the revelation in external and objective form of the last aspirations of men. Thus the aim of each of the fine arts is that sort of expressiveness possible to its defining technique operating upon its own particular medium to produce structural wholes with necessarily sensuous surfaces; and this expressiveness consists in significant specification, the direct delineation of such elaborated and finished spatial and temporal configurations as make present to the mind its own passionate and vivid actuality, externalized in the objective determinate beauties of works of art. Our apparent dilemma is solved. The fine arts have an aim distinguished for each particular art by its medium and its technique, instead of being given in terms of the practical ends which help to define the useful arts; and this aim, namely expression, is the same in all of the fine arts, so that both terms of this designation have a clear meaning. Moreover, since this aim is accomplished and consummated upon a sensuous surface, it may properly be called æsthetic, though the adjective applies rather to the character of the surface than to the motive power that perfects it 224 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT through an expressive technique. Since a particular technique may be defined, however, in terms of the kind of useful object that it is primarily employed to produce, part of the definition of a work even of fine art may be the name of a practically useful object. If the work turns out not to be such a useful object as the definition of the technique calls for, it is felt at once to fail, not so much of being esthetically satisfying in the thin surface sense of the word esthetic, as of being a work of art at all. Thus natural types and natural demands— human beings with two eyes, not one, a house that will keep out the weather-must often be conformed to, if we are to have works of fine art that are to be taken and felt as such. Merely fantastic objects, even of lovely forms, while they may be asthetically adequate in a perfectly clear sense, are likely to fail as significant works of art. As to the meaning of expression itself there are further confusions to be cleared away. Our overwhelming absorption in language as the vehicle of meaning, the limiting of our education so exclusively to words in books, often makes us forget that not even language can do more than refer to meanings. These meanings we are likely to take for granted as lying fully within the symbolic medium itself, and significance and knowledge as being necessarily given in words and sentences. But the least scrutiny of such a notion is enough to remind us not only that words are only approximately determinate even in their denotative reference and furthermore that they could not possibly be these meanings that they carry, but also that for further specification or de-terminateness in the definition of their meanings we must point finally to a case of what is meant, as embodied in an object of present perception. And here our final appeal is 225 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT clearly enough to sensuous discrimination and intuition, the object of such discrimination being an articulated sensuous surface, which is thus the last word in the specification and definition of meaning as such. But for intuition such perceived surfaces possess their own specific beauty, and thus the discriminated beauties of nature and of art are meaning itself. What works of art express is simply the determinate beauty that they specify. How adequately expressive they are depends on the native physical possibilities of their medium, the perfection of the technique applied to it, and the vitality and power and skill of the artist intent upon the expression of the meaning he feels within and seeks to make explicit upon the surface of experience for the common view of all men. The adequacy of this achieved expression depends further upon the powers of discriminating intuition in other men to grasp the meaning as externally specified. And here, at the best, expression never becomes absolutely precise and de-terminate, perfectly and completely specified, but is always felt to be just beyond, or within, or above, aspired to but never reached, either by the artist or by those who contemplate his art. To suppose, however, that meanings are more clearly specified in words than in the actually present intuited sensuous surfaces of works of art, or still worse to suppose that what is really expressed in any art may be translated into perfectly explicit statements in words, is not only to miss most of the expressive beauty of any particular work of art and the character of the fine arts as such, but also to forget the special function of language, and of poetry and prose, which have expressive power not merely through the denotations of their words, but also through their sensuous character and their structural arrangement, their subtle 226 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT condensations and expansions, their richness of emotional and imaginative connotation, their rhythmic feeling, their temporal rate and duration, their rapid transitions and re-turns, their whole discursive form and manner. The mere difference in the matter of avoiding ambiguity, and in accuracy of specification in general, between spoken and written discourse is enough to make the point clear. Not even the simplest prose narrative carries its full and precise emotional force to the mind unless the ear is functioning as well as the eye, and a reader who fails to feel with the writer will fail to produce for himself in his reading what was entrusted to the written symbols of discourse. Part of the specification they carried in the writer's mind will be lost, whether through the reader's fault or the author's inadequacy. § 2 In considering the beauty of expression we begin with the arts of language. But this is not because these arts alone are literally and unambiguously expressive by virtue of their linguistic medium; for linguistic denotation as such is never absolutely unambiguous, its more precise specification depending in the end always upon indicated sensuous content present to perception, such sensuous content as the non-linguistic arts deal with directly as their proper media of ex-pression. We begin with the linguistic arts rather because in speech and in language in general the character of the sensuous medium is so slight an element of the beauty felt, because the beauty felt consists almost wholly in expressiveness. It Cureus is a beauty further below or above the presented sensuous surface than that of any of the other arts, a beauty often most highly appreciated by individuals or peoples least sensitive to the more direct surface beauties of sensuous content =: 227 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT proper, or to the precision of significance in expression possible to the non-linguistic arts and in these non-linguistic arts more fully revealed upon their asthetic surface as thus specifically significant, so that their artistic form is more directly expressive, even if more thinly. If one were quite without sensitiveness to the expressiveness of the linguistic medium, any acquaintance with a foreign language would be enough to reveal it. The characteristic turns of phrase of a particular language, the feeling-tone and the emotional coloring of its very vocabulary, the qualities in things and people and life in general that it most fully and expertly carries in its own peculiar modes and fashions, and most clearly communicates, the traditional and conventional connotations of its words and phrases, through etymology and historical and contemporary usage, and its formal character, uniquely adapted to just such effects of elegance and grace or of simple and even child-like directness and warmth as fail of achievement in other languages, are, in this perfect untranslatableness, only a few of the more obvious evidences of the too easily forgotten fact that we have not even any way of measuring how much of what we take for simple denotation is, through feeling, association, habit, perception, social and individual convention, and training and character and temperament, a matter of specification not at all clearly or strictly linguistic in the more obviously symbolic sense, according to which words have specific meanings to be pointed to through other words, and finally through gesture, to indicate, as we say, exactly what they mean. Many of these effects in expression itself appear very clearly upon the auditory surface of speech and might have been pointed out earlier as having to do primarily with the 228 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT sensuous elements of sound. But they are not effects that come under the asthetic principles of order as intrinsic to sound itself; they are very far from being purely tonal structures. And in much of even the conscious cultivation and refinement of speech the real character of its expressiveness is strangely neglected. Men, for example, being struck by some foreign elegance or refinement in pronouncing words and syllables, actually adopt these outer characteristics in their own speech, seeming to forget that in doing so on the one hand they risk the loss of native directness of communication with their fellows that a natural and homely use of voice and language gives, and on the other that even if they achieve this foreign accent perfectly, they can never control the unconscious expressiveness of tone of voice and emotional quality, which still, though now perhaps con-fusedly, manifest their inner selves so unmistakably to the discerning ear. A middle western American may perhaps do well to tone down such of his consonants and vowels as strike harshly on his own honest ear, out of simple courtesy to the ears of others. But to attempt deliberately an "English accent," even to achieve one to the point of absolute and indistinguishable perfection, remains at the best a histrionic success, strangely at odds with men's social hopes in a world where our deepest need is genuine self-expression and full communication with other men. And in the realm of the histrionic itself the fundamentals here are likely to be neglected. An actor tells us often infinitely more in the tone of his voice than in the enunciation of his words, and even courtesy and breeding and kindness and generosity lie in the sound of the voice at least as much as in the phrases it may pronounce. Sound carries its own feelings more surely than words their dictionary 229 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT meanings, or phrases their connotations of elegance or social refinement. Genuine asthetic discrimination no more fails to mark directness, naturalness, and native congruity of tone production than elegance or finish or expertness or sophistication of phrase and vocabulary and "accent." And in a world where all languages and "accents" are judged beautiful or ugly either by their native users who love them or by aliens who hate them, it is a dubious advantage to substitute one for the other permanently on supposedly esthetic grounds, since none of them is so directly and asthetically felt as beautiful as are natural tones of voice and familiar qualities of intonation and even native locutions. Languages differ from each other in their auditory character largely in their peculiar noises, not in pure tonal quality, and of the beauties of noises men seem so far not to have achieved any fundamental or even conventionally agreed upon canons or criteria. Perhaps this one example is as good as another, and it would be fruitless to attempt anything like an enumeration of even the typical aspects of the expressiveness of language aside from its strictly denotative symbolic function, or even the superiorities of some languages over others in the felt directness of this denotative power itself. Certainly common opinion differentiates French lucidity, Latin accuracy and elegance in condensation, a sort of domestic and convivial heartiness and a childlike honesty and familiarity in Ger-man, where even technical terms are so often agglomerations of syllables out of folk vocabulary. In Greek and Spanish and Italian there are specific varieties of power, of formal dignity, and of literary intricacy, as foreign to English as any of the characteristic traits of temperament that so strike the least observant outsider as native or national failures or 230 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT successes, ethically and socially, in those who speak these different languages at home. If there are no criteria to mark the superiority for all men of English or French or Italian or German or Spanish lyric poetry, one over another, there is at least no difficulty in noticing in each of them specific qualities which contribute to its peculiar expressiveness, whether this happens to lie in a power to evoke ideas or images or emotions less easily evoked and precisely marked in another language, or whether assonance or rhyme or rhythm occur with more or less modification of the order of words of common speech, with a correspondingly greater or less need for selection, to meet sthetic demands, of words less current in everyday discourse, so that verse in the language, simply by being verse, possesses a specific rarity and distinction, or on the other hand is capable more naturally in this language than in another of specifying to the mind through the ear feelings of warmth and of simple familiar fireside emotions, foreign to other idioms in the more or less formal and explicit rhythms of verse structure. Since the possibilities of variation and specification we are citing here are of even greater range than that of the denota-tions of words and phrases possible to a language and filling whole dictionaries, it is hopeless to attempt any account of them even through typical illustrations. But the difference between Lesbia and Mary Morison is certainly no greater than that between the peculiar expressive powers of two different languages, since the whole difference between these two loved and lovely ladies lies in the poetic linguistic specification of their charms and their souls that is our last court of appeal in defining it. Unless, indeed, we turn to the obvious superiority of Catullus to Burns or of Burns to Catullus— 23 I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT these superiorities themselves being, for all important and relevant purposes, the degrees of perfection in the native expressiveness of the two languages— to apply them indirectly as estimates and specifications of the ladies. In a later chapter we shall have to revert to this subject; but for the present it must be clear that language as such is marked by expressive powers which bring to the surface of poetry most of the beauty that we find in it. The difference between Mary Morison and Lesbia is clearly enough suggested in these different syllables themselves, were there not the ever-re-peated lyrics to specify further their contrasting beauties whether of faithless lips or gentle thought. Languages have their own felicities and accuracies for bringing meanings before the mind in an almost transparent medium, and so far as this medium is attended to its auditory character is still further definitive of the meaning conveyed, more fully determinate of the ideal significance it carries. But languages also vary in their powers to summon imagery with all its variety of sensuous beauties, through symbolic denotation present to the writer, and in his intention, at least, presented to the reader or listener. It is clear that precision here requires not only the writer's control of his technique, but the control by the reader of much of this same technique, at the very least a full acquaintance with historical and conventional usages in vocabulary and phrasing. No mind pierces another mind to see the images before it; but it must penetrate the almost transparent medium of language to reach the images there mirrored. And only so much of the unseen content of the poet's lines can be discovered as is discoverable in the individual reader's storehouse of memory or by his own creative imagination, prompted to activity by the printed or spoken symbols of discourse. 232 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT Thus the specific beauties of a poem may easily be lost to an unimaginative mind, as all the values of English poetry might so easily be lost to a world where men, intent upon their own active business, should come at last to employ "business English" as their sole linguistic medium, a medium more completely foreign to the language of Shelley or of Shakespeare than theirs to that of Catullus or of Homer. The beauties of poetry would still be those identical beau-ties, but these beauties would simply not occur to readers of the poets, were there any readers left, as upon the syllables and lines before them. And if these beauties remain what they are in essence, that is of little interest to a world in which they are effectively prevented from occurring. For they can not appear upon the face of experience even when men concern themselves to look upon the lines that could alone evoke them, unless men's minds already hold the sensuous elements they would summon, and are capable of the imaginative response through which they must be re-created. If linguistic lore and stores of manuscripts and printed books may plausibly be said to preserve poetry itself, its beauties, even of sensuous imagery, can not so be kept in human experience. For their occurrence, minds are needed stored with the images that contemplation has engraved upon them, endowed with all the powers of imagination for reviving them as the poetry specifies, and as we shall further see, with all the specific possibilities of feeling and emotion that their beauties must also externalize, if they are to occur in their full intended character. But this is not all that language may express in its per-fection. For as poets have themselves individuality, their own special tastes, their own most vital interests, their own selection of a way of life and thought and feeling; so they 233 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT select from all the possibilities of language what suits these tastes and interests, and this manner of life and thought. What they write specifies it to other men, so that, as we say, they have their own distinctive style, often unequivocally marked in a single sentence or a line of verse. Thus through language gifted men may express their particular individual selves. And as human beings are so deeply interested in their own personal concerns and attributes, and in other men as characters or individualities, so, with even very slight feeling for the niceties of style, with little specifically linguistic training or knowledge of its technique, we often learn very early and very easily that sort of expressiveness in language that is the recognizable or familiar style of an author, though we should be at a loss to point out just what it is in terms of language itself that furnishes us so unmistakable an identification. Certainly this is no more a mystery, however, than our recognition of our friends on the street, since obviously enough here too, little as we may be able to analyze it, our recognition is the distinguishing of a sensuous surface, explicitly specifying to us that one individual in all the world of human creatures who is thus himself expressed in his appearance, an appearance welcome and enjoyed and perhaps to be called beautiful in its expressiveness, even though the strictly and thinly asthetic surface may be far from sensuously charming. Here is one of those cases where the surface is so deep that sthetic is scarcely the word for it; but if we are to deny all beauty to the expressive appearance of a friend, then perfect expressiveness in style itself is not, merely as such, a beauty even of literature. If we have here reached the limit of the beauty of expression, however, that is not to deny such beauty altogether; and if for strictly as-thetic beauty the actual expressiveness of the surface is irrel- 234 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT evant, certainly expressiveness as such can not be denied the function of giving to such a surface as is in itself sensuously satisfying, most of its significance, and in works of art to measure their vital, if not their strictly esthetic, beauty. Least of all could this function be denied to the expressive power of works of literary art, which without it would fall short of being works of fine art at all, failing, as they then would, to be even plausibly comparable to the sensuously satisfying sounds of music. § 3 If in early Greek drama, where these two arts were indis-tinguishable, as we may suppose, we have the best evidence that poetry is elementary music in the explicitly rhythmical chanting and intoning of its syllables, this same phenomenon reminds us of the equally vital point that music is itself fundamentally expressive. And if this evidence were not strong enough, we should have at least to admit, in order to give any meaning at all to Plato's condemnation of certain musical modes, that the expressiveness of music as such was clear to the intelligent mind in even those early and very simple developments of musical art. The explicitly rhythmical and tonal qualities of Greek drama, could they be given to the ear apart from the words and meanings, would be the impossible abstraction from the concrete drama itself of just the measure or amount of their expressiveness, so far as this was beyond the power of language, impossible, that is, to linguistic symbolism as such. The music is just so much expressiveness as the words could not achieve as mere mean-ings; yet it adds a force and a power felt and recognized as so strictly relevant to the meanings intended as to be necessary to carry them out fully. This one historical case would 235 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT be evidence enough not only of the expressiveness of music, but also of its precision and aptness in accomplishing that which language as symbolic discourse fails to achieve. If music can not say what words say, it is not that music is not strictly and directly expressive, but that its expressiveness ranges over a field of emotions and feeling that language does not exhaust in its intimate details, with a fullness of power unique and characteristic in its capacity for exactitude and definiteness in marking every various nuance. But Greek drama is not even the most striking evidence of this power, and we may with equal relevance turn from its almost mythical and at the best historically and learnedly recognized sublimity, to the vulgarly familiar music of jazz orchestras. It is perhaps fortunate for the health and vigor of the modern world that our tradition as to the exclusive powers of language to express sentiments and specify mean-ings, allows the properest young lady to receive an education in matters where words would be thought shocking if they even suggested what so much popular music presents unambiguously and precisely through fresh young ears to minds not yet sterilized by dogma and dullness, and bodies young and flexible in any case, but further prepared for the appreciation even of rhythmic orgies, by the expertness and subtle strength of muscles and limbs so strenuously cultivated in modern sports. The anomalous aspect of this direct and inescapable specification in sound of feelings and emotions foreign and even repugnant to the everyday discourse of respectable America, its steady, pushing business thrift, the inflexible and crude morality of its conventional and dogmatically orthodox con-verse, is nowhere more striking than in the cultivation of the arts on a grand scale by wealthy Americans who endow 236 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT civic museums, civic opera, and civic orchestras. To think of an audience of Boston's staid aristocrats of shipping and banking and business in general thrilling to the sensuous tonal and rhythmic specifications of the music of Verdi, not to mention modern French and Italian and Russian composers, to whose music Symphony Hall resounds week after week and year after year, would be merely amusing, if it were not evidence of such hypocrisy or ignorance or bluntness of decayed sense perception in a pretentious culture, and such significant and quite unintentionally effective education for keen ears and the open and flexible minds of young bodies. If, as has been said of Boston itself, the arts have their revenge on puritans and desert those who neglect them; it is at least more important for asthetic theory that music, not needing words learned in schools or learned at all, to carry its meanings, but only attentive and perceptive ears, carries to the mind through such ears as hear it all those precise and elaborate specifications of feeling and emotion that it directly expresses. No doubt the simple literalness of these observations might be mistaken for irresponsible or irrelevant indulgence in prejudiced social comment. It is therefore necessary to be a little more explicit if the point is actually to be made that music is as truly expressive as language, its field being, however, emotions and feelings instead of the qualities and characters of physical objects. Music may of course be very accurately representative over a limited range, representative of anything in the world whose character happens to be chiefly defined for us in sound,- storms, or animal noises, or bird songs, or idyllic piping shepherds, or even elevators or fire-engines or machinery. But musical composition depends for its structure and its characteristically musical effects 237 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT upon relations of tones in pitch and loudness and timbre, and upon rhythm; upon melody, harmony, dynamics, and tempo, and, so far as its main classic western European developments are concerned, upon tonality as established by the forms of the major and minor scales of all the keys, though all these more regularly musical terms are merely special names for the variations in the sensuous medium of sound that we have discussed. Melody is a temporal sequence of pitches in specified relative durations. Harmony is the whole subject of musical effects that involve combinations of pitches sounded simultaneously as in chords and chord progressions. Dynamics is a rather odd term for patterned increase and decrease in loudness. And tempo is, as we have seen, one aspect of rhythm itself. Tonality is the fact of key, depending upon an established pitch, the so-called fundamental or tonic, with a series of pitches harmonically related to it in a scale, the intervals of which are definitely fixed, and hence felt as in normal relations to the fundamental and to each other in this scale or tone series, whether major or minor. Tonality is thus a matter of convention, or rather of norms; but how fruitful and rich a convention it has been is shown in the classic developments of eighteenth and nineteenth century European music. It will also be plain enough that even so intelligible and so to speak tonally logical a convention must be learned and practised, and that much of the precision in the expressiveness of music thus depends—if it is to be apprehended at all—on trained ears, ears that distinguish pitch relations in keys, tonic and dominant and sub-dominant harmonies, modulation from one key to another, conventional elegances of all sorts, and the very numerous defined and traditionally established musical forms, set as general types 238 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT of pattern or methods of construction, to which the composer limits himself, thus revealing his intention in a unified sounding structure of the sort that a technique of sound can build. But all this preparatory knowledge is after all auditory, and to hear music as composition might naturally be expected to require ears trained to the perception of salient tonal quality and character and variation. As we should not expect an infant in arms to appreciate an epigram, so we can not expect musical innocents to recognize tonality or even specific musical rhythms, except the simplest. But this must not be taken for any lack of precision in the expressiveness of either the epigram or the music. Most of us are musically untrained, not so much tone-deaf as tone-ignorant, unfamiliar with the simplest musical transitions and with musical forms in general. We are therefore in no position to grasp the more precise tonal specifications of music; but for all that, its precision of specification is available to us in another aspect. As in literature style is the man, whom we therefore recognize in his writing, and as the merest amateur of the galleries learns to identify Corots, say, so in music style is so individually expressive that Handel and Haydn and Bach and Mozart are no more difficult to distinguish through the ear than familiar faces through the eye. And if we sometimes make mistakes, and go so far as to address the wrong lady on the street, we are not likely to urge our error as evidence that people do not really recognize their friends oy their appearances, or that the friends are not really so dis-unctively expressed in their appearance as to be individually ecognizable, least of all that appearing human beings are not really particular individuals. If signatures are sufficient guarantees of notes and checks, musical styles should at least 239 ..and yet we are "urge oun e semantic Ci.e. PP• ESTHETIC JUDGMENT be believed in even by those who do not recognize in them the specification to the ear of the composer's own self, hi taste, his manner, his bearing, his interests, and his powers, in that tonal region where alone, perhaps, his characteristics are for him and for us more than personally important. For this is the region where he has given them permanent articulate form and so revealed in expression the otherwise inarticulate passions of human beings, explored and mapped by the means he best knew some realm of the human soul, so that all men may now recognize its features. If music can thus indubitably render external and make explicit to men's ears the articulation of their felt passions, and this so precisely as to constitute the individual expression of an individual human being in a recognizable musical style, it must be clear that between this personal sort of expression and the precise specification of the finest shadings given to trained perception through adequate musical technique adequately grasped in all its precision of asthetic tonal surface, there le all those more generally characterizable musical expressions, sorrow or exultation, boldness, weakness, gaiety, love, foreboding, anguish. Not that music is ever merely bold, or merely gay, or merely sad. The sad sweetness of one funeral march is as far removed from the dignified solemnity of another as one man's actual concrete grief from another's, or from his own on another occasion. As a mother's sorrow over a dead infant is not a man's sorrow over a dead wife, so no one musical expression expresses exactly what another does. The specification is always absolutely and uniquely itself, and though no sensuous medium ever does more than approximate an artist's intention, the precise specification possible in music is in these matters of human passion almost superhuman in its success. It is be- 240 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT cause poetry is more than words and shares the nature of music itself that Wordsworth could be so sure of its exalted function, and that we need never fear that Mr. Shaw has outdone Shakespeare. Melody and harmony and rhythm define with an almost numerical accuracy the specific, technically achieved, expressive auditory surface of works of musical art, and the composer's notation may with some degree of exactitude symbolize his musical intentions. But a composer has in mind, of course, the actual sounding medium of all music, and this varies from instrument to instrument and with all possible variety in number and combinations of instru-ments. If primary musical technique is the technique that achieves-and uses musical notation to indicate the achieve-ment—musical structure as such, there is a secondary technique for the actual presentation of this sounding sthetic surface to the ear. This secondary technique, too often treated as primary in musical education, is instrumental, or, if the instrument is the human voice, vocal. Its function is not the actual imaginative and definitive creation of the structure, but perfect "performance," as we say. And that it is secondary is clear enough from the bare fact that without a control of the primary technique, to give a genuine grasp of the composer's expressive intention, the style of his com-position, the kind of auditory surface he was creating, no amount of instrumental skill could, except by the merest accident, reproduce in even a so-called correct reading the effective structure originally created by the composer's mind and recorded in his notation. Thus a full grasp even of notation, in all the refinements it is capable of indicating, is as requisite to reading music as a knowledge of spelling and punctuation is to following 24I ESTHETIC JUDGMENT prose. And for any adequate grasp of recorded music there is the further requirement of a knowledge of the whole of primary musical technique as such, the general and special features of which are the only proper beginnings of musical training. For it is the practice of this technique that really creates or comprehends the auditory structure and specifically and in detail defines its asthetic surface. For appreciation, at least, the secondary instrumental technique finds its consummation in sheer transparency; to disappear in the music is its whole function. Every evidence of it upon the sur- face is an esthetic blemish; whereas primary musical technique is the very structure of that surface, the lineaments of the beauty intended, a grasp of it being therefore essential to perceiving the presented auditory surface in its full detail, its structural form, and its genuine and actual char-acter. Performers are too seldom adequate enough musi-clans, or such self-effacing human beings, as to give us very frequent examples of this renunciation of their life-time achievement; an altogether perfect instrumental technique is too difficult of acquisition to be often demanded, and too great an accomplishment to be allowed by a human being, conscious of his painfully achieved or brilliantly talented mastery, to disappear in the mere music as indicated by the composer. But there is a compensation in virtuosity itself; for just at the point at which musical technique in the primary sense fails of absolute determinateness in carrying out the composer's intention, a gifted performer, whose mastery is more than adequate to actual demands, may enhance the expressiveness of this intention or even modify it to advantage, as a distinguished singer may put style and even poignancy into a very ordinary melody, as well as the sensuous filling 242 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT of beautiful tone peculiar to his own voice. In general, how-ever, even ordinary composers are so much more adequate as musicians than professional instrumentalists, that with all their limitations in instrumental technique, their performing of their own or of others' compositions is musically more satisfying than that of many a brilliant instrumentalist or conductor; though this is less so in the case of conducting, since even barely competent orchestra conductors must necessarily be musicians in a sense not at all applicable to most performers upon instruments, or to singers, who are so commonly and so notoriously lacking in musicianship. But after all, the physical means to music insist upon being respected. A composer who knows little of any but one instrument often fails egregiously in writing for other instruments. We are all familiar enough with the flat misrepresentation of musical intention so often achieved in songs arranged for the violin, or inexpert and unmusical "arrange-ments" for the piano. On the other hand a great master of some one instrument may accomplish beauties for its timbre and within its limitations that seem mysteriously and even superhumanly conceived, miracles of art, performed only by a musical god. If Bach is a giant, ranging over vast in- X strumental territories, Chopin achieves divinity in his own province, and we have scarcely another comparable local deity. Thus, although instrumental technique is secondary in music as such, and in all sound musical training, it is after all no slight matter even for composers. Sound is produced physically and heard through physical ears, and it must be clear enough that while primary musical technique creates musical structures themselves, specifies in musical terms that which music expresses, this secondary technique of in-struments, the means to presenting auditory structures 243 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT T through ears to human minds, is not only a necessary condition for any music at all, but in the various possibilities of various instruments and the perfection of performance, a further possibility for fullness and accuracy of specification in the auditory medium. It is not only a further opportunity for the composer's specific gifts to exploit, but a chance for the performer himself to share in musically expressive crea-tion, and thus by way of his own instrument and the perfection of his instrumental technique, to actualize for himself and other men, not only the beauties of the music composed by himself or by another, but those further beauties which express, in sounds as they are produced, his own spirit and its passionate aspirations, and so the passions and aspirations of other men. $ 4 In painting and sculpture it is to the nature of spatial objects and qualities that expression can most obviously be given, whether on flat surfaces, which may also express depth through the devices of perspective, or in the round. But although bare representation is itself a sort of simple expression of the features, and hence of the recognized character and significance, of physical objects, including of course human bodies and particularly human faces, representation alone is the least artistically expressive aspect of even the graphic and the plastic arts. Although the technique may be skillful, the beauties involved are those given in nature as occurring there, and now imitated, instead of being beauties of structures created by a technique which makes use primarily of the native affinities and orders of the sensuous ma-terials, shape, direction, dimensionality in general, and elements of color, employing these more or less consciously as principles under the guidance of the imagination to de- 244 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT lineate felt meanings in beauties thus discriminately selected or composed from the more strictly elementary and sthetic materials of art. So-called abstract design is thus the art, whether as drawing or as painting or as sculpture, that we are here primarily concerned with as the most direct and consciously expressive aspect of spatial composition. Such expressiveness of design is clear in so marked a difference as that between a Greek key pattern and the border of a Pompeian arabesque, a difference felt directly not merely as that between straight lines and curves, but as the difference between solid, substantial firmness and a light or perhaps even irresponsible or trifling grace, depending of course upon the particular instance. The point at which such human or moral sentiments enter and are actually expressed in pure design is not easy to fix; but that these terms are quite properly used, and as literally as linguistic terms can be used, to designate what only sensuous data themselves can actually and concretely specify and make determinate, must be clear enough. Their strict applicability will at once be acknowledged by any one who has ever noticed the sensuously rich curves and heavy masses of baroque ornament, or the clear-headed refinement and definite restraint, along with unequivocal sensuous gratification, specified to the point not so much of ingenuousness as a sort of absolute and intended definiteness, in the cornices of thirteenth century Tuscan palaces, or their wrought-iron lamps, or the effectively forbidding but handsome gratings at their entrances. Or take the variety of design in wooden porch-railings of our own old southern houses, all so clearly expressive of specific variations on the common theme that we recognize when we identify them as of their own period and type. Or take the difference in effect between Hispano-Moresque 245 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT plates, in their characteristic pink-brown lustre and many-lined patterns, and later Spanish plates with their dashing use of color and their boldness of design, or between either of these and Canti Galli, where linear design is present in patterns often subtle and intricate enough, but specifying a character and quality quite other than that of the Moorish elaboratenes, their color to though emp spir a strik inh Spanish, that no one not blind could very well take one for the other. Or compare English crystal tumblers with tumblers of Venetian glass. In one, clear-cut geometry and transparent usefulness; in the other, the feeling of a substance softened and shaped, but neither purified of all sense of the colored material medium, nor ever forced into the sharp forms defined by mathematics, but left in the softer lines that are felt as closer to its own character, or even given by its own volition, which the glass-blower has somehow felt and adopted as his. Perhaps even more clearly than that of music, the expressiveness of spatial design is that of the medium and the technique, and words fail all the more obviously to indicate what this technique, or rather these hundreds of techniques employed upon innumerable media, can specify to the eye in the way of defined qualities, composed and coherent yet elaborated complex beauties of color and shape and line, of masses and shadows and depths. They are no longer merely lovely sense-elements in purely spatial structures, possible to the intrinsically ordered spatial and colored materials which the artist feels as thus natively related, and so, capable of being composed into the forms he feels possible and appropriate to them; they are the beauties of what the structures express through the eye to the mind, of all the 246 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT specifically articulated and exhibited qualities and characters that our world of objects and human bodies contains. And here again we are using words as literally as words can be used. If eyes and faces and human bodies are expressive, clearly enough they are spatially expressive; they say what words can not say, but what a sculptor may discern in them, and what sculptured design may make permanent in its own peculiar beauty; not in its copying of their whole spatial character, not even in its representing of those aspects of texture and those few selected lines and modellings that are the discerned distinction to be fixed in marble or bronze, but in its own medium felt as holding expressive possibilities, brought to the surface by technical skill, and there, in terms of spatial pattern and texture, specifying that which the artist feels as the meaning and significance suggested to him perhaps in the observed human face or body, but only actu-alized and presented, only clearly and definitely expressed, in the medium that can be spatially so composed into that specific beauty of expression. In a loose and rather general way this expressiveness is commonly recognized; sculptured groups, we often say, are noble conceptions, or the pedestal of an equestrian statue itself impressively characteristic, in its proportions and its height, of the dignity and boldness and distinction of the military figure it supports. What is not so clearly recognized is precisely what it is that is expressive here and in just what sense. On the one hand the expressiveness of the actual spatial and colored medium is likely to be confused with the expressiveness of the subject of the work of art. And this involves on the other hand further confusions which, if we take them into account, further emphasize the simple as-thetic facts. A portrait may be admired for the accuracy of 247 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT the likeness it bears to a particular human face and form, and we may take pleasure in the bare fact of such representative imitation. Photographs or scientific drawings of plants and flowers, whether familiar or unfamiliar, are a pleasure to contemplate, partly, it would seem, because we enjoy representation as such. But this accomplishment is not expressiveness at all, of course, but only imitation or copy-ing. Furthermore, what is copied, say in a portrait, may itself be expressive, as an old man's bent body and wrinkled skin, or a mother's attitude, or an infant's innocent, clear eyes. And these are not the expressiveness of art either, though clearly enough it is spatial and colored esthetic surface that is the sole objective specification, whether in an actual human being or the painted or modelled copy of one, of the pathos here of bent and wrinkled age, the tenderness of maternal love, or the innocent eagerness or sweet contentment of infancy. So that it is clear enough that actual asthetic surface specification upon physical objects, human bodies or not, is what we call, even in life, the expression of human traits or moral sentiments, or any other quality that appears to the eye in the world about it. The expressiveness of art, then, is no unfamiliar phenomenon so far as it is merely one case of physical objects revealing on their surface, and thus specifying, the characteristics they express. But in works of art the means to expression is consciously and technically taken as physical material of given qualities and possibilities of asthetic surface, to be so colored and so arranged in space as to give in its own way— the way possible to spatial form and lines and colors-the specific significance that the artist feels and is thus able to express, provided his technique is adequate. What he expresses is what marble or paint can convey, never merely 248 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT just what live human beings are as such; so that, whether he has a model or not, what he puts into permanent structural form or design is the significance of that design as given on an asthetic surface, the expression of himself, of course, but also the expression of what he feels as the possibilities of his medium to specify quality, character, meaning. What is also often forgotten is the preciseness and unique-ness, the absolute determinateness, so to say, of this expression in a work of art. This is its peculiar and individual beauty, possessed by it, to be seen upon it, to be felt in its presence, and nowhere else to be found or known, nor to be preserved in the world at all except as this particular work of art is preserved either physically or in a memory of such detailed and complete reliability as is extraordinarily rare. Here too both the purpose and the inadequacy of reproductions become patent. Not that they are mean or worthless or false; but simply that they are not the originals, and that in so many cases the reproduction misses the very point, the completely determinate beauty that is the only great artistic value of the original, whether merely by a different surface texture in a different medium, like the most perfect plaster casts of marble statues, or by such grotesquely pronounced differences of color or line, or particular details of these, as make the reproduction a caricature. As fingerprints are absolute for the police, so brush-strokes may be absolute for critical perception. Thus it is not just thoughtfulness that Rodin's Thinker expresses, but a massive, painful, heavily obvious thought-fulness, though even here in so unimaginative and unsubtle a work of art the precision of expression can not be reached by words and is actual and present in the physical spatial object itself, not to be more than barely suggested by words, 249 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT § 5 In architecture itself, as distinguished from architectural ornament, which is after all expressive very much as sculpture and painting and drawing are expressive, new sorts of meaning come to light. For buildings bespeak man's domestic and social and religious life in some of its most satisfying aspects, whether of his intimate personal happiness or of the dignity and power and range of his social institu-tions, or his religious hopes and beliefs. Architecture is the useful and practical art of building buildings for all the purposes that buildings may serve; but it is also the fine art of expressing in these structures, made not of brick and wood and steel and stone alone, but also of the sthetic elements of mass and line and shape and color and texture and ornamental design and sculptured decoration, just what any purely spatial design on a large scale may express, but also, and quite beyond this, such characteristics of human life and man's whole world as are involved in the primarily useful purposes of building at all. And these are not merely characteristics associated by habit or custom or language or accident with buildings and their shapes and sizes and inner and outer arrangements, but characteristics or qualities such as domestic comfort, family intimacy, personal privacy, studious seclusion, judicial dig-nity, regal grandeur, social elegance, courtly pomp, all of which, and a thousand others, are more completely and explicitly specified in particular rooms of particular sizes and shapes, in particular arrangements, or in great public halls or palaces, or taverns, or towering walls, or imposing façades, or flat roofs, or great door-ways, or low windows, than is even possible to words, that can at the best name these qual- 258 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT ities and characters loosely and indeterminately, and must, as we have so often remarked, finally indicate their specific meaning in some one determinate form by a gesture, indicating in the field of perception the quality or character meant. If we had to define lonely grandeur, or bizarre opulence, or studious quiet, in anything but other phrases, if we had finally to point to data in perception upon the surface of which such characters or qualities are discernible, we could hardly find better or more precise specifications of them than works of architecture or particular features of such works. To object that the qualities so pointed out have a degree of determinateness in the given cases necessarily making them not identical with other determinate cases and so less broad than the total meanings of the linguistic terms in-volved, is after all simply to note two important and obvious logical truths; first that absolutely determinate qualitative meaning is not a function of any linguistic term, and second, that any given case of the felt quality of perceived objects is the whole meaning of any genuine application of any term to experience, this meaning being no more and no less than may be felt just here through the sense by the mind, since what else the term may mean in other applications is not its fuller and deeper meaning, but only another determinate meaning, to which, being a general term, it applies equally well. Meaning, to be really determinate, requires complete specification in esthetic data immediately present, taken by us all to be absolutely determinate in their own nature, though our own specifications in sense, even the most nearly accurate and satisfying ones, fall short always of that absolute determinateness that we postulate as in the nature or character or quality of the object to which we apply loosely descriptive general linguistic terms. 259 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT This point has been made above, both in regard to expressiveness in general and in regard to expressiveness in the various arts; but it appears to need a very special emphasis, if we are to judge by the easy confusions prevalent. Men, and theorists particularly, prefer somehow to suppose that linguistic symbols have a meaning of their own, above and beyond the determinate characters of reality as perceived, which, as a matter of fact, they may at the best roughly indicate until gesture comes to the rescue to point out unambiguously to perception a specific case of the quality or char-acter. And instead of allowing this to be the end, a pure qualitative datum that is articulated for discriminating sense perception, with its expressive determinate beauty there at last, these devotees of language turn their mere verbal terms—in their own theories, only, of course—into a sort of mystic substance, in which, as they insist, the natures of all the other determinate and specific characters or beauties it might indicate inhere. So that Platonism in its most fully contradictory sense, discarded by all men in their explicit logical professions, is worshipped and clung to, as if it gave significance to the world, when what it really does as so taken, is to exalt words into meanings and impute to them what is really only a mythical substance or humanly invented power, as an elucidation of such determinate qualities, in their determinate specified natures, as lie before us to be seen by any straightforwardly trained perceptive faculties for exactly what they are, the ultimate beauties of the world, specifying to us its infinitely various nature, and our own. So far as architecture is expressive as design it differs from the other visual arts only in two main ways, size and com-plexity. Buildings are on a scale which is human indeed, but which meets the requirements for human beings to move, to 260 ESTHETIC JUDGMENT function variously, and to congregate. And since they may congregate for purposes of all sorts, to see great spectacles, to advise and consult with each other, to put before an assembly proposals upon which the assembly acts, to sleep and eat and dwell in great numbers in close proximity to other buildings where also in great numbers they labor to-gether, to commemorate the events or heroes of a common past, or to call upon their gods, buildings are defined in size and arrangement accordingly. They may meet the requirements of social intercourse, of business activity, of political ambition, of private life or public; and they may even be temples conforming in shape and size and character to the demands for surroundings in which to meet the deity appropriately to men's varying conceptions both of what God is and of how He is to be met in worship. Thus while a façade may, simply as a design of magnificent proportions, express various degrees and varieties of dignity or solemnity, or fail to express anything at all, except perhaps its designer's empty or conventional mind or its own lack of genuine char-acter, there are in works of architecture inner beauties of expression, shrines and chapels within churches and cathe-drals, ball-rooms and dining-rooms and studies and courtrooms and offices and throne-rooms, railway waiting-rooms, music-rooms and libraries, and so on indefinitely, any one of which may itself, in its formal proportions and its asthetic surface, fail or succeed in specifying character and quality and significance. But clearly enough besides the possibilities for artistic expression added by size as such and also by interiors, which are not only capable of being beautiful in themselves but are often distinctly felt as determining in part the expressiveness of the exterior as well, works of architecture, being primarily 261 CHAPTER XII THE COMBINED ARTS AND PROSE 1. The complexity of the combined arts, especially of the arts of the theatre. 2. Characteristic individuality of works of any of the combined arts. 3. Specific nature • of these arts as varying with the predominance of one or another of the subsidiary constituents. 4. Illustrations: opera, verse with music in songs; summary statement. 5. Prose fiction as illustrating the combined character of literary art. 6. The linguistic medium and its linguistic structure; the underlying non-linguistic sensuous media and their non-linguistic structure. 7. The fundamental power of prose as art. In a general treatment of asthetics it would be inappropri-ate, as in a limited space it would be impossible, to attempt any full account of the arts, either as historically developed or as technically differentiated and characterized. But for any comprehension of the nature of expressive beauty, illustrations are required from the characteristic major arts, which have been treated separately one after another because expression in each of them is determined both by the peculiar technique and by the special medium of each, in other words by the kinds of asthetic material of which its structures are composed and the way in which these elements are operated upon to form them, as well as by the artist's intention. Though this intention might conceivably take on external expressive form in various arts, the expression actually and 270