Vernon Lee-Beauty and Ugliness

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BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
zO
H H
B
AND OTHER STUDIES
BEAUTY ^ UGLINESS
IN PSYCHOLOGICAL ESTHETICS
BY
VERNON LEE
AND
C.
ANSTRUTHER-THOMSON
LONDON JOHN
:
LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

:
NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXII

:
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON
TO
M. TH. RIBOT
DE L'INSTITUT
IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF
ALL
WE OWE TO
V. L.
C. A.-T.
AND
HIS WORKS TO HIS KINDNESS
'
Lody^ we receive but what we ^ve,
And In
Ours
is
our
life
alone does "Nature live ;
her wedding-garment, ours her shroud !
"
"
Coleridge's "
Ode on
Dejection
"
We
may
accordingly conjecture that the ersthetic feeling

oj
originates in a relation
the perceived impression to
the reproduction which it excites."
KtrLPE, " Outlines of Psychology/'
Titchencr's translation, p. 252
PREFACE
Dealing with
my previous volume, Laurus Nobilis, the most intelligent of my critics complained that I took our aesthetic preferences for granted, without explaining their nature or even proving their existence. If that rash reviewer really thirsts for
psychological aesthetics, he
may
find
some temporary
refreshment in the present volume, which contains as much of the How and Why of Beauty and Ugliness as I have been able to squeeze out of some rather dry books and out of fifteen years of my own and my fellow-worker's observations. If he, or any other inquisitive person, should then remain with unslaked curiosity about aesthetics, he must go to the Psychological Laboratories of Germany and America, where he may, in return for further knowledge, be used up as an experimental subject. And this gives me an opportunity for saying a few words to another kind of critic, namely, the Experimental Psychologist. Since preparing this volume for the press, indeed not longer than a week or ten days ago, I have had the great privilege and pleasure of visiting Professor Ktilpe at the University of Bonn, of hearing what he was good enough to explain of his method, and of being present at some of the examinations ^notably one on aesthetic judgments of value by Dr. Pohl conducted by his students. And I have come away with the conviction
vii
yiii
PREFACE
!
not only that theirs is the future way of studying aesthetics, but also that is the way in which, alas I can never hope to study them. My aesthetics will always be those of the gallery and the studio, not of the laboratory. They will never achieve scientific certainty. They will be based on observation rather than on experiment ; and they will remain,
for that reason, conjectural
just therefore they
and suggestive.
But
may,
venture to think, not only
give satisfaction to the legitimate craving for philosophic speculation, but even afford to more thorough scientific investigators real or imaginary facts for their fruitful examination. Indeed, thinking over those recent conversations with Professor Kiilpe and his ardent young disciples, I am coming to see my collaborator and myself in the light of travellers and antiquarians of the old school {dilettanti they called themselves, unconscious of self-censure !), as compared with the systematic excavators of our own day. In a certain obscure region of the soul, we two have noticed odd, enigmatic, half -hidden vestiges, which might be (and might also not be!) walls, terraces, and roadways ; we have filled our pockets with shards of pottery and tesserae of mosaic ; we have made rough sketches of what looked like masonry unless it was rock, and noted down peasants' tales of buried treasure. Well Let the excavating engineers
!
come, those who methodically shovel up each clod, and examine and classify every prehistoric kitchen midden of the human mind, and let them dig up that mental region in every direction. If there is anything where we suppose, why, they will, even without our notes and sketches and maps, be bound the to find it. And sooner or later who knows ?
PREFACE
IX
ground plan, the column-bases of the soul's highest temple may be displayed, nay the gold and ivory god be discovered and set together ; the God whom we believed to lie hidden in that unnoticed corner
of the mind, Apollo himself, the radiance of life shaped in the image of man. And in this presumptuous, yet not immodest, mood, let me thank not only Professor Kiilpe and my other kind critics at Bonn, but my older friends, M. Th. Ribot and Professor Karl Groos, without whose generous encouragement and help I could never have done even the little I have.
Vernon Lee
Chelsea, July 191
CONTENTS
PAGE
I.
Anthropomorphic Êsthetics
Appendix
:
Quotations from Lipps
^f
II.
-Esthetic
Appendix
Empathy and
:
its
Organic
45
ha
Accompaniments
Schmarsow and Van ds Velde
III.
The Central Problem

Appendix
I.
:
of Esthetics
77
II.
Munsterberg Titchener
144
I^.y
III.:
The Wurzburg Experiments
i^g
IV.
Beauty and Ugliness

Reprinted from the Original of 1897
153
V. Esthetic Responsiveness, its Variations AND Accompaniments

Being Extracts from Gallsrt Diaries of Vernon Lee
241
VI. Conclusion
VII. Analytical Index
351
367
Zl
LIST
OF ILLUSTRATIONS
rACING PAGB
Mosaic Floor Pattern
in
the Florence
FrontispUu
Baptistery Drawn by C. Amtruther-Thomson
Doric Column from Parthenon

From a photograph by
the late
42
i86
W.
J. Stillman
Honeysuckle Pattern from Greek Vases

Drawn
by C. A.-T.
Facade of Santa Maria Novella

I.
188
Raverat
Gothic Arches at Venice

From
a photograph by Alinari
198
Renaissance Arches
I.
216
Raverat
Catena's St. Jerome

From a photograph
by
226
Manseu
Skeleton
Diagram of Titian's " Sacred AND Profane Love "
234
Interesting and Dull Shapes of Leaves of Bay and of Ivy, also a Wild Tulip and
Debased Garden Houseleek

I.
359
Raverat
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
ANTHROPOMORPHIC
In an
article
ÊSTHETICS
published in the Quarterly Review for dealing with Tolstoi's What is Art ? April 1900, I had occasion to allude to a new science of aesthetics, which, in my opinion, could already dispose of some
of the great Russian's arguments,
reconciliation
his
between art and
life
and indicate a different from
ascetic conclusions. It is the object of the following pages to give some account of these new aesthetics, to define the various problems which they are gradually seeking to resolve, and to point out the tracks of study along which they may eventually attain a solution. I have said that these aesthetics are new, and I should add that they are still rudimentary, full of hypotheses admitting as yet of no demonstration, and of collections of facts requiring to be brought into intelligible connexion. Nor could it be otherwise. Whereas the aesthetics of the past were, in the main, a branch of purely constructive philosophy, concerned rather with logical coherence than with verification, and therefore systematic and dogmatic ; the aesthetics of to-day are, on the contrary, not so much what is actually expounded by any single writer as what results from the unintentional concordance of various students, and the convergence, rather inevitable than actual, of several kinds of

2
study.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
ugliness,
For the problems concerning beauty and and concerning those artistic activities which increase the one and diminish the other these problems of esthetics are being approached from two sides, and by two sets of investiga-
who are often existence and, oftener

tors,
still,
ignorant of each other's ignorant of the very
tors
questions which they and their unknown collaboraare between them narrowing into definite
existence.
These unconnected studies, thus unconsciously converging in the new science of aesthetics, are themThey are, respectively, selves recent and immature. the science of mind which, under the name of psychology, has only lately detached itself from general philosophy ; and the various sciences dealing with the comparison, the origin and the evolution of artistic form, and which are still dependent on ethnography and anthropology on the one hand, on
archaeology and what
is
is
called connoisseurship
significant
on
the other.
Thus
by the
it
that whatever
materials for an eventual science of aesthetics have
been
tered
left
us
partial observations,
past exist as fragmentary facts, and lopsided hypotheses, scat-
the works of philosophers, Plato and Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Spencer, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the works of specialists of some definite branch of art like
in
Aristotle,
Winckelmann and Morelli, or pleaders in the cause of some definite artist, like Ruskin in Modern Painters, and Nietzsche in the Wagner Case. There remains, besides, a large amount of fact and theory eventually applicable to aesthetics in books on children, savages, and lunatics, and the whole literature admirably represented by Professors Ernst
ANTHROPOMORPHIC .ESTHETICS
Grosse, Yrjo Him, and Henry Balfour.* And the methods to be employed, the analogies to be followed, nay, the underlying reasons of the phenomena under consideration, will be learned mainly from biologists, psychologists, students of bodily and mental evolution, who, for the most part, misunderstand or disdain the very existence of aesthetics. The object of the present paper is to show some of the points on which all these separate studies are tending to converge, in the hope that an attempt to map out the vague field of aesthetics may contribute
to the definition of
eventually to
its
its boundaries and its tracks, and thorough systematic cultivation.
II
The first problem

of the adjective
of aesthetics involves a definition

this
from which
the
study takes
its
name
and
of
study
itself.
We
trouble
ourselves,
historical questions,
any more than with the adventures of the word

transformation from the philo-,
need not with other
"
aesthetic
" and
its
sophical adjective connected with perception, to its current connexion with art and the beautiful. But
important to decide whether the word, thus misapplied, should be considered as the adjective referring to art or the adjective referring to beauty ; the alternation between the two meanings having, with most writers, contributed not a little to confuse these already rather inextricable inquiries. For, if
it is
"
aesthetic
" means " that which has to do with art,"
* The Origins of Art. By Yrjo Him. London: Macmillan, 1900. Die Anjdnge der Kunst. By Ernst Grosse. Freiburg, 1 894.
(Translation
New
York,
1897.)
KunsUoissenschaftliche Studien.
of
By Ernst Grosse. Tubingen, 1900. The Evolution Art. By Henry Balfour. (Rivington, 1893.)
Decorative
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

also
and
arises a
" that which has to do with beauty," there tendency to identify the two notions, and a
series
consequent
for instance,
of self-contradictions.
No
one,
can deny that the drama, the novel, poetry in general, are of the nature of art. But no one can deny that in all of them, besides appeals to our desire for beauty, there are appeals to quite different demands of the human soul, such as the demand for logical activity, for moral satisfaction, and for all manner of emotional stimulation, from the grossest to the most exalted ; let alone the
demand
in every
for self-expression, for construction,
and
for skilful handicraft.
form some of them are consistent with the production and perception not of beauty but of
pleasure, but
All these demands, involved of art, are of course demands for
ugliness.
Now, if " aesthetic " is made synonymous with " artistic," and brings the connotation also of " beautiful," the pleasure taken in art will be confused with the pleasure derived from beauty and we shall be landed in that casuistry which admits of beauty dependent on logical clearness, or mechanical skill, or practical fitness, or moral legitimacy, or
;
dramatic interest in fact, beauty which has every quality except that of not being ugly. Thus the formula of Keats '* beauty " either limits the meaning is truth, truth beauty of truth or extends the meaning of beauty to include
scientific exactitude, or
a great
many very
unbeautiful items.
The
applica-
tion of the
arity
word "
beautiful " to whatever peculi-
work
an aesthetician recognises with satisfaction in a of art, has so far been the chief reason why the problem of beauty and ugliness has been defrauded of any study commensurate to its import-
"
ANTHROPOMORPHIC ESTHETICS
ance and
its difficulty.
therefore urgent, as a first step in all aesthetics, that separate expressions should be reserved for " that which has to do with art," and " that which has to do with the beautiful " ; and since we already possess the perfectly intelligible adjective " artistic," there is every reason that the other adjective " aesthetic " should be reserved for
It
is
the designation of the phenomenon of beauty and correlative ugliness, instead of complicating already intricate inquiries by the shifting of mean" ings or the introduction of unfamiliar words. The foregoing discussion may seem a mere dispute about terms. But we shall find that this is not the " case, and that the definition of the word " aesthetic '* What is art, provides a clue to the whole question, and what has the beautiful to do with art ? " For we shall find that it is the demand for beauty which qualifies all the other demands which may seek satisfaction through art, and thereby unites together, by a common factor of variation, all the heterogeneous instincts and activities which go to make up the various branches of art. This view is nowadays almost universally replaced by some version of the theory, first broached by Schiller in his Letters on Esthetics, and revived by Mr. Herbert Spencer, according to which art is differentiated from other employments of human activity by being a kind of play. The *' play theory takes up all the various branches of art, insisting especially on the literary ones and neglecting, as a rule, those where beauty is united to utility, and connects them by the common characteristic of disinterested contemplation, that is to say, the fact, true or false, that they serve no practical aim and constitute a kind of holiday in life. To Schiller's
its
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
theory of art being a kind of play, and valuable in virtue of its freedom from care, Mr. Spencer added the notion that art, like all other forms of play, was the result of stored up energy which found no other modes of venting itself. But this hypothesis of a specific " play instinct," of which art was merely one
embodiment, overlooked the fact that nearly all efficient, and certainly all creative work, however much directed to practical ends, must depend upon some surplus of energy, and is, in nearly every case, attended by the pleasure special to the measured
doling out of such superabundance. Professor Groos, not merely one of the most remarkable of living aestheticians but the greatest authority on Play as such,* has, moreover, been obliged to admit, in his masterly volumes on the play of men and of animals, what is a very damaging fact to his own theory of art, namely, that it is incorrect to speak of any " play-instinct " as such, and that
pjlaying
is
not a specific activity, but merely one of
the modes in which
many
themselves. Mr. Spencer's formula of the " Art-as" theory ; but having eliminated the Spencerian play notion of the " surplus energy," he has merely returned to Schiller's theory that the pleasurableness
fore rejected
of art
is
may spend
or most human activities Professor Groos has there-
due to the
is
characteristic of all other kinds of
play, namely, the sense of
freedom or
of holiday.
But
facts.
this
surely an inversion of the true order of
do not take pleasure in playing because playing makes us feel free ; but, on the contrary, we get greater and more unmixed pleasure while playing, because we are free to leave off and alter in fact, to do what we cannot do while working,
We
* Die
Spiele der Menschen.
By Karl Groos.
Jena, 1899.
fessor
accommodate our activity to our pleasure. ProGroos has himself, in a memorable formula which we shall meet anon, connected the special pleasurableness sought for by art with an activity totally different from play as such. And I hope to show that Schiller's opposition between the serenity of art and the severity of life is very far from fundamental. I hope, assisted thereto by some of
Professor Groos's
the aesthetic condition
come
of nearly all
;
acts of attention
hypotheses, to suggest that on the contrary, the outhealthfully constant and repeated and that art, so far from delivering
is,
own
us from the sense of really living, merely selects, intensifies, and multiplies those states of serenity of which we are given the sample, too rare, too small, and too alloyed, in the course of our normal
practical
life.
And
tic,"
here
we
find ourselves once
of the distinction
between "
artistic
more in presence " and " aesthe-
of reserving the second of terms for our impressions of beauty and ugliness. For, after having found that the artisticemployment of certain faculties cannot be differentiated by calling it play, we shall find that the very finest works of art have been produced by the expressive, constructive, logical, and other activities, when most practically employed, and to the exclusion even of all decoration, which might be explained as a parasitic excrescence of play upon work. There is no playing when a potter or an architect alters the shape of a vessel or a building until it become what we call beautiful ; nor when
and the necessity
these
a writer arranges his sentences or a stonecutter his
lettering in such a
manner that we
shall
not merely
learn but be pleased in the course of learning.
And
8
if
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
a freedom from practical considerations is undoubtedly implied in such making of necessarythings beautiful, that freedom is not the aim of this artistic process, but its necessary condition, since we do not act freely in order to take pleasure in freedom, but please ourselves because we happen to be free to
do
so.
If,
therefore,
we give
the
name
of art to every such

utility
attempt to add another quality beside that of

to useful things or useful acts, there is a character which differentiates art from activities, whether working or playing.
all
common
other
this
And
common
which makes sometimes play and sometimes work artistic, and whose absence removes play and work alike from out of the category of art,
character,
is
precisely that character, absolutely sui generis, for
which I desire to reserve the word " aesthetic." For if we examine all the categories of art, we shall find that, whatever their primary object whether the construction of something useful, the expounding or recording of something significant, the expression of an emotion or the satisfaction of a craving, the doing of something whether practical or unpractical, this primary object's attainuseful or mischievous ment is differentiated by the attempt to avoid as much ugliness and to attain as much beauty
The the particular circumstances will admit. required building or machine may be inevitably the person to be portrayed awkward in parts the fact to be commay be intrinsically ugly the instinct to municated may be disgusting be satisfied may be brutal or lewd ; yet, if the building or machine, the portrait, the description, the dance, the gesture, the dress, is to affect us as being artistic, it must possess, in greater or lesser
as
; ; ;
ANTHROPOMORPHIC ÊSTHETICS
degree, the special peculiarity of being beautiful. And where, on the contrary, this demand for beauty has not been manifest, where there has been no attempt to substitute beautiful for ugly arrangements of line, space, colour, sound, words or movements, there the word artistic is inapplicable in contradistinction to the phrases technically ingenious,
logically reasonable, -practically appropriate, sensually
agreeable, emotionally exciting, morally commendable,
or any of the other qualifications of human work or human play. Art, therefore, is the manifestation of any group of faculties, the expression of any instincts, the answer to any needs, which is to any extent
qualified, that
is
to say, restrained, added to, altered,
or deflected, in obedience to a desire totally separate from any of these, possessing its own reasons, its own
standards and its own imperative, which desire is the aesthetic desire. And the quality answering to this aesthetic desire is what we call Beauty ; the quality which it avoids or diminishes is Ugliness. We have now come to the second main problem of aesthetics what is Beauty ? Is it a specific quality more or less universally sought for and recognised ? or is it the mere expression of certain variable
:
,-
relations, of suitability, novelty, tradition,
and
so
an end, human or divine, continues to be brought forward as a whole or partial explanation by a number of The notion is implicit, for instance, sestheticians. in Ruskin's insistence on the merely constructive
forth
?
That beauty
is
visible adaptation to
and
practical necessities of architecture.
Yet
this
explanation has little philosophical credit, and was thoroughly refuted already by Kant, whose Urtheilskraft is, by the way, an important contribution to aesthetics. Another explanation of beauty
10
confuses
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

it
skill or the logical manifestation ; another notion recurs in a subtler form in the recent tendency to make ease of perception not a condition,* but an equivalent, of beauty ; the identification, for instance, of such simplifying of lines and planes as makes a picture or statue easily apprehended with such arranging of them as makes it repay our apprehension of it. And this erroneous view is extremely difficult to avoid, and, in the present day, often goes with the greatest subtlety of artistic perception
with the technical

its
clearness necessary for
alternative notion, that to be beautiful implies a relation entirely sui generis between visible
among The
aestheticians.
and audible forms and ourselves, can be deduced from comparison between the works of art of different kinds, periods, and climates. For such comparison will show that given proportions, shapes,
patterns, compositions, have a tendency to recur
not disturbed by a self-conscious Such comparison will show that mankind has normally preferred its visible goods and chattels, for instance, to embody certain peculiarities of symmetry and asymmetry, balance and accent and has invariably, when acting spontaneously and unreflectingly, altered the shapes afforded by reality or suggested by practical requirements until they have conformed to certain recurrent types. Such comparative study as this, just beginning in our days (thanks in some measure to mechanical facilitation like casting and photography), should become the very core of all aesthetic science. For only the study
whenever
art
is
desire for novelty.
in
See Cornelius [Elementargesetze der Bildenden Kunst] (1908), whom it is derived from Hildebrand, Problem der Form.
Tpp.
Cf. The Central Problem of /Esthetics,
80-81 of present volume.

of the
ii
work of
art itself can reveal
the
of
name
of beauty,
what answers to and on what main peculiarities
beauty depends. And until we know this we shall continue the vague or even fruitless speculations of former philosophers as to how and why beauty affects us at all, and the random guesses of art critics as to the manner in which such beauty has been obtained. This comparative study of art the comparison of category with category, work with work, detail with detail ^has depended, hitherto, mainly on the attempts to ascertain the authorship of individual works of art, on the part, for instance, of archaeologists of the type of Furtwangler, Lowy, and Wickow,
form
this quality of
and of connoisseurs of painting of the Morelli school. And, on the other hand, it has been greatly helped by the studies and demonstrations of a small number
Hildebrand in book on Sculptural Form, and like Ruskin himself, not merely in his writings, but in the diagrams and illustrations with which he supplemented them. This study of the real constitution of the work of art will probably sooner or later be enriched by the methodical comparison, not merely of form as it
of practical artists, like the sculptor
his
exists in
art
as
art of the weaver, the potter, the

as of the architect or painter
armourer
much
and
and inferior work, but by the comparison also of form in real objects and form In the finest as modified, " stylised," by art.
as it exists in superior
sculpture,
antique
and
mediaeval,
the
play
of
muscles, for instance, is not given as it is mechanically inevitable in reality ; and many facts of bodily structure are deviated from in the search after Similarly, the perspecagreeable surface and mass.
tive,
the composition, of great pictures
is
at variance
12
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

;
with that of real landscape and in pattern as such, animal and vegetable shapes have been made congruous, symmetrical, rhythmical, so as to suit an aesthetic imperative recognisable equally in the basket-work of savages and the carvings of Gothic stonemasons. I have used more than once the expression cesthetic imperative. Such an imperative is implicit, of
in all artistic tradition, and directs the practice of every craftsman and every school. Nay, could we but translate into logical terms, into
course,
intelligible words, the unspoken and unformulated preferences which every artist, great or small, obeys, we should know very accurately what is and what is not beautiful, and wherein resides the essential quality of every work and every school of art. But as artistic practice is its own and only expression, and the reasons determining the craftsman are necessarily unconscious in so far as we identify consciousness with logic and words the study of what beauty is can be carried on only by the scientific methods of comparison and elimination. And we can symbolise as well as exemplify this method as applied to visual art, by taking the photograph of a real object and that of the same object artistically rendered ; effacing, adding to, altering each until
the two have become similar ; pursuing the same system of practical analysis and synthesis with works of different kinds and degrees of merit ; determining by such elimination and integration what constitutes what we call " beauty " ; and then verifying our conclusions by statistically treated comparison of recurrent artistic forms, of which the uniformity of recurrence would prove the universal acceptability. But why should we thus prefer certain arrange-
ments of
lines,
13
alone
colours, surfaces, and sounds let The psychological side of words ? aesthetics, and its interdependence with all other questions of mental science, begins with this question, of which the scientific statement would be
of
:
as follows
What
facts of consciousness in the first
place,
what physiological processes in the second, appear to underlie or to accompany the satisfaction in certain forms as being beautiful, and the dissatisfaction in certain other forms as being ugly
?
This problem, whose final solution is naturally conditioned by the general advance of psychology, of course repeats itself with reference to every kind of art, and every craft involving questions of beauty and ugliness. But in literature the question is immensely complicated by other interests, logical, emotional, and practical, which make up the bulk of what is only partially fine art ; and it is obscured by
detail questions like those of the direct action of
words, none of which have been properly examined as yet. The aesthetics of music are, if possible, in a still more backward condition, owing to the special difficulty of self-observation and the hopeless confusion of the terms employed. So that, despite the value of men like Stumpf, Hanslick, and Dauriac,* I am not aware of much progress since the masterly analysis of the late Edmund Gurney, whose great work on The Power of Sound refuted all existing explanations without substituting any new ones. But the arts appealing to the eye have proved less refractory to psychological investigation ; as they have, moreover, thanks to connoisseurs, archaeo* Stumpf, 'Tonpsychologte,
Musikalisch-Schonen,
ist
volume, 1883;
Hanslick,
Fom
1904;
also Billroth,
new edition, 1896; Dauriac, VEsfrit Musical, Wer ist Musikalisch ? 1898.
14
logists,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

examined.
cally
and anthropologists, been far more scientifiSo with regard to them it is already possible to show the chief tracks along which observation and hypothesis are moving, the direction in which all categories of art philosophy
will
be bound to go.
Ill
One
modern
of
aesthetics
the most valuable negative results of a result to which the various
students,
connoisseurs,
archaeologists,
historians,
psychologists have co-operated without fully appreis the distinction between ciating its importance
the qualities of a visible figure, pattern, or, more summarily, " form," and the qualities suggested by the identification of this form as representing a given object. For each of these sets of qualities can affect us independently, even sometimes contradictorily and the manner of perceiving them is not similar. Thus it is possible that a given form, that is, a given
arrangement of
lines, planes,
and colours, may
affect
us as being what we call ugly, although the object represented, that is, the thing which we are made to think of, affects us as being what we call beautiful.* Take, for instance, certain painted or carved garlands they give us the pleasure of thinking of the beauty, freshness, sweetness, etc., of flowers and the yet pleasantness of concomitant circumstances ; give us, at the same time, the displeasure of they their broken lines and irregular bulgings, of confusion and lack of harmony ; the flowers suggested were delightful, but the pattern suggesting them was wretched. Or take a portrait, say by Van Eyck or Rembrandt. It may strike us as ugly when we
:
* Cf. Esthetic Responsiveness
recognise
it
it
15
as the face of a
human
being, and
endow
with
it
its
associated peculiarities of disagreeable

at the
texture, poor health,
But
may
and bad temper or sensuality. same time strike us as beautiful if
we attend
to its intrinsic peculiarities as a visible form, the manner in which it fills up space, the movement of lines and surfaces, the total harmony of its appearance. This difference between the thing seen and the thing suggested explains why crowds will be
interested by pictures which lovers of art reject utterly ; and why, on the other hand, aesthetic persons will be fascinated by patterns on stuffs and
shapes of utensils which the man bent on practical or literary interest passes by without a glance ; and,
similarly,
why
so
many " works
of art," illustrations
to books or portraits for instance, will be thrown aside as eyesores after a moment's keen interest whereas quite unobtrusive things, barely commented
on
at
first,
a cornice, a chair, a table, a pot,
may work
their
way
into our affections and cause positive
by their defacement. This difference between what is commonly designated as form and subject (though it were clearer to say " form and object ") corresponds with that between seeing and recognising.* When a sportsman sees a hare previous to firing at it, he does not, he cannot, see the whole shape of the animal ; but he notices, he detects, some peculiarity which, given
distress
the surroundings, suggests the notion of a hare. Neither more nor less than the notion of a hare, that
* Such a recognition
is
what
is
meant when Binet writes
" Une
ferceftion est le processus -par lequel Vesprit complete une impression
des sens par une escorte
îmagesP
See Binet's Raisonnement and
Taine's L' Intelligence.
i6
is
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
to say, a synthesis of various qualities, is suggested to his dog by a certain scent. What are wrongly called optical delusions, by which we misjudge sizes, directions, and shapes, and occasionally take one thing for another, a flat surface for a bossy one, smoke for water, a. bush for a man, are a proof that the supposed act of seeing is, nine times out of ten, the mental construction of an object upon one or
two
visual indications.
This abbreviated way of seeing is usual whenever we have to decide what a fact of sight probably represents in order to adapt our action or to pass on
to some other similar interpretation it is the way of seeing characterising either rapid change in the world around us or rapid shifting of our own attention. But the thorough and, so to say, real seeing, the perception of the visible form in its detail and its whole, takes place whenever we are brought long or frequently before the same external things, and have occasion to grow familiar with their aspect it is in this manner that we see the rooms we inhabit, the country we live in, the clothes we wear, the tools we handle, the persons we take interest in ; the characteristic of this seeing, as distinguished from recognising, being the survival, in our memory, of an image, more or less vivid, of that thing's visible presence. Therefore, as already hinted, we may tolerate ugliness when we merely recognise, that is, detect a characteristic and follow a train of suggestion but we demand beauty whenever our attention recurs to a form, lingers on its details, or is confronted
;
:
steadily with
its
image in memory.
And
conversely,
we we
avoid and forget the ugly facts of reality, while seek to see once more, or to remember, all sights which have affected us as being beautiful. And
17
whereas, of course, attractiveness of suggestion is the extrinsic quality of works of art, and the qualityliable to change and to wearing out ; their enduring fascination, their intrinsic merit, consists in the attractiveness, which we call beauty, of their form. Now, the thorough seeing of form, the dwelling of our attention upon its intrinsic peculiarities, the realisation, in fact, of form as such, implies upon our part a special activity which, according to the case,
accompanied by satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This special activity is the interpretation of form according to the facts of our own inner experience, the attribution to form of modes of being, moving, and feeling similar to our own ; and this projection of our own life into what we see is pleasant or unpleasant because it facilitates or hampers our own
is
vitality.
The discovery of this projection of our inner experience into the forms which we see and realise is the central discovery of modern aesthetics. It had been foreshadowed by various psychologists, and is implied in the metaphors of many poets. But it owes its first clear statement and its appropriate designation to Lotze, who, fifty years ago, wrote in his Mtkrokosmos a passage destined to become classic in mental science, and which I quote, because it presents this rather intricate psychological phenomenon in very familiar and intelligible instances.
" Our fancy meets with no visible shape so refractory that the former cannot transport us into it and make us share its life. Nor
is
this possibility of entering into the vital
to us limited to creatures whose kind to the bird, for instance,

realising
modes of what is foreign and ways approximate to ours ;
who
sings joyously in his flight.
We
participate just as well in the narrow existence of the mollusc,

in imagination the
monotonous well-being got by the
opening and shutting of
its shell.
We
project ourselves not merely
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
into the forms of the tree, identifying our life with that of the slender shoots which swell and stretch forth, feeling in our soul the delight of the branches which droop and poise delicately in mid-air.
extend equally to lifeless things these feelings which lend them meaning. And by such feelings we transform the inert masses of a building into so many limbs of a living body, a body experiencing inner strains which wc transport back into ourselves." (Book v,
cap. 2.)
We
'
"
To
imagine things
as
they are for themselves,"
*
;
Souriau, a most suggestive psychologist, whose aesthetics would have been extraordinarily valuable if only he had added a knowledge of contemporary German thought to his own investigations on the subject :
writes
as they are for themselves, is tantamount to imagining what they would be if they had an obscure consciousness of their own existence. Now we have only one way of thus imagining things from inside, and that is, to put ourselves inside them."
M.
" to imagine things
<
For this " putting ourselves inside " the things to which we attribute modes of feeling and acting
similar to ours the
literally
German language
;
has afforded a
Einfiihlungyi
most fortunate expression
it calls it
" feeling ourselves into."
Such projection
\
i
of ourselves into external objects, such interpretation of their modes of existence by our own experience,
such Einfiihlung is not merely out all poetry, where it borders on and dramatic sympathy, but is numberless words and expressions
manifest throughand overlaps moral at the bottom of whose daily use has
say, for overlook this special peculiarity. instance, that hills roll and mountains rise, although we know as a geological fact that what they really do is to suffer denudation above and thickening
* UEsthetique du Mouvement. Paris, 1889. t The reader will see further on {/Esthetic Empathy) that fortunate expression has not been without serious drawbacks.
made us
We
<
this
below.
19
soar,
Also
that
arches
spring,
cupolas
belfries point,
although the material buildings merely
obey the laws of gravitation.
Nay, we attribute
movement
to motionless lines and surfaces ; they move, spread out, flow, bend, twist, etc. They do, to
quote M. Souriau's ingenious formula, what we should feel ourselves doing if we were inside them. For we are inside them we have " felt ourselves," projected our own experience, into them, or more correctly into the pattern which they constitute. And here, before going deeper into this subject, and coming into the presence of the greatest discoverer in this field of aesthetics, let me ask the reader to think over the last sentence in my quotation from " We transform by such feelings the inert Lotze
;
:
masses of a building into so many limbs of a living body." That is the text suggestive, but still very fragmentary. Here is the commentary, full, clear, and of the most far-reaching application, as given us by Theodor Lipps in his great work on Spatial Esthetics and Optical Illusions "
:
the Doric column lifts itself, what precisely is it does the lifting ? Is it the mass of stone of which the column is made ? ... It is not the column, but the spatial image presented us by the column, which does this lifting. It is the lines, the surfaces, the bodily shapes, not the material masses embodying the surfaces, bounded by the lines, filling out a figured space ; it is the lines, surfaces, and shapes which bend or wind, which expand or contract. They also, and they alone, are for our aesthetic contemplation the loading element. It is not the roof of a building wMch presses down ; it is the visible surface of the roof which presses down or The material masses combine, obeys a downward tendency. . in the measure requisite to their material existence, their material weight, cohesion, carrying power, etc. ; or combine them according The as is most conducive to the material existence of the whole. forms combine in the manner of their aesthetic character or in such
. .
"
When
manner
as shall
be
aesthetically significant.
is
Such
\i.e.
significant
com-
bination of aesthetic relations
given in idea
to our imagination].
20
tion
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

of material masses constitutes the technical creathis
;
The arrangement
but only
combination of aesthetic relations for oviT imagination constitutes a work of art. As in every other case, so here also the essential of the work of art is an imaginary world unified
and self-contained Welt 'j."
['
eine
und
in
sich
zwar
geschlossene
ideelle
This phenomenon of aesthetic Einfuhlungy or, as Professor Titchener has translated it, Empathy ,* is therefore analogous to that of moral sympathy. Just as when we " put ourselves in the place " or,
more
vulgarly, " in the skin " of a fellow-creature,
him the feelings we should have in similar circumstances ; so, in looking at the Doric column, for instance, and its entablature, we are attributing to the lines and surfaces, to the spatial forms, those dynamic experiences which we should have were we to put our bodies into
we
are, in fact, attributing to
similar
conditions.
Moreover, just
as
sympathy
with the grief of our neighbours implies in ourselves knowledge of the conflicting states ^hope, resignation, pain, and the efforts against pain which constitute similar grief in our own experience ; so this aesthetic attribution of our own dynamic modes to visible forms implies the realisation in our consciousness of the various conflicting strains and pressures, of the resistance and the yielding which constitute any given dynamic and volitional experiences of our own. When we attribute to the Doric column a condition akin to our own in keeping erect and defying the force of gravitation, there is the
* Titchener, Psychology of Thought Processes (Macmillan, 1909,
" This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that and p. 181 : term as a rendering of Einfiihlung " They shade off gradually into those empathic experiences,"
..."
etc. etc.
revival in
21
our mind of a little drama we have experienced many millions of times, and which has become registered in our memory, even like that less common drama of hope, disappointment, and anguish which has been revived in the case of our neighbour's grief and attributed to him. But modern psychology, ever since the early work of Wundt, has inclined to teach us that a revival in memory is a repetition, however much blurred and weakened, of a past process. So that when we project into the soul of our bereaved neighbour such feelings as we have ourselves experienced on similar occasions ; when we interpret the forms of architecture in the terms of our own muscular pressures and strains, of our own volitional yielding and resistance, and of those combinations thereof which
designate as rhythm ; we are in both cases, however seemingly different, producing in ourselves that particular dynamical experience which we attribute to the person we have sympathised with, to the form " into which we have felt ourselves." The projection of our experience into the non-ego involves the more or less vivid revival of that experience in ourselves ; and that revival, according to its degree of vividness, is subject to the same accompaniment of satisfaction or dissatisfaction as the original experience. So, when this attribution of our modes of life to visible shapes and this revival of past experience is such as to be favourable to our existence and in so far pleasurable, we welcome the form thus animated by ourselves as " beautiful " ; and when all these processes of attribution and revival of our dynamic experiences are, on the contrary, unfavourNor able to us we avoid that form as " ugly."
we
must the reader suppose that such Empathy can
"
22
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
be found only in our complex and fanciful dealings with the world of art. On the contrary, if Empathy has conditioned the being of art and can therefore explain it, this is precisely because Empathy an elementary (or next door to elementary) is mental phenomenon accompanying all spatial contemplation, however much our very familiarity
has
made
us overlook
instance, the
it. Let us ask ourselves, for meaning and corollaries of Professor
that " figure
Kiilpe's statement {Outlines of Psychology, p. 336) is a sum of extensions.''^ Evidently HMt extension, when not a mere verbalism (and in
!
order to have become a verbalism !), must be our extension, for the inert cannot extend or indeed tend in any literal sense, and the attribution of extension is therefore an attribution of an item of our own This extension may become a active experience. mere verbal symbol, what we call a mere metaphor, meaning thereby that its complete meaning is not mentally realised. But whenever this complete meaning is realised, whenever this " metaphorical extension becomes in our fancy a literal extension, awaking in us, not the sensations of present acts of extending done by us, but the memories of our past acts of extension connected with the seen spatial figures, we feel activity and life, then there is Empathy because our own activity, our own life, have been
:
brought into play. Such, roughly stated and deduced- out of the many examples and repetitions in his volume, appears to be the central hypothesis of Professor Lipps's Exclusively interested as he is Spatial Êsthetics. in the problems of consciousness as such, averse from the materialistic tendencies of psycho-physics, and suspicious of all attempts at reducing ideas and

23
emotions to bodily conditions, Professor Lipps proceeds no further in his examination of this question. Considered as an activity of the soul, Empathy
it] cannot be denied do possess dynamic experience we revive it and derive satisfaction or dissatisfaction from its projection into what we call
[for
so
we
;
shall
now
call
existence.
We
irrefutably
visible form.
IV
This is all that Professor Lipps has cared to teach ; and the teaching of this is enough for the unrivalled greatness of a single philosopher. But other sestheticians, unable to attain to Lipps's satisfactoriness of explanation, have pushed the problem of Einfuhlung or Empathy a good deal And here we come once more into the further. presence of Professor Karl Groos, who is, after Lipps, decidedly the most important of contemporary
German
earlier
writers
on these questions.
to
Introduction
Êsthetics, in 1892,
on a kind of aesthetic to which he had given the somewhat misleading name of " Inner Mimicry " ; and he has returned in his Spiele der Menschen, and his second volume on aesthetics, to the notion that
insisted
of an imitative character,
Already in his he had Einfuhlung [Empathy"]
" in complete aesthetic enjoyment there are present motor phenomena and that these show the sympathy in question {Miterleben) to be a bodily participation."
experience invoked by Lipps is to original movements. Does not its revival imply a renewal of some, at least, of the bodily phenomena constituting those movements ? Professor Groos reminds us that feelings of muscular strain have been recognised, ever since
referable, after
all,
The dynamic
24
in
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the studies of Lotze and Fechner, as accompanying many persons the sight, even more the recollection, of fencing or billiard matches ; that similar sensations in the vocal organs have been even more commonly remarked attendant on the hearing or thinking of musical intervals ; that there are such physical accompaniments to almost all emotional states, and that they have been disputed over, as universal or as limited to Charcot's " motor type," by physiologists quite innocent of aesthetics, like Professor Strieker and Dr. Ballet.* Moreover, Professor Groos has pointed out the sense of bodily excitement and well-being often accompanying strong aesthetic emotion, of which innumerable expressions in ordinary language are witness. That aesthetic Empathy is based upon, or universally accompanied by, actual bodily changes, Professor Groos seems unwilling as yet to assert in the teeth of Lipps's hostility to such a notion.f But having admitted that bodily accompaniments of aesthetic conditions may exist only among
*
The " motor
type " was discovered (or invented
!)
as a result
of pathological study of such cases of partial amnesia as obliterated
the visual or auditive
memory and reduced
the individual to
memory
some of Galton's discoveries concerning the various individual methods of learning by heart. The " motor type " has got, perhaps accidentally and wrongly, entangled with a type of person who, 1st, localises usually unlocalised bodily processes 2nd, whose " muscular " reflexes are less than
of movements, a fact corresponding to
;
usually inhibited, so that he has difficulty in thinking without articulate speech or gesticulation.
logical Society
Let us hope that the inquiry undertaken for the Berlin Psychoby Dr. Richard Baerwald may help us to disentangle some of this complexity of psychological phenomena or (perhaps)
confusion of psychologists' thought. T For Professor Groos's present views and Central Problem of Esthetics, p. 77.
my
own,
cf,
7he
"
viduals," as distinguished
25
the large class of what are called " motor indi-
from " visualisers " and " auditives," he boldly claims that thorough aesthetic realisation, or what he calls " inner mimicry and consequent vivid aesthetic satisfaction, is limited " exactly to the individuals of more or less " motor
type,
to
those,
in
fact,
presenting such bodily
accompaniments to
aesthetical conditions.
" It is probable," he writes, " that it may appear presumptuous on the part of us individuals of the motor type, if we believe ourselves to be capable of assthetic enjoyment more intense than that of such others as are without all similar bodily resonance. But this view is only natural ; the difference between us and them is just in the summation of present sensations with past ones, that is to say, in a more complete condition than theirs is." *
Contemporaneously with the speculations of Lipps and of Groos, and in complete ignorance of both, an attempt was being made, by two English students of art history, to carry the same ideas still further in
essay
the direction of psycho-physical parallelism. In anon Beauty and Ugliness, published in the Contemporary Review (October-November 1897), the aesthetic seeing, the "realisation," of form, was connected by C. Anstruther-Thomson and the present writer with bodily conditions and motor phenomena
of a most complex and important kind. It was claimed by one of these visiters that a long course of special training had' magnified not only her powers of self-observation, but also most probably the normally minute, nay, so to speak, microscopic and imperceptible bodily sensations accompanying the
I have had to extend this sentence for greater clearness.
26
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
action of eye and attention in the realisation of Among these habitually disregarded or completely fused sensations there could be distinguished, with certain individuals at least, not merely the " muscular strains," already noticed by Lotze and Fechner, and the vaguer organic perturbations referred to by Groos, but definite " sensations of direction " (tensions corresponding to uf, down, through, alongside, similar to those remarked upon by William James in his Psychology *) and sensations of modification in the highly subtle apparatus for equilibrium ; and finally, sensations of altered respiration and circulation sufficient to account for massive conditions of organic well-being
visible form.
and the reverse. These observations, whether they deal with mere
individual idiosyncrasy, with peculiarities (as Professor Groos suggests) of the " motor type," or whether they prove of more general character, were welded into a theory of aesthetic pleasure and pain
by the perhaps hasty acceptance of what is known in recent psychology as the " Lange-James Hypothesis." t Professors Lange and William James had,
Experimental psychology has since added a
sensations
;
number
of similar
see particularly Professor Titchener's Thought Processes
(1910)
and Feeling and Attention (1908). t W. James, Principles of Psychology
(1890), p. 449, vol.
ii
" Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise
to the bodily expression.
My
theory, on the contrary,
is
that
the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact,
and that our feeling of

P. 451 theory, which
:
"I now
is
the same changes as they occur is the emotion." proceed to urge the vital point of my whole this : If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try
'
from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no mind-stuff ' out
to
abstract
It
27
should be explained, independently of one another, suggested that the conditions of bodily change, e.g. the reddening and shrinking of shame, the constriction, turning cold and white, the semi-paralysis of fear, which had hitherto been accepted as aftereffects of various emotions, were, on the contrary, the contents of that " feeling " ; in fact, constituted, together with the idea of the feeling's objective cause, the whole of that feeling, say of shame or of fear. By an obvious analogy, the feeling of the various muscular strains, changes of equilibrium and respiratory and circulatory changes, might be considered as constituting the special aesthetic emotion, varying with every form contemplated, and agreeable or disagreeable according as these changes were or were not favourable to life as a whole. The hypothesis advanced in the Contemporary Review sinned first by building upon the Lange- James theory, of which itself would be one of the strongest proofs ; and secondly, by misapprehending the still most difficult problem whether pleasure and pain are separate emotions or merely modalities of all emotion. But, despite these and many other faults, the essay on Beauty and Ugliness has an undeniable importance that of originating not in psychological speculations, but in study of the individual work of art and its individual effects ; and thereby attacking the central problem of aesthetics, and arriving at the fact of Einfilhlung
of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral
state of intellectual perception
is all is
that remains."
true,
Page 453
"
If
such a theory
of elements,
resultant of a
sum
physiological process of a sort
then each emotion is the and each element is caused by a already well known. The elements
is
are all organic changes,
and each of them
the reflex effect of the
exciting object."
28
"BEAUTY
AND UGLINESS
or Empathy from sides other than those whence Lipps, Groos and their followers have started. If the authors of that essay were to restate their
views after study of contemporary German aestheticians, and after additional observation and meditation on their own part, the result might be summed up, and the theory of Einfilhlung [or Empathy] rounded off as follows All visual perception is accompanied by interpretation of the seen shapes in terms of previous experience. When attention shifts rapidly for the sake of practical adaptation or expression, the shape is seen in the most summary and partial manner, barely sufficient to awaken the idea of peculiarities which may be associated with it, as texture, weight, temperature, position, smell, taste, use, etc., and to initiate, in most cases, some series of movements by which we adapt ourselves to these peculiarities. This process is that of recognising, naming ; and it becomes an ever-shortened and more automatic act of guessing from a minimum of data at the real nature of the seen object and at our proper reactions towards its presence. Such is But visual perception considered as recognition. when, instead of such perfunctory shifting, the attention deals long or frequently (in actual present fact or in memory) with any visible shape, there sets in another kind of interpretation ; and other data of experience become fused with those of sight. There come to be attributed to that shape not objective qualities with which it has previously been found accompanied, but modes of activity of our own evoked in the realisation of the relations of that and, instead of shape's constituent elements ; adjusting into movements destined to react upon the seen object, our motor activities rehearse the
:
volition, in fact, the life,
29
tensions, pressures, thrusts, resistances, efforts, the
with
its
emotions, which
attribute to
it.
we
project
into the
accompanying form and
Here we
Lipps.
are back at the Einfiihlung or

this projection of
Empathy
of
Now
our
own dynamical
and emotional experience into the seen form implies a reviviscence of those particular dynamical and
emotional experiences.
think, revival in
If,
is
as
there
is
reason to
memory
tantamount to actual
repetition of an inner process,* this attribution of our Hfe to seen shapes will, just in proportion to its
imply or induce an activity in the bodily systems involved in the original dynamical or emotional experiences thus received and thus projected outside ourselves. And, whether through direct connection with the original dynamic experience, or owing to their greater or lesser facility, other bodily conditions, alterations, for instance, in the respiration and circulation, will also come into
intensity,
play,
the total
or not to
and add their particular quality and force to phenomenon of consciousness. According
bodily or mental, is favourable pleasure or displeasure will result ; and, probability, this pleasure or displeasure will
life,
as this total condition,
in
all
itself
provoke fresh organic alterations, adding, in
new doses of satisfaction or dissatisfaction to the existing mass. Thus, whether we accept the Lange-James theory and view the revived dynamical conditions and their associated organic changes as constituting the
their turn,
But not by any means

i.e.
processes in the organs concerned; a
is more consonant with biological See Semon's Mnemische Empfindungen (1909). Cf. discussion of this point at p. 135, and cf. Miinsterberg at pp. 143-4.
central,
cerebral, reviviscence
economy.
30
aesthetic
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

emotion
;
or whether
we
rest satisfied
with
the statement that the revived dynamic conditions are the cause, and the organic changes the result, of
aesthetic emotion whichever alternative we choose, we should yet possess an hypothesis explaining why attentively realising a visible shape should produce a feeling of pleasure or displeasure feeling sometimes filling the whole soul and occasionally marked by unmistakable bodily sensations.
this
Thus
the logical development
of
the notion of
Empathy, its conception as a deep-reaching and intricate complexus of action and reaction of what we distinguish as body and soul, would explain how beauty has come to be associated with all our notions of order, of goodness, of health, and of more complete life ; and ugliness, on the contrary, with everything by which the life of body and soul is diminished and jeopardised. After thus analysing the presumable nature of the aesthetic phenomenon, it is perhaps well to remind the reader that, by the very constitution thereof, such analytical knowledge of it is normally denied us
aesthetic
during
its
duration.
For, in the
first
place,
the
dynamic conditions generated by constant repeti* tion, and therefore bearing no sort of " local signs," are, by the act of Empathy {Einfuhlung) projected out of ourselves and attributed to the seen shapes, much in the same way as changes in the eye and optic nerve are not localised in them, but projected, as
the attribute colour, into the objects originally producing them. And, in the second place, the accompanying organic changes are also divested of definite " local signs," and fused into a complex emotional quality (well-being, malaise, high or low spirits)
* Cf. Groos and Miinsterberg, pp. 134 and 143-4.
31
which must be disintegrated before its components can be picked out. Hence, whatever the processes into which the aesthetic phenomenon be analysed
by methods of
special introspection or reasoning, the
such remains a dualism expressible " This form is beautiful " ; and " I like seeing this form." Moreover, as both Professor Lipps and the authors of the essay on Beauty and Ugliness insist, the aesthetic phenomenon is individual, and varies with every single individual form ; and, since it consists in the attribution of an individual and varying complexus of dynamic (and perhaps organic) conditions, it must always, in real experience, bear the character of the individual form by which it is elicited. There is, in reality, no such thing as "the Beautiful." There are only separate and different beautiful
as
phenomenon
only as follows
forms.
VI
The acceptance of some such explanation of the preference for beauty and the aversion to ugliness will make it evident why the aesthetic instinct, instead of calling any art into existence, in reality regulates the various formative, imitative, and expressive impulses which variously combine in the production of art ; imposing upon these activities a " how," an imperative as categoric as the one which the moral sense imposes on the practical impulses of existence. Considered, moreover, as such a regulating instinct, aesthetic preference is evidently concerned with a field far wider than that of art. And, indeed, study of the crafts and manufactures whose evolution has not been (as in our
transitional
civilisation)
abnormally rapid, shows
32
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
that all objects and all rites on which the attention dwells frequently or long have taken that aesthetic character which we nowadays associate, most falsely, with notions of uselessness or play. Indeed it is
historically
demonstrable
(as
Ruskin
and Morris
guessed) that the production of " works of art " as such, and independent of ulterior purposes, is a mark of sesthetic decay or anarchy ; for no form can be either fully perfected by the craftsman or appreciated by the public unless it be familiar ; that is to say, unless its complete Empathy or Einjuhlung be secured by repetition in every variety of application, as we find it the case with the forms of Egyptian, Hellenic, or Mediaeval art, which exist equally in the most exalted and the most humble applications. And similarly the separation of a class of " artists "
(with its corresponding class of " art-lovers ") from ordinary craftsmen and average mankind has always brought about aesthetic uncertainty, since this independent class has invariably tended to what is called " art for art's sake," that is to say, art in which technical skill, scientific knowledge, desire for novelty or self-expression have broken with the traditions resulting from the unconscious sway of spontaneous aesthetic preference. These traditions, representing the satisfaction of the aesthetic instinct through universal and long practice, are the stuff of every artistic style. The individual artist, however great, merely selects among the forms habitual in his youth and alters them, even as the mechanical inventor or the philosopher alters and develops the appliances or the systems of his predecessors. One of the earliest results of the historical and critical work of archaeologists and " connoisseurs " has been the
33
recognition of the kinship between the masterpiece and the " schoolwork " from which it arises and which arises from it how many persons could tell a Giorgione, for instance, from a Cariani, or a Botticelli from a Bottacini ? And the problem of what individual temperamental difference accounts
;
for
the
irresistible
vividness,
the
inexhaustibly-
harmonious richness of the masterpiece, this unsolved problem of artistic genius shows by its very
existence that the greatest innovator does not create out of nothing, but transmutes already existing
forms into something possessing the familiarity of the old and the fascination of the new. Hence we see that the most sovereign art has always arisen when genius has not been wearied in the search for novelty nor wasted in the making of things appealing only to the idle and superfine. We must not be misled, like Tolstoi, by the aesthetic anarchy resulting from that rush of inventions and reforms, that confusion of historically and geographically alien habits and standards, which has marked the last hundred years. Such moments of
ferment and disintegration are necessarily rare and
and their artistic chaos or sterility is abnormal and of little consequence. The history of art shows, on the contrary, that even barbarism has not atrophied or interfered with the aesthetic instinct. We see that in any civilisation which was widespread, homogeneous and stable, the most consummate works of art could be enjoyed by every one, because the forms embodied in, say, the Egyptian temple or the Gothic cathedral, the Greek statue or Japanese painting, were the forms familiar in every craft, through an unbroken succession of kindred works of every degree of excellence. Applying the
passing
;
34
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
conceptions of recent sestheticians, we understand that the art of any time or country was the common property of all the men thereof, simply because the craftsmen had the habit not merely of those general relations of proportion and dimension whose Empathy {Einjiihlung) is agreeable to the normal human being, but also of those more special forms into which the men of different places and periods have been wont to project, by aesthetic sympathy, the modes of acting and willing most favourable to
their well-being.
That such
of a
cise psychological
whatever its preand physiological explanation, is very deep seated, highly organised, and faraesthetic well-being,
spreading kind, has been, I trust, made evident to the reader of these pages. Dependent on all our
habits of
movement, of resistance, and of effort commensurate with our experience of balance and re-echoed through our innermost bodily volition life, it is no wonder that aesthetic well-being should
;
be associated with our preference for order, temperance, for aspiring and harmonious activity ; or that philosophers, from Plato to Schopenhauer, should have guessed that the contemplation of beauty was one of the moral needs of the human creature. Evolutional speculation may indeed add that this harmonious vitalising of the soul, this rhythmical cooperation of so many kinds of feeling and doing, this sympathising projection of man's modes into nature's forms, and this repercussion of nature's fancied attributes in man's own life, have answered some utility by unifying consciousness and rhythmically heightening vitality. And, in the light of these theories, the irresistible instinct will be justified, by which all times and peoples, despite the doubts of
and bowed before beauty
of the divine.
35
philosophers and the scruples of ascetics, have invariably employed art as the expression of religion
as a visible
manifestation
Such are the main problems which the new and such a few of the answers which it is already enabled
science of aesthetics has undertaken to solve
;
to foreshadow.
APPENDIX TO ANTHROPOMORPHIC
.ESTHETICS
Quotations from Lipps'e Raumaesthetik and
/Esthetische
EinfUhkng
[I have purposely refrained from all attempt to give any English form to these translations for fear of misinterpreting Professor Lipps's
occasional obscure expressions.
V.
L.]
Raumaesthetik.
Already when, looking at the

separate portions successively, I
spiral, I
follow
it,
arvd take in it
ence/or
me or
in
narrow and then wide. As a consequence the spiral becomes successively narrower or wider, it narrows or widens itself, and it does this in a definite manner. The existence of the spiral is a becoming. We have here a first conor, reversing the
my -perception. way of looking
am making this spiral coTtie into existThe spiral is first wide, then narrow
;
at
it, first
necting point for the representation of the conditions, according to which (with reference to the mechanical experience I have collected ever since my first day of life) such a spiral line would have But the shape itself of the line already objectively originated.
gives
its
occasion
for
such suppositions (Vorstellungen)
concerning
natural origin and conditions (Entstehungsbedingungen).
For
forms habitually arise in reality under specified mechanical conditions, and I have already seen the origin of all kinds of curves, increasing and diminishing, and of this particular shape or similar ones. And lastly, even if Forms do not arise in this way, yet they assert themselves And this also happens under specified mechanical conditions. so. Now to these mechanical conditions we give the name of forces, tendencies, mechanical activities. In so far as we cause the line
36
{i.e.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
its
the spiral in question) to arise out of these, we are interpreting shape mechanically. And to this we add, or rather to this there adds itself, the repre-
sentation of possible inner relationships of

selbst)
not of the same
result (Ergebniss)
my own person (meiner but of the same character,
that is, there adds itself the representation of possible kinds of my ozvn doing, in the process of which forces, motors, tendencies, or activities
realise themselves freely or
influences,
impeded: there takes place a yielding to or an overcoming of resistances, there arise strains, tensions (Spannungen) between impulses, and these are in turn re-
Those Forces and force results (Kraftwirkungen) appear in the light of these categories of my own relations, of these
solved, etc. etc.
categories of
my
activity, these in(ipulses
and tendencies and of these
modes of
this realisation.
j^sthetische Einfiihlung, by Th. Lipps, in Zeitschrift fur Psych, u. Phys. der Sinnesorgane, vol. 22, 1900, p. 439 et seq. I do not create the /wmg spiral by objectifying some particu. . . lar manner of myself living in spiral manner ; but I make the spiral
my life (which has nothing to do with the but all the more to do with force, with inhibitions and freedom, with resistance and resistance overcome, with tension and solution) by adding my life to the forces, inhibitions, resistances, etc., which appear to me to be present in the spiral and by making this addition of my life I put my life also into them. In other words, the act of Einfiihlung does not consist in giving this personal quality (Farbung) to the spiral and to the manner in which the spiral appears to rise, not to the spiraVsform, but to the forces through which that form comes to exist. But, of course, as this personal quality is added to this particular mechanical action, or is assimilated to it, so this personal quality becomes the quality of a mechanical fact of this particular description, namely, of the mechanical fact spiral. My own mode of existing is transformed in the spiral to whatever
to be alive, by adding
spiral as such,
extent
it is
attributed by
of existing
is
own mode
shape of
spiral.
.
my feelings (Eingef uhlt) to the spiral ; my transformed into a mode of existence in the But this appears first in the spiral, not first in
form of an animal's body,
me.
When
I lend a soul (Beseele) to the
to a cat or a dog, does this mean that I myself have existed as dog or And yet it remains certain that the creature can be thus as cat ?
endowed with
istics of
soul or
life.
life,
only because I attribute to

?
it
characterI attribute
my own
this
How does
come about
The
answer
is
obvious
life,
to the animal's body those peculiarities of
my own
the attribu-
tion of which
is
37
me
suggested by such experiences as have been made by in connection with the sight of that animal. I attribute them
combiname. By this means those peculiarities of my own life take the especial form and direction and the concrete contents, through which life (in general) becomes the specific life of a dog or a cat. This may be expressed, if one chooses, by saying : " I live myself in the form of the animal." It is in this sense that, with reference to the spiral, I also live my life in the mode of the spiral's shape (lebe ich auch Angesichts der Spirale in Form der Spirale mich aus).
tions to
(hinein tragen) in the degree, with the modifications, in the
which
this experience necessitates
Let us proceed a step further. We have shown clearly the similarity, but also the difference between the Einjiihlung into the spiral and the previously mentioned Einjiihlung into the gesture of anger.
The difference consists in this, that in the case of the spiral my own mode of activity which I transfer into it (einfiihle) is connected with
the mechanical forces, tendencies, activities to which the spiral is due, not owing to association of experience, but through association of resemblance, or more strictly, association of similarity of character. Wishing to give a further instance of such association by resemblance (of character), and, in so far a further instance of that kind of Einfiihlung in which the connexion is due to resemblance (of character) between me and the object, I will choose as illustration Rhythm. The regular sequence of accentuated and less accentuated syllables, or the rhythm of tones in music, necessitates, as did the spiral, a special movement of perception. This perceptive movement is of a particular kind : I am and I feel myself hurried along from element to element, from group to group. That which is hurrying me (pushing me ?) is the similarity of the elements and groups. Every psychic action has the tendency to continue itself in the same manner. This law is no other than that of similarity. At the same time every element and every definite group holds me fast. The accentuated syllables hold me tighter and longer than the unaccentuated ; those more strongly accentuated more than less strongly accentuated. It is in this alternation of pressing forwards and being held back, and in the consequent alternation of freer progression and rest, of tension and solution, conflict and overcoming, and in the regularity of this alternated psychical activity, in this that consists, first and foremost, and looked at psychologically, the phenomenon
of
Rhythm.
.
Rhythm
.
is,
therefore, primarily
a rhythm of the acts

less
of perceiving the accentuated and unaccentuated or

syllables.
,
accentuated
"
38
But
this
is
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
The law of association through similarity is not all. law of the extension of every characteristic kind of psychical excitement or movement, a law of irradiation owing to similarity a law of the co-resonance of similar or similarly tuned " chords of our inner nature, a law of the psychical resonance of the similar. Every category, or every specified rhythm of a psychical excitement or movement which takes place in any part of the soul (psyche), i.e. which is realised in any items of consciousness, has the tendency to spread itself further and over as wide an area as possible, a tendency to fill the whole " psyche," and hold it i.e. to sustain, reproduce, to cause to vibrate all that which has the same modality of psychical happening.
also a
.
.
Rhythm, taken as a whole, is a specific manner of sequence among separate psychical acts of the same kind. It can, therefore,
be simply transposed from one sequence of such acts to another, from a sequence of syllables or tones to a sequence of motor-images (Bewegungsvorstellungen). On the other hand, it is a natural essential of the universal character of a rhythm, of its particular easiness, freeness, heaviness, legato quality (Gebundenheit), etc., that psychical acts of whatever contents you choose (beliebigem In this manner we can Inhalt) can become vehicles of this rhythm. get a radiation over the whole psyche or over all kinds of contents thereof, a sympathetic vibration of all possible chords of our inner
for instance,
nature.
And
lesser
since such a co-vibration can happen, degree happen.
it
must in greater or
I use the
word rhythm
in its largest sense, namely, as a characteristic
mode
of psychical happening (Ablauf) in general.
The reproductive force of rhythm is not directed upon . . the particular contents of such former experiences, but upon the mode of psychical movement which is realised in them. The result is the reproduction of a general condition of my being corresponding with the rhythm, the perception (Vorstellung) of a unifying or embracing (umfassend) " general mood " (Gesammtstimmung) of freedom and necessity, of passionate pushing forwards or quiet moderation, or seriousness or cheerful play, etc. What I experience internally when I hear a rhythm is, therefore, double : first, the particular movement of the activity of perception forced upon me by the rhythm.
.
Inasmuch
as this
39
is forced upon me by this rhythm and with it, inasmuch as this movement is directly implied in the rhythm's perception, so this movement seems to belong to the rhythm or the rhythmical object, seems to be its movement and movement tendency. And secondly, it is / who am experiencing this
movement
directly connected
general condition (Gesammtstimmung) of my personality. . . . What connects them (the rhythm and the mood) is that they are both
one and the same movement. The mood is that in me occasioned movement itself, but not merely as movement limited to that point of consciousness (psyche) where it originated, but as movement of the total personality, whose nature is defined by everything which I have at any time experienced and can now be reawakened in me ; and therefore possessing the character of co-operation of the total ego.
. ; breadth, restfulness, depth, warmth and cold of colours these are none of them qualities of the perceived rhythm, tones and colours, that is to say, they are not qualities which we I do not hear seriousness find in these items of consciousness as such. or cheerfulness when I hear the sequence of accentuated and unaccentuated syllables ; I do not hear the thinness (Leerheit) and the fullness, the breadth and the quietness, when I hear a sound ; I do not But these see the depth, the warmth or cold, when I see the colour. words denote the sensible manner in which I am internally moved, when I perceive the sounds and the colours ; these words betoken the " affective character " of the process of perception.
Seriousness or cheerfulness of a
rhythm
weightiness, and their contraries in tones
Zeitschrift
fur Psych,
is
u. Phys., vol. 22, p.
416:
Esthetic pleasure
{Belebung, Beseelung).
dependent upon the attribution of Life, of soul Esthetic contemplation, out of which (esthetic
pleasure arises, always contains such Belebung or Beseelung.

is
But
it
impossible for me to see or hear life, living outside myself, or otherwise perceive it with my senses. I can find it only in myself
as a peculiarity of
my
personality.
In aesthetic contemplation I
therefore lend to the aesthetic object my own personality in a particular
manner, or at all events a mode of my personality's existence. The Object, to which I aesthetically lend life or soul, carries in itself a
reflection of
my
personality.
Raumaesthetik.
P. 61
:
Such geometric-optical delusions
arise universally
from the
representation of the Forces, Activities, Tendencies, which appear to
40
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
operate in the spatial images, or through whose operation these spatial images appear to have their existence, P. 62 : We have seen that the activity, through which a form, or any form-element appears to come into existence, cannot be thought of as without counter-tendency or counter-action. It is only through the working against one another, and the balance of activity and counter-activity that we obtain the resting (ruhende)
Form.
P. 63 : We must carefully discriminate between the Activity and the Tendency, both of which lead to a given spatial act, and this spatial act itself. It is not the act but the tendency, the striving, the impulse produces the necessity of an optical delusion. P. 79 : This fact ... is the fundamental fact of aesthetics. For space is an object of aesthetic perception, only inasmuch as it is a space which has been given life (belebter Raum), only inasmuch as it is the vehicle of an inner tension, of an exchange of activity and counter-activity. It is the mission of the arts of beautiful spatial form to increase this interchange of activities and to diversify it ; and to present to us in the forms a meaningful Rhythm of living, which rhythm of living is self-enclosed into a meaningful whole to show us in the forms a directly intelligible exchange of comparative constraint (Gebundenheit) and of freer action ; to show a regulated progress of single activities to conflicts and of conflicts to resolutions ; to show a beautiful Combat and Victory of material, and yet never merely material, forces. P. 84 : ... The particular power of resistance against the attempt to abolish or diminish its existence, which we attribute, in greater or lesser degree, to every object when compared with mere
empty
itself
space.
:
" unites " its extreme points or disposes extreme points ; at the same time the straight line " stretches " itself between its extreme points. P. 94 : If in a spatial element there happen to meet two or more independent activities which are neither foreign nor hostile in their direction and which, for this reason, can be united in one representation or the representation of one activity, then these two or more activities will reciprocally heighten each other. And with this will be heightened the optical result thereof. P. 115 I finally wish to remind the reader what an aesthetic importance the peculiarity of vertical extension has, and the contrast between vertical extension and horizontal extension in the ornamental spatial arts. Geometrically speaking, there is no qualitative difference between them. But in architecture, sculpture, and ceramic.
P. 84
The
straight line
its
between
41
the contrast between the two is the original factor of the existence of form. The works of these arts bound themselves horizontally and erect themselves vertically. . . . Out of the interchange of
is
these activities arises above active in these works.
all
the
life
quality (Lebendigkeit),
which
P. 118: No activity or tendency can be apparently increased without our being obliged to conceive the contrary activity or tendency as increased also. But as the latter increase is assumed by us virtually because we had assumed the first increase, the first becomes
the primary, the other the secondary. As a result a modification takes place, apart from this mutual increase in the direction of that primary increase (I suppose Lipps means we feel the primary more).
...
P. 259
When two
one
lines are
moving near each other
in diflFerent
directions, every
sees the
movement
of the second of these lines
in the light of a contrary
movement. If I see the principal parts of a building rising vertically, then every oblique line of the building,
wliich I see alongside of or between them, appears to
itself to this vertical
me
to oppose
movement. I seem to feel naturally in those vertical lines at the same time as in the whole building to which they belong, a traction of vertical movement. This traction is not followed by the oblique line, therefore this oblique line opposes the traction. If it did not, it would be dragged along and would no longer be the oblique line which it is. On the other hand, the perception of the oblique line awakens in (on the whole) in an oblique direction.
actually vertical
for
me
the idea of a traction In comparison with it the

;
movement seems to me less self-obvious it becomes my conception more and more of an accomplished fact (Leistung).
and therefore
realises in itself a
It withstands that traction in another direction.
tendency
At the moment
the vertical
to that of the oblique one, I
of passing from the perception of the vertical line am filled with the representation of
;
movement
I,
therefore, continue having
it
in the pre-
perception of this oblique line is influenced by the impression of the vertical line, it will seem to me that the oblique line ought really to run vertically also ; in a manner I expect that it should do so. And as usual, the perception
sence of the oblique line.
In so far
as
my
that
this
it does not, awakens the sense of something opposing itself to expected action. P. 279 Every unified spatial form possesses for our representation a tendency to the particiJar effect which seems to be realised at a
:
42
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
given point of its course ; it possesses this tendency as a whole and already before the point where the effect is actually produced. Hence
arises a particular optical delusion.
P. 337 We cannot possibly get it out of our mind that the widening or letting itself go into breadth must render vertical movement slower, and that the narrowing in horizontal sense must quicken the vertical movement.
:
Every unified line possesses at every point the tendency P. 341 to that mode of being a boundary (Begrenzen) or enclosing, which that line seems to realise in its further course ; and in a degree
:
commensurate to the directness with which it seems to continue from that point of its course to this point of it.*
P. 347
:
In architecture
we
see
everywhere unified masses, parti-
and receding. Everywhere do we meet the motif oi the upper and lower projections in the most universal meaning of this word. Through these the mass is transformed into a living rhythm of tension and resolution. The receding parts not merely go back but hold back, or affirm their spatial existence against the force of widening out or the tendency to coming forwards, which becomes visible in projections. They (the receding parts)
cularly in vertical direction, projecting
thereby embody a greater horizontal tension or achieve an increased inner cohesion. At the same time the energy of their vertical activity
increases.
On
in horizontal direction,
vertical
the other hand, the projections, in so far as they yield seem also vertical not to go out of themselves,
but to go back into themselves.
movement.
Finally
They become points of rest in the the vertical movement as a whole is
increased, etc. etc.
we
P. 396 : One word about the fluting of a column. In the flutings see the column drawing itself together towards its axis, then
coming forward out of itself, withdrawing again, etc. etc. There takes place on its surface a rhythmical interchange of tension and resolution. The corners (or edges) in which (in the Doric pillar) the flutings meet are points of solution or of diminished tension. The counteraction towards the enclosing action of the boundary of
the whole, or against the horizontal pushing out of the mass is directed by the corners inwards ; it is concentrated in the nucleus of the column
and held in check by the boundaries of the nucleus. By this means the whole outer boundary or boundary of the whole is unburdened. Its enclosing activity is an easier, securer one, and less threatened by the
I remember the late Mr. G. F. Watts showing mc that curves wide or narrow according as we imagined them to be segments of larger or smaller circles. V. L.
affected us as
DORIC COLUMN FROM PARTHENON From a photograph hy the late \V. J. Stillman
counteraction from within.
43
At the same
time, the vertical action
boundary of the whole which they determine, is less tense, has a more certain effect and is more reassuring. And inasmuch as the impression of the whole is necessarily determined directly by this " boundary of the whole," the whole column appears naturally with this character. This diminishes the over-estimation of the height which would have resulted from the rounded shaft. As a fact the height of a fluted cylinder is under-estimated in comparison with that of an unfluted
in the ribs or sharp edges of the fluting, or of the
one.
obvious that in the Doric column this unburdening (Entlastung) is motived by the tapering, in short by the constraint (Gedrungenheit). The total impression is that of a secure mode of being (Daseins) united with immense achievement, or else an impression of the quiet unhesitating execution of the achievement. If the fluting were absent in the swelling width of the column, there would be danger of the column appearing to make a cumbersome and fatiguing effort. One understands equally
It
is
of the whole
that, in the reverse case, that is to say when the impression of an important intended achievement is missing, that is to say in intrinsically lighter forms, the fluting gives the impression of the elegant, the
superficially tense, of
an ostentatiously displayed certainty, in short
of the really weak, but stiff {Kraftlos gespreizten). P. 5 : The shape of the column . . . does not merely exist,
but becomes, and that not once for all but over again at every moment. In other words, we are making {i.e. the shape of) the column into the subject of a mechanical (i.e. dynamical) interpretation. We do so not intentionally, or as a result of reflection ; on the contrary, the mechanical interpretation is given directly with the perception. Now the processes of such mechanical becoming do not occur merely in the world outside us. There is a category of mechanical becoming (or happening geschehen) which is in every sense namely, the of the word more closely connected with ourselves
becoming in us. . therefore consider the becoming outside of us according to the analogy of the becoming in us, that is to say, according to the analogy of our personal experience.
. .
We
A similar way of considering things can already be noticed whenever we speak of a "Force" residing in an object; more " clearly even whenever we realise a " tendency " or " striving (streben) in anything that happens, whenever we realise {i.e. outside of ourselves. ^V. L.) any " doing " or " being done to," any " activity " or " passiveness." All such giving life to our surrounding realities comes about, and can come about, only inasmuch as we
44
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

own feeling of force, our own own activity and passiveness.
. .
.
attribute to outer things our
feeling
Such an attribution brings outer things closer to us, makes them more intimate and in so far more seemingly intelligible. . We are reminded of processes which we can experience in ourselves, not of individual concrete instances of such processes, but of processes similar in character. There arises in us the image of similar proceedings of our own and with the image the particular feeling of ourselves (selbstgefiihl) which naturally accompanies such proceedings. The mechanical proceeding which seems to fulfil itself with " ease " suggests such " doing " of our own which fulfils itself with similar freedom and ease and the large expenditure of mechanical " Energy " {italics sic) suggests a similar expenditure of our own power of will. On this depends in the one case the happy consciousness of ease and freedom of our own activities, and in the other case, the equally happy consciousness of our own power. . . The column seems to gird itself up (sich zusammen zu fassen) and erect itself, that is to say, to proceed in the way in which I do when I gird myself up and erect myself, or remain thus tense and erect in
of striving or willing, our
.
. ;
.
opposition to the natural inertness of my body. It is impossible for me to be aware of the (shape of the) column without this activity seeming to exist in the shape I am thus aware of. All our pleasure in spatial form (/.<?. visible shapes. V. L.) . . .
is
therefore due to sympathy of a
happy kind
(ist
Freude uber
raumliclie
Formen
begliickendes sympathiegefiihl).
ÊSTHETIC
EMPATHY AND ITS ORGANIC ACCOMPANIMENTS
Translated by R. L. Shields from the original French of Vernon Lee in the Revue Philosofhique, vol. Ixiv (1907)
As already pointed out
in
the foregoing intro-
ductory essay, Professor Lipps laid the foundation of a new and real philosophy of beauty and art when he formulated his hypothesis of Empathy an hypothesis which may be com(Einfuhlung) pared to that of natural selection in its originality To apply the and its far-reaching importance. idea of Empathy will be the principal method whereby the aesthetician of the future may solve the to problems of morphology and artistic evolution analyse, verify, and refer the phenomenon of Empathy to more elementary phenomena of mind will be the main future task of psychology as applied
: :
Darwin (and not Lipps has given us the hypothesis of Einfuhlung ; let us examine what he has done with his discovery and what it behoves us to do with it.
to
aesthetic
activities.
A new
without
his Wallaces), Professor
II
To begin with, let me remind the readers of my other studies on Professor Lipps, and let me explain
45
46
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
to those who are unfamiliar with them, what is hidden beneath this very German and seemingly Einjiihlung, or, as Professor fantastic formula Titchener has translated it, Empathy. This word, made up oi Juhlen, to feel, and ein (herein, hinein), in, into, conjugated (sich einjiihlen) with the pronoun denoting the reflective mode this word Einjiihlung
:
has existed in
German
aesthetics ever since Vischer

it
and Lotze
and furthermore
least
has
existed
in
literary phraseology at
since Novalis
and the
Romanticists. We shall see later on at the price of what ambiguity and deviation from his own thought Professor Lipps has bought the dangerous advantage
of using an already existing expression for a
new
idea.
Sich einjiihlen,
in feeling (the
to
transport
oneself into
something
German reflective form has a sense of which to feel does not give, and which one cannot render except by the help of a verb such as
activity
einfUhlen into something, or into some one, has in ordinary German

into)
to transport, froject,
enter
sich
the meaning of putting oneself in the place of some one, of imagining, of experiencing, the feelings of some one or something : it is the beginning of sympathy, but in this primary stage the attention is directed entirely to the feeling which one attributes to the other, and not at all to the imitation of that recognised or supposed feeling which is the act of sympathising (German mitfiihlen). It is in this sense that, even before Vischer, Fechner, and Lotze, people spoke of einfUhlen oneself into the life and movement of a plant or animal.
But
*
tree
branch of a swayed in the sunshine (the example, now The lectures, afterwards collected as Vischer's Das Scheme und
in feeling oneself into the place of a
were given before 1870.
die Kunst,
.ESTHETIC EMPATHY
47
famous, is given by Lotze in the Microcosmos) it was evident that the feelings in which one was supposed to share were feelings which the branch of the tree did not experience they were the feelings which we should, have had, not in becoming a branch, but in transporting into the branch our own human nature. The recognition of this is the beginning of Professor Lipps's theory of Einjilhlung, or rather, it is the meeting-point of his use of the verb Einfiihlen and that verb's ordinary meaning. When we fut ourselves in the 'place of some one or something, what we call the place is the feelings characteristic of that place or situation, feelings of which we have had direct experience in our own past, and which we now attribute for one reason or another (by no means always the same sort of reason) to a creature other than ourselves. It is no concern of the present inquiry whether this other be, more or less literally, similar to ourselves ; whether the perception of a resemblance is what suggests this attribution, and whether, in short, this attribution of direct data of our experience coincides with the reality of facts or whether, on the contrary, the person or thing to which we have attributed our own conditions be more or less dissimilar to us and incapable of feeling what we would feel in its place. What must be grasped by the student of Esthetic Empathy is that there exists, for one reason or another, an act of attribution of our energies, activities, or feelings to the non-ego, an act necessarily preceding all sympathy, and that this projection of our inner experience necessitates the revival of subjective states in what we call our memory. It is necessary to insist on this elementary psychological fact, because it explains the essential nature of all sympathetic movement :
;
48
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
and, what concerns us for the moment, the nature of everything which the German language, before or with Professor Lipps, means by the word Einfuhlung, It is because the states attributed by us to the perceived person or thing, the states which we beheve we recognise in it, are our own states, that
in us
reviviscence of these past states will be accompanied by satisfaction or dissatisfaction, intense in
proportion to the greater or less vivacity of this and to the presence or absence of other states capable of corroborating or inhibiting it. Our pleasure or displeasure in the subjective state which we recognise or imagine, is due to this subjective state having been ours, and becoming ours again when we thus attribute it. In other words, every subjective phenomenon, emotion, feeling, state of well-being or the reverse, etc., can only be known directly and in so far as given by our inner experience ; consequently, what we take for the perception of its existence outside us is only the consciousness of its strong or weak reviviscence in ourselves. Empathy, or Let me repeat and re-repeat it Einfuhlung, that is to say, the attribution of our modes to a non-ego, is accompanied by satisfaction or
reviviscence
:
Now,
because it takes place in ourselves. there is a category of this attribution of our modes to a non-ego which is distinguished by the fact that this non-ego is not capable of the modes thus attributed to it. I refer to the attribution of movements, of motor conditions and even of
dissatisfaction
intention and volition and effort, in a word, of character, sensitiveness, and movement to inanimate and motionless shapes. Let me give an example which is also a quotation from Professor Lipps's
earlier book.
AESTHETIC EMPATHY
49
" The Doric abacus widens itself out in comparison with the column, and seems, consequently, to yield to the pressure of the entablature and to spread out as it gives way. But while thus yielding
it
pulls itself together vigorously (Jasst sich zugleich
krajtvoll
zusammeri)
and
asserts
itself
(behawptet
the superimposed weight. Thus it becomes the intermediary capable of resisting the vertical thrust of the column and the weight of the roof concentrated in the architrave." But, the reader may object, all that is simply the description of the play of mechanical forces taking place in the Doric order. Yes, of course this play of forces is well known to us, and especially in the But where does this case of the Doric building. play of forces really take place ? Is it in the stone The stone has of which the edifice is built ?
sich) against this action of
qualities of weight and cohesion, and these qualities have limitations the weight of the superimposed part might, in certain positions, exceed the cohesion of the lower part ; then this lower will crack, and the building may even fall in. But the stone can
:
neither spread out, nor pull itself together vigorously, nor resist an activity. Stone knows neither thrust nor resistance. In using these expressions we are yielding to the habit of applying the modes of our own existence in explanation of the outer world. Let us note, in passing, this tendency of our mind,
for it serves as a clue to the often obscure
windings
question of Einfiihlung. But, to return, when we apply to certain buildings, or to their details, terms such as rising up, thrusting out, extending, expanding, contracting, etc., we are not referring to the material part of them, stone, brick, or wood ;
of this
we
are referring to their Jorm.
We
will take
some
50
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
of this from Professor Lipps's first book {Raumeesthetik). " The whole column, after having widened out at the base to adapt itself to the ground, draws itself together in its shaft and raises itself vertically with a concentration of energy, a rapidity and security corresponding to this concentration." We understand perfectly the meaning of these words, and in so far as we have a visual memory and familiarity with architecture, they give us an inner vision of the forms in question. All this is part of our daily habits, and there is nothing new in it. But let us ask ourselves in what sense an architectural form, that is to say a given assemblage of lines and planes, can accomplish actions which we have recognised as impossible to stone, brick, and, in a word, to the material in which this form is presented to us ?
It
is
more examples
obvious that visible form,

is,
made
of stone, or
incapable of action, unless we give a literal and incorrect meaning to the expression " to act on our perceptions." Form exists ; it does not act ; it is, on the contrary, our faculties which act in furnishing the relations and directions which make up this form. Thus the more we analyse the more we recognise the presence of activity on our part, and the absence of activity on the part of the form.* There is another point to consider : all this activity manifests itself in time, and breaks up into successive phases ; in speaking of the column, that is to say of the form oj the column, in terms of
in
itself,
merely drawn on paper,
Compare also Raumeesthetik, p. 22 " The column erects itself not made erect. The erecting is the column's own deed, it is the realisation of its own active force, it is the column's free and
*
:
it is
willing act."
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
activity^
51
we have also spoken of it in terms of time ; we have even come to attribute to this column, to
this motionless shape, all of whose parts co-exist without change, modes of movement, of rapidity and security in an action which it is reputed to accomplish and this action we have subdivided
;
into successive
moments
the meaning of this succession of untruths universally accepted even in our most exact phraseology ? Simply our incapacity to think otherwise than in terms of our own experience, the incapacity to explain to ourselves the non-ego except by the inner data of our consciousness succession, moveis
:
What
ment, activity and their different modalities. The temporal existence, attributed to this form really existing only in space, is our existence in time ; the
succession of
moments
attributed to the co-existing
form is the succession of our impressions ; movement, rapidity, and security do not belong to the form, but to our taking -possession of this form and the activity we speak of is ours. " The serious or gay character of a rhythm," says Lipps
qualities of this
;
" the fullness, gravity, restful character of musical sounds the depth, warmth or coolness of a colour-scheme ^these are qualities which do not belong at all to rhythm, sounds or seen colours ; in other words, these are quaHties which do not exist in these items of perception, taken in themselves. I do not hear the serious or gay character when I listen to a succession of accentuated or unaccentuated syllables nor do I hear poverty, abundance, or rest in listening to a sound ; I do not see depth, warmth, or coolness in seeing colour. These words express the manner in which my inner sensibility is moved at the moment
(see above, p.
39),
:
52
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

:
of perceiving sounds and colours these words designate the a-ffective character [of the perceptive
process]."
is
Moreover, with a merely perceptive process there usually associated an explanatory process com:
plete apperception of a thing includes certain acts of comparison not only among the elementary sensathis thing, but also certain acts our present impressions to past impressions ; to take cognisance of an existence or quality means to join it with other existences and other qualities it is an integration of the new
tions
produced by
of
of reference
sensation into a previous synthesis.
perception of a form, then, comprises, a nucleus of simple sensations, the consciousness of the psychic process, of the mode more or less easy, more or less continuous, regular and energetic of this psychic process ; and consequently, as Lipps observes, the consciousness of the affective character of such a mode. But the perception of a form includes, in addition, the reference of our psychic process to other processes we integrate the synthesis of our actual activities into an already known and analogous synthesis ; and our consciousness of making an effort, of bending, or of drawing up, of yielding or resisting weight, of balancing ourselves, of extending ourselves in height, or depth, or breadth is complicated by the previous experience of similar states, and is enriched by accompaniments
The
around
" Der Impuls ist ein * Compare also Raumeesthetik, p. 42 bestimmt gerichtet raiimlicher Impuls. Es ist unmoglich, einen solchen Impuls vorzustellen ohne dass wir ihm in unserer Vorstellung, sei es nur andeutungsweise, folgen, Wir folgen ihm
:
. . .
in unserer Vorstellung,
dies
heisst
aber nichts anderes

ist,
als
wir
lassen in unserer Vorstelling das,
worauf er gerichtet
entstehen.
.ESTHETIC EMPATHY
particular to this experience.
53
So,
rapid and easy and continuous perception of their relations are complicated by modes of activity of which we have had consciousness on the occasion of an analogous encounter between our body and foreign bodies.
meet, the modes of activity of consciousness in the more or less
when two lines which we have
Thus we
explain the relations in space of these lines movement in time ; we attribute to these lines not only balance, direction, velocity, pace,
in terms of
rhythm, energy, but also thrust, feeling, intention, and character.
resistance, strain,
In
word, in
perceiving forms made up of lines and planes, that is to say, in directing our attention successively to their difEerent parts, in measuring, comparing, and referring one to the other, and in referring them in their details and totality to our previous experiences, we go through an incident or a drama, and this incident or drama not being localisable in ourselves, through lack of " local signs " * attached to these states, is projected by us into the form on which, for the moment, such a large number of our energies are concentrated. But since all this incident, all this drama, takes place in ourselves, since it consists in the reviviscence of activities and experiences stored up within us, it cannot be indifferent to us, it must be subject to the pleasure-displeasure alternative which accompanies the consciousness of our activities. That is
* Cf. The Central Problem of Êsthetics and Appendix. For Local Signs, see W. James's Psychology,
Miinsterberg in
ii,
155,
167
cf.
Wundt, Grundrissder
Psychologie, 3rd edition, pp. 125, 130 ; Komflex Lokalzeichen, pp. 156, 161 ; KomflexeL. der Tiefe, p. 165 ; also Kiilpe, Outlines, Titchener's translation, pp. 26, 344, 365, 417.
54
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
a form to which we direct our attention will arouse in us a more or less distinct state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. This state will produce a tendency, perhaps even an act, to prolong or shorten it according to its agreeableness or disagreeableness ; and this tendency, this act, will recall our attention to ourselves. To the objective and passive formula " this form is beautiful " will be added the subjec-
why
like (that is to say, / try keep in relation with) this form." Such is, it seems to me, the analysis, the description of the process which Professor Lipps has pointed out as at the base of all preference or aversion with regard to visible shapes. And it is to this process Professor Lipps has applied the term, already
tive
to
and active formula " /
existing in his language, Einfiihlung.
Ill
expression " ^lEsthetic Einfiihlung " has the advantage of connecting a complex and little studied psychological phenomenon with certain facts of daily observation. But this advantage is counterbalanced by connecting with this new scientific idea the other meanings of an expression which had already been used in different circumstances. Thanks to its name, Einfiihlung became more acceptThe verb able, but it did not remain the same. ^^ sich einfiihlen,''^ literally to feel oneself into something or some one, implies, by its reflective form, the idea of an ego which enters into the non-ego : and Professor Lipps seems to have yielded to this implication.
The
Admitted in an entirely conventional manner in his first book on the JBsthetics of Spatial Form, this connotation latent in the word Einfiihlung has grown
.ESTHETIC EMPATHY
55
with the development of the hypothesis in his book on General Esthetics, the second volume of which occupies our attention at this moment. The grammatical I implied in the form of the verb has become little by little a metaphysical ego possessing essential qualities and unity. Professor Lipps has
fluently of the projection of our ego into the object or form seen ichjuhle mich ein, he repeats constantly ; and this ich, this ego becoming
:
come to speak
more and more

and
personal, finally ends
in the conditions
which
of
it it
feeling the recoil of
by participating has created in the non-ego as a child may try to imi-
tate the
movements
its
own shadow.
unjust in attributing to Professor Lipps a little metaphysical mythology ? Most times, certainly, especially when he limits himself to the problems of elementary shapes of which he has made so masterly a study, Professor Lipps conceives and explains Empathy as a psychological phenomenon of reviviscence and of projection of our past states. But as happens in all mythology, the mythological moments, if I may so call them, are intermittent : one believes and one does not believe ; with the result of having an uncertain, confused impression in which hovers many a troublesome perhaps. " All that we perceive in the inanimate world (in der unbeseelten fVelt)" says Professor Lipps
I
Am
But this (p. 339), "is merely being and becoming. being and becoming we perceive and conceive {nehmen zair zvahr undfassen es auf), that is to say, that we make it ours by an intellectual process. But," Professor Lipps continues, "while doing this we fill up the perceived phenomena with our own activity, with our life, our strength, in a word, with
ourselves.^^
S6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

Of course
This quotation is an instance of the gradual encroachment on obvious facts of an assertion which
requires rigorous examination.
in taking
note of a 'phenomenon we apply to it the data of our own experience ; in the cases foreseen by Professor
we attribute to this phenomenon certain modes borrowed from our activities activities which are known to us because they are ours. But between attributing certain modes of our activity, attributing certain activities which belong to us, and attributing our activity, there is a difference which
Lipps,
:
not always taken into account. Thus, having transformed the attribution of activities which we know, insomuch as they are ours, into a projection of our activity, Professor Lipps, continuing to take the part for the whole, transforms our activity into our life, our strength, to end the crescendo by a final
is
metamorphosis our life, our strength, become " ourselves " (uns selbsi). Will the reader object that these are merely figures of speech, and that we must not fall foul of words ? But with abstract thinkers, with definers and systematisers such as
:
Professor Lipps, verbal expression
is itself
subjected
to analysis and used to furnish generalisations. To speak of attributing to phenomena certain activities, or rather certain modes of activity, is to limit oneself we are to the data of psychological observation aware of having modes of activity and of interpreting
:
But external phenomena in terms of these modes. to speak of projecting ourselves into external phenomena is, first of all, to postulate the entity, the unity of an ego ; it is moreover to formulate a psychological fact (the projection of ourselves) which does not agree with the data of introspection. One has a right to
ask,
to begin with, in what
way the
ego,
granting
its
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
literal existence,
57
could divest itself of the subjective, inner character which belongs to it, and clothe itself in the objective, external character of the non-ego into which it is supposed to have entered ? And putting aside this difficulty (of a rather theological aspect), is it possible to assert that inner experience gives us examples of such a transference It is indeed true that of the ego into the non-ego ? the feeling of self has been connected with the sense of effort by a school of psychologists ; and common parlance suggests that the feeling of self disappears This much is in moments of great " absorption." certain, that whenever the attention is concentrated on an object outside ourselves, this attention is proportionately little concerned with what is taking But that such an absorption in the place within us. non-ego, such a loss of the feeling of self and self's functions is inevitable in the phenomenon of Einfilhlungy is an assertion exceeding psychological experience and, even, occasionally clashing with the data of such experience. To explain the pleasure or displeasure accompanying perception of a given form by the entrance of our ego into this form is a metaphorical method tempting to minds more literary than philosophic, but which Professor Lipps should not encourage by using expressions as misleading as they are picturesque. Neither do I imagine that Professor Lipps could fall into such a metaphorical trap. But the ego of Einfuhlung leads directly to this pitfall, and makes it more difficult to follow the real process which is hidden under this phraseology. The process in question is that which we have described in our first pages, namely, the process of interpreting visible shapes in terms of our own activities, just as we interpret all external data
58
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
which implies or less distinct reviviscence of previous motor conditions and, therefore, the pleasure-displeasure
a
in terms of our experience, a process
more
alternative attached to these conditions.
Does Professor Lipps make this process the explanation of aesthetic satisfaction and dissatisfaction ? Doubtless, since it is Professor Lipps who first pointed out the phenomenon of Einftihlung, and since the process in question is hidden in the phenomenon of Einfiihlung. I emphasise the words is hidden there; for in using these words I am showing both my acceptance of Professor Lipps's ideas and my divergence from them. For while the simple process of attributing certain of our activities, and of interpreting by certain facts of our experience, sometimes stands out clearly in Professor Lipps's thought and words, at other times it is hidden or masked. It is perfectly plain and distinct when he speaks of " the throb of life felt in penetrating by contemplation into a work of art, the throb which, for this very reason seems to belong to the work of art and to be the throb of its own inner life " and again when he identifies the pleasure of Einfiihlung with the pleasure " of the inner expansion and contraction which I accomplish {an der ganzen inneren Bewegung, die ich vollziehe), when I follow the (architectural) forms." But if the psychological process stands out clearly in these words, is it not singularly obscured in the following sentence ? " The ego which remains in this aesthetic contemplation, is a super-individual ego^ in the same sense that the scientific and ethical egos are super-individual. The ego lives in the thing contemplated (es lebt in der hetrachteten Sache.)." Would it not be more in keeping with facts to say
:
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
59
that the contemplated object lives in the mind which contemplates it ? And does it not seem that one catches a glimpse in Professor Lipps's thought of the vague entity of a homogeneous ego, separate and almost material, leaving the realm of reality (imagined in some way as dimensional space) to take
up
abode in " the work of art," to participate in its life and to detach itself from its own, after the fashion of the Lenten retreat of a Catholic escaping from the world and purifying himself in the life of a convent ? This metaphor might be applied, but it would make us forget that the ego is not an entity apart, not a personage able to go in and out of a given place, but is a group of subjective phenomena, or
its
rather a special kind of feeling intermittently present in consciousness. Moreover this metaphor would make us forget also that " work of art " is the name given sometimes to an object existing outside
and sometimes to the image of it which and to the inner condition accompanying the perception of this object. Now it is only in this last sense that the work of art possesses a life in which we can share and all the real truth in the Einfiihlung hypothesis is connected with the subjective existence of the work of art, that is to say, with the idea of it which we make for ourselves an idea made up in part of our experiences of life and activity ; I would venture to
ourselves,
we make
for ourselves,
specify
even further,
experience of movements of our
made up in part own body.
of
the
^
It
is
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

IV
this last possibility
refuses to entertain,
which Lipps absolutely and to which he seems conclosing every

it is
avenue. One the dislike of admitting the participation of the body in the phenomenon of aesthetic Empathy which has impelled Lipps to make aesthetics more and more abstract, a -priori^ and metaphysical. This concern for safeguarding the spiritual purity of Einjiihlung by the interposition of an ego equivalent to an immaterial entity seems not to have existed at the time when he wrote his first and best aesthetical book, his admirable Raumcesthetik. Beginning with the very well-known but insufficiently studied phenomena incorrectly called
stantly concerned in
might almost believe that
*'
optical illusions,"
phenomena
consisting in falsi-
the real proportions of geometric shapes through the application of judgments derived from our other experience, Lipps devoted himself to studying with genial sagacity the ideas (to which current language bears testimony) of activity, of temporal existence, of motion, accompanying in our consciousness the sight of lines and planes which (in the phraseology itself testifying to the existence of these phenomena) meet and unite in order to make up what we cA\ forms. From this study has come, if not the theory, at least the empirical and the logical demonstration of the process to which Professor Lipps has given the convenient but misleading name of Einfuhlung.
fying
"Every
unified spatial form," he writes in his first
book on
Êsthetics (Raumeesthetiky p. 279), " has in our representation of it a tendency towards the special effect which seems to take place
at
some point of
its
existence.
The form
has this tendency in
its
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
totality
6i
the point where this effect takes kind," Why ? Because {Raumcesthetik, p. 304) " we see, so to speak, what we expect to see, because we have this expectation, and because the reality does not thwart it." Similarly (Raumcesthetik, p. 337), " it is impossible for us not to think that widening out necessarily implies a slackening of the vertical movement, and that, vice versa, horizontal contraction does not imply an acceleration of the vertical movement." In the same way {Raunuesthetik, p. 260), " When one stone resting on another does not fall . . this fact awakens in us the representation of a counter-tendency which we attribute to the stone's prop. Or, more correctly, when we analyse what really takes place, the countertendency is only the denial of our expectation of seeing this stone
and before,
result
as well as after,
place.
The
is
an optical
illusion of a particular
fall."
Let US
ask again
why
cesthetik (p. 35) gives us
it should be so ? the following reply
Raum:
" Daily life shows that we are guided, in practice as well as in mere judgment, by experiences of a mechanical order, without our having
a conscious
memory
.
of the content of these experiences.*
It
is
therefore certain that past mechanical experiences act unconsciously

in us.
When past experiences belonging to the same category become sufficiently numerous they crystallise in us so as to form a Law. And once crystallised into a Law these past experience? no
. .
longer act separately in us, but only united in this law, realising
the elements they possess in

sarily conscious of this
common.
And
just as
we
are not con-
scious of past experience taken separately, so neither are
we
necesis to
Law.
Although
if it
.
this
law has no
:
.
intrinsic
and
isolated existence,
it
acts in us as
really existed
.
that
not only cases similar to those of which we have had experience in our past, but also new and varied cases ; provided always that these new cases ." fall under the same law. .
say, that
we submit
individual cases
to it.
And
The last part of this chain of explanation is perhaps expressed in rather too general terms, but
* Raumcesthetik, p. 35 Everyday life shows that in our judgments and practice we can be guided by mechanical experiences, without the data [Inhalt] of these experiences now existing consciously in memory. Past mechanical experience therefore
:
undeniably produces unconscious workings in us.
62
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the reader will notice that in all the passages we have just quoted, Professor Lipps is dealing in psychology based on observation and not in metaphysics containing a 'priori statements. In these quotations there is no mention of an ego entering into the thing contemplated and letting itself be moved by the activities emanating from itself. Empathy (for Professor Lipps already uses the word Einfiihlung Êmpathy depends upon the in his earlier book) condensation of past mechanical experiences acting
is to say (in empirical wording), upon the residue of motor conditions which have been deprived by repetition of all marks of origin and environment ; briefly, the activities which we attribute to perceived shapes are activities which have become, so to speak, abstract, and recur without the revival of details, in the same way as another kind of conditions, namely, those dealt with by M. Ribot's hypothesis of Emotional Memory. " When reality does not thwart it, our expectation is verified because we have it," says Lipps, a saying which could be paraphrased more technically an active or emotional condition arises in us when its suggestion is not inhibited by other active or emotional conditions of a contradictory
:
in the present as a real law, that
nature.
In the theory of Einfiihlung thus formulated in Professor Lipps's first book there was nothing which could not be accepted by empirical psychology,
nothing to which
pages
of
I
did not subscribe in
my
account
of his Raumcesthetik, nothing of
which the masterly
Hugo
New
an eminent experimental psychologist, Miinsterberg (Principles of Art Education, York, 1905), are not an amplification in more
technical terms.
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
65
Unfortunately, it would seem that, at this point. Professor Lipps's thought was checked along these lines, deflected in the direction of old-established aesthetics, metaphysical, abstract, and even a frioristic.
Professor Lipps
against certain opinions

his
would seem to have stumbled which were converging with
own, by which he was offended. One of the most distinguished recent German aestheticians, Karl Groos (Spiele der Menschen and jEsthetik), starting from the examination of the so-called " playviews upon introspection, at the very moment of the appearance of Professor Lipps's first book (of which he borrowed a page), an explanation of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure based on a phenomenon which he called " Inner Imitation " {Innere Nachahmung). This Inner Imitation, which Professor Groos, a writer of an observant rather than a systematic mind, made no attempt to define exactly, almost corresponded to Professor Lipps's EinjUhlung. But it differed in so far that the Inner Imitation, a phenomenon known to Professor Groos through personal introspection, contained a very unmistakable trace not only of motor images, but of muscular sensations, similar to those which Fechner had discovered in himself while watching a fencing match, or a game of billiards, and to those in which Strieker, though refuted in this by M. Gilbert Ballet, imagined auditive memory to consist. The existence in Inner Imitation (such at least as it was first formulated by Professor Groos), of this element of muscular sensations, connected Groos's hypothesis with the " Lange-James " theory of the part played by organic sensations in emotional states ; and at the same time allowed the explanainstinct,"
basing
his
happened to formulate
64
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
tion of a part at least of aesthetic pleasure by organic conditions favourable to life. The alliance with such ideas, repugnant to the wholly intellectual, if not
wholly spiritualistic, aesthetics of Professor Lipps, seems to have made him recoil. There may also have been something further ; and here I am compelled to speak of myself and of my essay (in collaboration with C. Anstruther-Thomson) which was published in 1897, under the title of Beauty and Ugliness* This essay, in which I had given a
psychological setting to documents furnished by a fellow-worker of extraordinary aesthetic experience and of even more highly developed gift of introspection, contained (quite independently of all influence from Professor Lipps, whose ideas we did not yet know), the discovery made contemporaneously by him, by Professor Groos, and by us, of human activities, nay a tendency to attribute movements, to visible shapes ; moreover our essay also used this fact as the principal explanation of the pleasure and displeasure accompanying aesthetic
contemplation of such visible shapes. So far one might have expected that the agreement of our ideas with those of Professor Lipps, who dealt with our essay in x\i& Archiv fiir systematische Philosophie (VL Band, Heft 3, Berlin, 1900, p. 385), would have corroborated the ideas formulated in his RaumBut, just as in the case of Professor Groos, cesthetik. this resemblance of our ideas with those of Professor Lipps was vitiated in his eyes by the addition of notions which he reprobated. As yet but novice in psychology, I had subscribed with a novice's enthusiasm to the so-called Lange* Contemporary Review, of this volume.
October-November 1897.
See p. 153
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
65
James hypothesis ; and what was worse, generalising on the introspective observations furnished by my collaborator, I had deduced the quite unwarranted conclusion that certain organic phenomena and submotor conditions were the localisable conscious accompaniment of the perception of visible form ; in fact, that aesthetic pleasure and displeasure were due to organic reverberations produced by such subconscious changes in the muscular, circulatory, and respiratory apparatus, changes which the self-observation of my collaborator had demonstrated in herself as an accompani-
ment of very intense visual perception. Of the theoretic part of this essay (the observations, which were due to my collaborator, ought to have been verified by experimentation and the method of
Lipps picked out with was confused, fantastic, Although illogical, presumptuous, and untenable. unjust in certain details, this criticism by Professor Lipps was of the greatest use in my subsequent work on aesthetics. It would have been even more so if,
Questionnaires)
Professor
pitiless
clearness all that
before reading
which
the study of his Raumcesthetik, in recognised the clue to the whole subject, had not already sifted out all the ideas I had previously held. Without Professor Lipps suspecting it, I was already his enthusiastic disciple, and the rebukes he administered in the Archiv Jiir systematische Philosophie were only the more felt and the more efficacious. But while this criticism of my work was thus fruitful for its victim, it would seem to have had a less suggestive effect on the mind In Professor Lipps's second book I of its writer. chapter, Kritischer Exkurs, allusions to the find in a essay Beauty and Ugliness, nay the quotation of an
it,
I instantly
66
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
English expression I had used there, justifying the suspicion that this essay may have been the stumbHngblock which deflected towards abstract, and almost spiritualistic sesthetics, the mind of Professor Lipps already disagreeably impressed by the resemblance between his Einfiihlung and Professor Karl Groos's Innere Nachahmung. Is this piece of literary biography mere fantasticality due to my inordinate self-importance ? Possibly, but it may, nevertheless, serve as a diagram of the evolution of Professor Lipps's thought. This evolution appears to have been as follows : Analysing case by case those " optical illusions " which prove our habit of projecting our mechanical experiences into linear shapes, and comparing these elementary cases of Einfiihlung with the far more complex phenomena
of attribution of
human
activities
and human motor
conditions to architecture, in fact dealing with observation. Professor Lipps laid the foundations on which psychological aesthetics of the future must be built. But hostility to all interference of psychophysiology in psychological questions, impatience with isolated facts and a passion for formula have made Professor Lipps attempt to construct deductively a complete system of aesthetics, with every detail deducible from a preceding detail, the whole being logically derived from a single premise the existence of JBsthetic Einfiihlung*
:
* Cf. Archiv fur system. Phil.,
Neue
Folge, VI. Band, Heft 3,
Berlin, 1900, pp. 385-390; at the latter page begins a review of Karl Groos's Spiele der Menschen with the words : " Diese Verwandschaft
lasst
es
erscheinen, dass in
K. G.'s
Spiele der
Menschen den
Auslassungen von Vernon Lee und Anstruther-Thomson wert beigelegt wird." In the review of Beauty and Ugliness we read, together with some
iESTHETIC EMPATHY
6^
I have insisted thus lengthily on the distinction between Empathy considered as an elementary postulate, and Empathy as a Sufficient Reason in aesthetical theorising, because it is important for the
utilisation of Professor Lipps's discoveries that the reader of his three badly arranged and redundant volumes should be given a clue consisting in a clear distinction between these two aspects of Professor
extremely deserved censure of certain confused ideas
guilty of, these sentences
we had been
" Der Kultus der Korperempfindungen ist zur Manie geworden." " Es ist Verzeihlich, wenn ein geistreicher Kopf wie James auch aber das endlose einmal barocke Einfalle behaglich ausspinnt Weiterspinnen derselben soUte man nuhn lassen." In Die asthetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst (Leipzig, 1906), a section of the Kritischer Exkurs deals (p. 417) with " iEsthe:
tischen Eindruck
und
a reference to a passage of Beauty
korperliche Tatigkeiten," and contains (p. 439) and Ugliness concerning Light-
heartedness as a result of certain bodily
accompaniments of
aesthetic
perceptions.
The Exkurs
ends with the admonition that unless one
can answer his criticisms " Schweige man endlich von diesen angeblichen Faktoren des aesthetischen Genusses, es sei denn, um sie dem gebiihrenden spott
auszusetzen."
Now
" Es
it
happens that one of Professor Lipps's unanswerable

is
the following : unmoglich (underlined) dass ich von diesen Veranderungen in meinem Korper, den Muskelspannungen, etwa weiss, so lange ich eine Saule betrachte und in den Genuss ihrer Schonbeit verobjections
ist
sunken bin."
dispute turns upon the meaning of Versunken. Of course, Versunken means by definition that one can absolutely perceive nothing except the column and one's pleasure, then evidently one perceives no organic sensations or anything else. But if by Versunken we mean no such mono-ideistic condition, there is no reason why a person with habits of such observation should not remark a sensation which seems relevant to the column experience, just as much as he may remark a sensation (say a tight boot) which is irrelevant to the column experience. I fear that this notion of being so Versunken in contemplation of columns merely shows how little even great aestheticians have observed their normal degree of aesthetic attention.
The
if
68
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Lipps's theories. There is, so to speak, one Professor Lipps who has opened and who continues to open up (in those chapters of the newer volume which resemble the Raumcesthetik) a. vast and fruitful field for aesthetic research ; or, to put it better, a Professor Lipps giving, as Darwin did to biology, a new direction to all thought, and all observation, concerned with Beauty and Art. But there is also a Professor Lipps who is trying to confine in a neat system, and in abstract formulae, a subject which is
complex, connected with others, and moreover exceedingly obscure. There is a Professor Lipps who, after fixing the boundaries of the subject, having defined its terms, prescribed the method and built up the system, proposes to limit all future aesthetic study to amplification and exemplification, in a word, to a commentary on a (quasi-theological) system whose first sentence reads "In the beginning was Einfilhlung " a Professor Lipps who treats as
heretics
and perverts those seeking truth by other methods and from other premises ; and above all, a Professor Lipps who, at the slightest allusion to
psycho-physiological parallelism, or at the faintest attempt at connecting the phenomena of Beauty with organic states and feelings, silences us with : " All that has nothing to do with aesthetics." Now, such pretensions must be rebelled against. Let us study and every psychological study of Beauty might profitably begin with this study let us study Professor Lipps's hypotheses, analyses, and
definitions ; and the more we do so with respectful independence, the more we shall find them a mine But we ought to study Professor of valuable ideas. Lipps in order to continue and to correct his work. I even venture to say that it will be only through a
iESTHETlC EMPATHY
and
69
long work of criticism, a work in which all methods all individualities may unite, that the wealth of Professor Lipps's thought can be adequately utilised and even properly appreciated.
On
the one hand,
we ought
to take the hypothesis

it
of Einfilhlung (after having stripped
of
all
that
is
not purely psychological, and perhaps of its misleading name) and apply it to all branches of art, to all categories of shape, following in this the masterly example of Professor Lipps in his analyses of the elementary forms of architecture and pottery, reducing these forms to a certain number of schemes We shall thus get of interplay of aesthetic forces. on the one hand the analytical classification of these elementary schemes of visible shape, whose number Professor Lipps has calculated as about 1620. On the other hand we shall have the statistical enumeration of these different elementary aesthetic schemes as appHed in the art of all ages and all times. Such artistic morphology will clear the way for a study of the evolution of form, a study destined to constitute the real history of art. The phenomenon of Einfiihlung will thus explain, on the subjective side, our morphological preferences and aversions in the realm of visual form ; or, considering the matter objectively, it will explain the predominance and recurrence of certain elementary schemes of form, and the tendency to elimination of the schemes
which are aesthetically opposed to these. But when this is done, half of the problems
aesthetics
of
remain. Einfiihlung does not explain everything in the artistic phenomenon the
will
still
:
70
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
form to what it represents or suggests there constitute a whole group of psychological problems where judgment and recognition play the chief part. An end must be made to the confusion (existing sometimes even in Professor Lipps), not only between the form of the object represented, that is to say the anatomical, material, real structure, and the cestheticform representing, that is to say recalling, the aspect of this represented object. shall have to guard against confusions such as that of classifying (as Professor Lipps does) among plastic problems the logical question of whether a bronze crown should be put on a marble head, and (what is worse still) the legitimacy of placing one figure on the pedestal supporting another. In all this vast, obscure field of the relations of cesthetic form with the idea of the object which it represents, the hyporelations of
We
thesis of
This
of
is
Empathy cannot serve as a clue. not all if we consider aesthetics

:
as a part
Lipps rightly does (calling his book The Psychology of Beauty and Art), we have the right, nay the duty, to consider the phenomenon of Empathy no longer as an explaining cause, but also as itself an effect requiring to be explained. It will not do to repeat that Einfilhlung is accompanied by pleasure or displeasure, according as the " activities " stirred up are agreeable or not.
psychology,
as
Professor
We
must ask (many scientific men have asked in a far from flattering to art and beauty !) what can be the use, and consequently the reason, for the development rather than the elimination of this
way
play of imagination in vacuo ? In other words, we must ask what advantage accrues to the individual and the race from this strange phenomenon of
Empathy, and why
aesthetic
sensitiveness, leading
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
71
apparently to no practical advantage, should be biologically encouraged by the implication therein of intense, massive and durable pleasure ? What has Esthetic Empathy been able to contribute to the survival of the individuals and of the races gifted with this aesthetico-dynamic delusion ? And this brings us back, pace Professor Lipps, to the study of the phenomena accompanying the aesthetic phenomenon, to the study of the reverberations of Empathy on our physical as well as our psychic condition. I would therefore submit, if not to Professor Lipps, at least to all the disciples I wish him (and whom my work will, I hope, tend
to increase), I would submit certain reflections on the scientific attitude to be adopted regarding these " organic sensations " which Professor Lipps requests us to talk no more about. In this, as in every question, psychological or otherwise, the student must learn to define and criticise his own thought,
not to allow himself to be led astray by words in short, to know exactly what he is talking about. To identify the pleasure experienced at the sight of a picture with the feeling distinguishable (when strong enough to be distinguished) in the head, chest, back and so forth, is not to know what one is talking about ; or, it is to talk, as I was guilty of doing in my first essay on these questions, without having cleared one's ideas. But is the prevailing confusion on these points a reason for forbidding all examination into muscular or organic phenomena,
:
into conditions of physical exaltation or depression, such as the student may happen to observe as accompanying his aesthetic experience ? Surely not. It is only in keeping a record of these
facts
that
we can determine
their
relation
to
72
aesthetic
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

conditions,
or
the absence of any such

sensations,
relation.
Are these muscular or organic
whose existence Professor Lipps does not deny, simple repercussions of the activities which our
Empathy
has attributed to visible shapes

the
local
sign,
Or
are
they the indication,
of
processes
integrated in the physical substratum of the activities * revived in us while thus attributed to the non-ego ? Are they, as Professor Groos seems to think, the accompaniment of the most developed aesthetic activity, which redouble this same activity ? Or are they, on the contrary, like perhaps the laryngeal and respiratory and oral sensations of imperfect auditives, the result of an insufficient aesthetic sensibility seeking to reinforce itself by a second appeal to the attention ? f Each one of these possibilities requires to be studied ; the result of such study would throw much light on the psycho-physiological mechanism of Empathy and, consequently, on the psychological nature and the evolutional cause of this very strange phenomenon. It might also clear up an obscure point in the psychological explanation of Empathy, that is to say the origin of the qualities of weight and direction, among those attributed to visible shapes
:
* Karl Groos, Msthetik, p. " Dass wir motorischen in
429
.
der Ueberzeugung leben, einen
intensiveren Genuss zu haben als solche, denen jede korperliche,
Resonanz
fehlt,
wird
;
natiirlich finden
ja bei unserenfalls
man Unbescheiden, aber doch wohl auch denn die Verschmelzung mit Vergangenem ist vorhanden ; wir Unterscheiden uns also durch
von den anderen." t The answers to a Questionnaire on the individual differences in musical receptivity, on which I am at present engaged, lead me to think that such " sensations in the vocal parts " are commoner
ein Plus
among the imperfect auditives, the latter being characterised me by lack of memory of simultaneous sound combinations.
for
.ESTHETIC EMPATHY
qualities
73
which might seem, Hke warmth and cold attributed by Professor Lipps to colours, to require the co-operation of distinctly sensorial and muscular reviviscence with the more abstract, and so to speak spiritual, modes of mere motion, effort, and resistance, all of whose subjective synthesis is projected by us into objective forms. And, to wind up this list of what seem to me desirable inquiries, an inquiry into the bodily well-being or malaise (more or less localisable) accompanying certain cases of aesthetic contemplation might shed some light on the direct or indirect racial advantage which accounts for the development instead of the atrophy of our aesthetic faculty, and in so far upon the evolutional
reason of the pleasure-displeasure alternative attached to seemingly useless activities. The aesthetic phenomenon is enmeshed with the phenomena of memory, attention, and the connection between thought and motor reactions, even if it is not entirely dependent upon them. And the riddle of pleasure and displeasure connected with the aesthetic interpretation of shapes merges into the larger riddle of pleasure and displeasure in general. To forbid the study of the physiological accompaniments of aesthetic contemplation is, therefore, to exclude many hypotheses and probably also many syntheses of facts bearing upon the entire field of psychology. However much the aestheticians of the eighteenth century and certain modern laggards have thought to the contrary, aesthetics will not help us much in appreciating the beautiful and But in showing the reason for disliking the ugly. intuitive preferences and aversions connected with beauty and ugliness, psychological aesthetics will contribute to the general and applicable knowledge
74
of that
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
microcosm of complex and obscure movements which we call the human soul. I do not entertain the hope of influencing the ideas of the master to whom my own owe a good
half of their value.
I shall
be
satisfied if I
persuade
some readers to take
their stand with
disciples of the great
me among the German sesthetician. And I
shall fulfil more than my expectation if I succeed in pointing out to those who are already disciples, a possibility of further utilisation of the master's doctrine, not by restricting it to the limits he would himself impose, but by applying it, carrying it on and, if need be, fitting it to the constant progress of psychological thought and observation.
APPENDIX TO ESTHETIC EMPATHY

(SCHMARSOW AND VAN DE VELDE)
Professor August
Schmarsow {Unser Verhaltniss zu den biUenden
Kiinsten, Leipzig, 1903) has taken up and pushed to the utmost the explanations implicit in Groos's hypothesis of Inner Mimicry
organic accompaniments, making the beholder's sense of and objective movement the measure, so to speak, of his interest in visual shapes. The agreeableness of the third
its
and
his bodily existence
dimension in art
interest in the
is
therefore explained, not
by
a furtherance of our
movement
of lines, but as a promise of freedom

respiration, for instance (p.
of our
own locomotion and
no)
This pushing back of the nearer planes into the distance, this enlarging of the field of vision beyond the factual region . this ' Stand off three steps ' (' Drei Schrift vom Leibe ') is already the conquest of the third dimension, and locomotion is needed to measure the width of our glance the give and take of our eyes and our body teaches us the beneficent effect of having and of keeping a free field of action around us. After feeling ourselves narrowed in and confined, we can now breathe freely, and we enjoy
. .
!
"...
ESTHETIC EMPATHY
75
our deeper breathing as a gift from space. ..." This corporealmimetic-kinaesthetic explanation naturally makes Professor Schmarsow very impatient with Lipps's analysis of the Doric column, which he demolishes as follows (p. loo) " The supposed recognition of such strife (such opposition of forces) in a Greek temple was nothing but a Gothic infection (eine gotische Infektion) asserting itself as the result of aesthetic analysis. The real impression of the Greek column depends rather on the plastic roundness, the harmonious unity, and the moderate activity of the well-grown shaft. When we look at such a column, we project ourselves completely, put ourselves in braced and close attitude, into this architectural-plastic figure ; project our own body as a growth akin, from head to foot, to that figure. We feel the echo of our own organic unity and self-sufEcingness in this column, inas.
much as it stands on its own feet and carries its own head. ..." The expression " Innere Nachahmung " occurring several times
in Professor Schmarsow's text
his aesthetics.
leaves
many
no doubt of the origin of
Despite a great
ingenious points (particularly
to the Zeitschrift fiir ^sthetik) " these aesthetics have the drawbacks inherent in the " Inner Mimicry
in his
more recent contributions

first,
theory
dynamic empathy
that they do not explain (as the Lippsian aesthetics of essentially do) the different aesthetic impressions
by, let us say, bad Vitruvian Doric (Professor Schmarsow even speaks of the Doric column sharing with the human body the possession not only of a head, but of feet !) and good Greek Doric ; let alone the difference of impression made by the Doric of Paestum and the Doric of the Parthenon, and which is precisely due to differences in the empathic play of forces corresponding to slight differences in the lines ; and secondly (which is also firstly !), that the mimetic process is produced not by the essential visible qualities of the shape, but by the suggestion that the shape is, or is intended to be, that of something else, namely, of a human body. In short, the Doric column acts, not inasmuch as the shape which it is, but inasmuch as something different which replaces it in our attention. On the other hand, the well-known " art nouveau " architect, Henry
made
(Foot neuen Styl, Leipzig, 1907), has misappropriated the most obvious part of the Lippsian aesthetics to the extent of informing us that " have set up the Law that Line is a force "
Van de Velde
We
(" Wir, die wir das Gesetz aufs tell ten, dass die Linie eine Kraft ist,"
p. 80).
But instead of applying this Lippsian principle by analysing what given kinds of lines and combinations of lines correspond to given combinations of forces, an analysis which might prove unfavourable to the kind of shapes in which he deals, Herr Van de Velde goes on
']6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

might have,
its
to identify line as such with gesture as such (a perhaps legitimate
contention), and to conclude that as every individual has his

gesture, so every civilisation has, or
own
Line.
own The
" Line " of our own period, being, of course, that of the " Jugend
Styl."
THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF

ÊSTHETICS
This chapter appeared, translated into German, with slight differfur jEsthetik for 1910, under the title of WeiUres iiber Einfuhling, etc.
ences, in the Zeitschrift
In the often quoted but little read essay entitled Beauty and Ugliness which I published in collaboration with C. Anstruther-Thomson in the Contemporary Review for October-November 1897, we put forward as explanation of aesthetic preferences and aversions the probable existence, in all visual formperception,
of
a
factor
which
subsequently
identified mainly with the
phenomenon described
by Professor Lipps as Msthetische Einftlhlung, while recognising that this supposed factor in aesthetics also bore considerable analogy to what Professor Groos has called Innere achahmung, and, in his recent admirable paper, Msthetisches MiterlehenJ^
The comparison
Professors Lipps
of
my own
views with those of
and Groos and even of other less epoch-making aestheticians, and also fourteen additional years of my own observations and experiments in the field of aesthetics all this has brought some alteration in my attitude on these subjects. And it is this alteration I propose to explain, not from
* Zeitschrift jur Msthetik^ IV. Band, Heft 2, 1909. 77
78
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

justify myself,
any wish to
tion
but because the explanayounger students some of the confusion of thought which I have gradually cleared up for myself the confusion, principally, between,
may
save
the explanation of aesthetic preference by habitual interpretation of visible shapes in terms of human dynamical exferience, which is all I accept of Professor Lipps's Einjiihlung ; secondly, the explanation of this anthropomorphic habit by a more or
first,
less
localised
;
and more of
thirdly,
less
externalised act of
the explanation of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction quality and the emotional resonance of aesthetic perception by a supposed participation of those great organic processes, cardiac, respiratory, equilibratory, and locomotor, which the so-called " Lange-James " hypothesis invokes as the chief factors in everything which we call " mood " or " emotion," a participation suggested or corroborated to me in 1896 by Professor Sergi's Dolors e Piacere (cf. Beauty and Ugliness). These three suppositions were confused in my mind (if not in that of the fellow-worker who furnished me with the experimental and less abstract portion of the essay) at the time of my collaboration in Beauty and Ugliness. I have since got to understand that they are closely connected together, but they are independent of one another ; and if I succeed in making younger students hold them asunder and study them separately, I shall have done much for the progress of aesthetics. In the following pages I shall examine in what relation the three propositions may be found to be when the analysis and especially the personal observation of subjective and objective facts shall have taken the place of the dissection of mere definitions and
and.
mimicry
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF .ESTHETICS

abstractions
is
79
aestheticians.
requisite
which has hitherto engaged so-called I shall point out what kind of evidence and procurable for the final acceptance
any of these three propositions ; and, while attempting to put a little order into the problems
of
of a future science of aesthetics, I shall, I trust, bring
to the student the immense complexity, the immense (perhaps irreducible) obscurity of the vast intermeshed phenomena which we aestheticians, great and small, have each of us attempted to " explain by some tiny, tidy, little " all-embracing
principle of our own.
home
following pages will therefore deal, in as a manner as possible, with the facts in favour of first, Lippsian Einjiihlung (Empathy), of secondly, Innere Nachahmung (Inner Mimicry), and
The
undogmatic
thirdly, of the application, let

aesthetic
me
call it Sergian, to
Lange-James hypothesis. Before doing this, and during the whole course of doing it, I shall, however, be employed in putting a little order into all our thinking about the various sides of the aesthetic problem, and this, by insisting upon the recognition and temporary isolation of what I find it convenient to call the Central Problem
of the
of .Esthetics.*
* Since writing the above
phenomena
my
attention has been called to the
mentioned by Legowski on simple geometrical figures, and their apparent conclusions that greater ease of comprehension may be at the bottom of our preference for certain elementary aesthetic relations like symmetrical division. Such ease of comprehension probably does account for some degree of preference, and anything which economises our attention or gives it a new impetus (like partial asymmetry) must be reckoned as so much to the good. But I do not see how ease of comprehension can explain our preference for certain qualities of line and certain conjunctions, impacts, of lines in cases where there is no symmetry at all. A merely geometrical
results of experintients, particularly those
{Beitrage zur Exferimentellen ^sthetik), 1908
8o
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

II
to
And in this I can best explain myself by reference my own work and to the evolution of my own
ideas.
In that, as I said, often quoted but little understood essay called Beauty and Ugliness, what was least understood by our readers, and not at all by our critics, was the fact of the limitation of our inquiries to such a central 'problem of essthetics. collaborator and I were not investigating into the nature of the work of art as a whole, with its representative, evocative, dramatic {so to say novelist's emotional) functions, its powers of imitating, recording, suggesting objects and events belonging to the real external world or the real human vicissitudes outside itself. We were trying to account for the interest and powers of one factor only in the work the factor of mere visible shape of art's effects (or " form ") by which the visual arts convey all
My
imitation, representation, suggestion, expression, and general emotional stimulation ; and which shape or form can please and displease, fascinate or repel entirely apart from any such imitation, representashape is easier to grasp than the artistic deviation from this shape. But the latter is alive, its aliveness interests, attracts, or worries us, wrhile the shape dravirn vsîth ruler and compass fills us with despairing boredom. There is, in all art, what Ruskin called the Lamp of Life ; and it is with it that my aesthetics deal. There is, moreover, a preliminary to all making shapes beautiful, and that is making them char. Indeed, some of the artist's chief practical work consists in this preliminary, as Hildebrand has pointed out when he compares the methods of showing of art with the methods of hiding resorted to by what we call Nature for the preservation of animals. Lack of such making shapes clear retards aesthetic appreciation^ and sometimes puts it off to the Greek Kalends.

tion, suggestion, etc.,
8i
in
and even not unfrequently
direct contradiction thereto.
This 'problem of visible form is not the problem to which Hildebrand and his disciple Cornelius have attached that name, meaning as they do the adequate suggestion, by means of visible forms, of properties and
groups of properties not really shown or necessarily visible ; in other words, the way to employ artistic form in order to suggest something beyond itself.
The problem we dealt with in Beauty and Ugliness was, on the contrary, that of the intrinsic satisfactoriness of visible form as such, and the pleasure (or
the reverse) which its contemplation can awaken. In fact, we were dealing with the same problem which has been almost exclusively treated (and nowhere else in so masterly a manner) in Lipps's Raumcssthetik and those portions of his other works in which Professor Lipps is satisfied with amplifying and applying the principles put forward in the Raumcesthetik. And I shall call this the central problem of aesthetics because the other aesthetical problems ramify from or lead up to it, complicating and obscuring it in every way, but leaving it, whenever we can put them aside, as an essential core of all questions concerning the satisfaction and dissatisfaction produced by visible shapes independently of the (probably chemico-physiological) action of colour. The second part of Beauty and Ugliness contains, at page 682 (p. 228 of present volume) of the November 1897 number of the Contemporary Review, the following statement which I select for brevity from a great number of similar ones
" We follow lines by muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye, and these muscular adjustments result in a
82
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

and velocity in ourselves and
to the lines
sense of direction
a consequent attribution
of direction and velocity
thus perceived.''^
I have underlined the second part of this sentence because it contains the essence of the theory of ^sthetische Einfiihlung as set forth in Lipps's Raum(Bsthetik^ while the first part of the sentence contains a hypothetical explanation of that " attribution of direction and velocity to the lines thus perceived." If the magnificent analyses of Lipps had been known to me at the time of my collaboration in Beauty and. Ugliness (the Raumessthetik was published in 1 893-7 and came to my knowledge from a quotation in Karl Groos's Spiele der Menschen published in 1 899), I should not indeed, as Professor Lipps expects of his disciples, have accepted this attribution of direction and velocity, and, of course, of human energy and all its modes, to lines and motionless shapes, this Einfiihlung, as an ultimate But psychological fact requiring no explanation. I should have recognised, as I now recognise, that
this
phenomenon, which brevity obliges me to designate by Professor Lipps's most misleading title of cesthetische Einfiihlung, or Professor Titchener's translation Esthetic Empathy, does not require either for the verification or for the explanation of its presence the existence of any such " muscular adjustments " as the observations of my fellow-
worker and, in some measure my own self-observation, had led us to connect with it. The phenomenon of Einfiihlung (as connected with visible lines and shapes) can be demonstrated by such purely psychological facts as Lipps himself has accumulated, with
a
magnificent masterliness, in his analyses of the Raumcesthetik and cognate parts of his other works. And it can be explained (without even Lipps's
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF AESTHETICS
83
decidedly metaphysical phraseology about " projection of the ego " or other animistic conceptions due to that misleading expression Sich einfiihlen) by reference to merely mental phenomena. The attribution of the mode of our human dynamics is (or is not) a psychological fact, and is explicable by other psychological facts, real or not real. Modern psychology (and even modern philosophy, thanks to Bergson) has prepared us to understand that aesthetic Einjiihlung would not be a sudden phenomenon starting ex nihilo, but a mere regrouping of senses of movement which are for ever present in our consciousness, indeed which seem to form its woof. " Feelings " (as distinguished from " sensations ") of dynamic conditions and attractions are among the immediate, the primary data of our psychic life ;
feelings of direction, of velocity, of effort, of facility,
the notions expressed by verbs, adverbs, and prepositions constitute as large a part of our consciousness as those verbs, adverbs, and prepositions
all
do of our speech. They are always present in our " thought " ; * they are two-thirds of our knowledge
*
Le Dantec, in
a review of Bonnier's
Ôrientation in the Revue
Philosophique, 1901, quotes as follows from Bonnier je repete que nous ne sentons pas si nous avons, dans
"...
nos segments de membres, ces choses qui sont des os, des muscles, des articulations, etc. Nous ne sentons pas que le levier osseux s'est incline dans tel sens, car nous ignorons sensoriellement qu'il y a un levier osseux ; nous ne sentons pas le glissement articulaire, la tension des tendons, des fascia, le refoulement des aponevroses sous les muscles gonfles, ni meme le gonflement des muscles, car ni articulations, ni tendons, ni fascia, ni aponevroses, ni muscles ne nous
sont reviles sous n'im'porte quelle forme analytique et figurative.
Mais
fensemble de
de la masse segmentaire et frofonde nous est revile sous une forme obtuse synthetique et globale,mais absolument consciente en tant quîmage d'attitude ou de variation âttitude,
ces variations intimes
c'est-d-dire de
Italics
mouvement."
mine.
84
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
of our own existence.* Nothing would be more natural than that, in the constant process of referring the less known to the better known, of expressing the future in terms of the present, we should interpret the relations of seen lines and shapes in the modes of our own ever-present activities, since those lines and shapes are themselves perceived, apprehended, measured, compared and reconstructed bycomplex processes of such activity on our own part. This would be the first part of the Lippsian Einjuhlung. The second would follow equally naturally, since
the peculiarities of our own modes of activity, whenever not localised f in ourselves by any actual
movements with their accompanying sensations, would tend to attach itself to the exterior objects which had awakened the thought of them, very much as owing to the unlocalised nature of the sensations from our eye the qualities of colour are
transferred to the seen objects; so that the qualities of swiftness, smoothness, energy, direction, etc. etc.,
really appertaining to our
own experience would be attributed to the lines and shapes in the course of whose perception {i.e. of a real activity of measurement, comparison, and reconstruction) such modes
* Cf.
psychologischen
fiir
Richard Hamann's extraordinarily interesting Ueber die Grundlagen des Bewegungsbegriffes in Zeitschrift
Psychologie, vol. 43.
" Whenever we attribute Motion and Repose to a foreign body, we are using up our own inner experiences. Our habit of describing the change of place-relation between an isolated body and its " background ' in terms of Motions and Repose is so much anthropomorphism, all the stronger when what we are speaking of happen to be inanimates. Such judgments of Movements are proceedings similar to that by which we interpret facial changes as expressive movements." t Cf. Miinsterberg in Appendix to tliis essay.
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF ESTHETICS
85
of activity would have been awakened in our consciousness.* And finally and this is the third
* Cf.
Revue
Philosophique,
November
1910,
N.
Kostyleff,
la
Les travaux de Vecole de psychologie russe :

fensee.
Etude objective de
visuelles,
la theorie de Wundt, dans les perceptions dominant appartenait aux sensations motrices (' Bewegungsbild qui etaient censees determiner non seulement ') les dimensions, mais encore la distance de I'objet et sa localisation
P, 495
" Ainsi, d'apres

role
le
dans I'espace." " L'oeuvre capitale de Bourdon qui en resume un P. 495 grand nombre, fait ressortir tres nettement tout ce que les sensations retiniennes ont perdu de leur ancienne importance." " Dâpres Bourdon, les donnees les plus elementaires de la P. 495 grandeur et de la forme sont egalement determinees par des processus moteurs. Pour la grandeur, il reconnait que la projection de I'objet sur la retine n'est rien sans les mouvements que nous effectuons pour le parcourir des yeux, sans la mesure de la distance qui le separe de nous et sans I'idee que nous nous sommes faite de sa grandeur absolue. L'image retinienne n'est done que le point de depart des processus qui tous sont plus ou moins moteurs." " Fidele a son principe d'ecarter toutes les donnees P. 497 introspectives et d'etudier uniquement la maniere dont les photoreactions observees chez les animaux se developpent et se compliquent chez I'homme, il commence par decrire I'heliotropisme des animaux inferieurs, le passage du dermatropisme aux reactions d'un organe special de la vue et les progres successifs de cet organe, des somatoreactions generates constitutes par un simple mouvement du corps, aux icono-reactions accompagnees d'une distinction plus fine des details de I'objet. Abordant ensuite la vision de la direction chez I'homme, il reconnait que ' les photo-reactions de la retine ne sont parfaites qu'au niveau des cones de la fovea et constate que I'adaptation progressive de I'organe produit une modification du mecanisme primitif * de fa9on que maintenant, comme premier effet d'une photo-reaction non maculaire, il survienne un mouvement somatique qui tourne la retine iconoptique vers I'objet.' Ce mecanisme complementaire se compose, d'apres lui, de mouvements fixateurs du corps, de la tete et de I'oeil, mais le reflexe oculaire se developpe graduellement et finit par remplacer les autres. C'est le jet de ce reflexe qui renseigne sur la direction de I'objet." " L'erreur a peu pres generale, dit I'auteur, consiste P. 498 a rattacher la localisation psychique directement aux mouvements
:
:
'
86
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
step in a purely psychical analysis of Einfiihlung
these modes (or combination of modes) of activity would be accompanied by the " pleasure-displea" sure " alternative, and amount to an " emotion whenever their isolation in the field of attention
(by Lipps's " aesthetic isolation ") brought all these feelings of movement (movement of " attention " and movement associated by the act of interpretation) Such to play the chief part in our consciousness. would be the purely mental phenomenon described
by Lipps as cssihetische Einfiihlung^ and such its explanation by purely mental data ; and the acceptance of such a hypothesis would depend merely upon the correct observation and analysis of the psychical facts of the preference of certain
I'epiphenomene psychique de la photoavons conscience de nos reactions qu'en tant qu'elles ont un rapport direct avec le monde exterieur nous n'avons pas conscience des reactions de nos organes visceraux, et I'oeil en est un. Les photo-reflexes somatiques deviennent conscients dans une phase qui suit celle qui a ressenti I'influence du reflexe fixateur, c'est-a-dire dans la phase cerebrale." " L'oeuvre de Nuel acheve revolution commencee P. 499 par Wundt, la substitution, a la sensibilite retinienne, de I'experience motrice de I'organe visuel." " Mais I'effort de Mach ne s'est pas arrete a cela. P. 508 Cherchant a preciser la nature des elements sensoriels qui forment une image mentale il essaya d'analyser celles qui sont le plus pres de la perception, les images visuelles et auditives, et arriva finalement a conclure qu'elles se composent de sensations motrices qui accompagnent les reflexes du cerveau." " La psychologic objective dit que ce sont les sensations P. 507
oculaires, alors qu'elle est
reaction somatique.
En
general, nous
motrices qui avaient rendu la perception initiale consciente." " Ce n'est done pas la sensation du contact immediat P. 507 qui nous donne la connaissance des choses, mais bien les reflexes
:
cerebraux dont
n'est pas
elle est
le processus
Autrement dit, ce le point de depart. de contact, mais le processus de mesure et
d'identification qui fait la connaissance des choses et revit ensuite
dans
la
pensee."
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF ÊSTHETICS

visible shapes
87
instance,
whether it and upon the
is
constant and regular, for
verification of the alleged
presence of ideas of movement and their transfer from our consciousness to the objective reality
which had awakened them.* Such purely psychological testimony to a purely psychological explanation of a purely mental process
of
cesthetische
Einfiihlung
Professor
Lipps
has
drawn from this explanation by purely mental facts are shown from the unpublished note written by me in April 1904, and inserted at p. 334 of the present volume in Aesthetic Responsiveness, and which agrees extraordinarily with the sentence marked A in my quotation from the book which Professor Miinsterberg published in 1905, and with the sentence marked A in the quotation from Professor Groos's article on Miterleben published in 1909. I point out the independent manner in which
conclusions to be
The
we have
Groos's
arrived at these conclusions because the coincidence
is,
I think, indicative of their correctness.
Das
cesthetische Miterleben (in Zeitschrift

:
fur Msthetik,
IV. Band, Heft 2, p. l8i) " We can separate three

leben).
different stages
{i.e.
in aesthetic Miter-
feelings
Whenever during the contemplation of an object our bodily and moods (Korperliche Gefuhle und Stimmungen) corre-
sponding with the expressive forms of the object {Ausdrucksformen des Dinges) happen not to be perceptibly localised in our own body, then they will simply fill the object. When the emotional (gefuhlsreiche) organic sensations corresponding to the expressive forms (Ausdrucksformen) are still too weak and too obscurely localised for them to withdraw our attention from the {i.e. perceived) thing, but sufficiently strong to produce a marked effect upon the whole condition of consciousness, then when these kinaesthetic sensations also possess the active-motor property of kinesthetic epiphenomena (wenn sie die aktiv-motorischen Elemente der Kinasthetischen
. . .
Nacherzeugung enthalten), then there arises that condition which subsequent reflection makes us designate as -projection of ourselves If we go into the object (Selbstversetzung in das Object). ... yet a step further, we shall find that localisation in our body breaks
the spell of the projection of ourselves." [N.B. I must beg the English reader's forgiveness (here and hereafter) for the intolerable involution and obscurity due to my fear of departing from the literal sense of the German original.
88
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
accumulated in the analyses of simple and complex shapes contained in his Rauimesthetik and other of his works. Other evidence on the subject of a purely psychological order could be obtained, as I shall endeavour to illustrate experimentally, by scrutinising the vôrds and expressions implying
movement
and
habitually applied to motionless shapes
and noting the degree of cogency which such words are admitted to possess by persons employing them.
objects,
Ill
at the time in 1896-7 of my collaboration Beauty and Ugliness I had no knowledge (and my in collaborator still less) of Lipps's theory of Einfilhlung. I was too much of a novice in general psychology to recognise, as I now do, that merely " mental " data might afford an efficient and sufficient basis for a hypothesis of attribution oj processes in the -perceiving
But
subject to the perceived, object (or rather its visible Moreover, the Lange- James theory * had, shape).
for reasons
which
will
be obvious, offered
itself as a
preferable explanation.
I
now
(191 1)
consider that
Empathy may
in
many
cases
be
the result of processes no longer in consciousness.
Cf. Titchener's
Thought Processes, p. 32 " We have learned, again, that physiological conditions may prothat nervous duce their effect not within but upon consciousness
;
and tendencies may direct the course of conscious processes without setting up new and special processes of their own. What is now, so to say, a mere tag or label upon a dominant formation may, a little while ago, have been itself a focal complex."
sets
.
And
"
I
again, p. 170
regard as a mental element any process which proves to be irreducible, unanalysable, throughout the whole course of individual
experience."
89
But there were other reasons besides my immaturity of psychological thought and the vogue of a striking hypothesis, which prevented my remaining,
Professor Lipps has more than once textually and in severe allusions * admonished me to do, satisfied with merely psychological descriptions and explanations of the phenomenon which my fellowas
worker and myself had, as I have shown, discovered independently. own observation of the central cesthetic -process {i.e. form preference), and the amazingly developed self-observation of the collaborator to whom I owed all my examples and experiments and indeed my first notion of such a
My
factor as
Empathy
{Einfuhlung)
of the presence of other

cases at least,
had made me aware phenomena which, in some

contemplaI did not purely mental or psychic
aesthetic
accompanied the
tion and preference of visible shapes.

arrive at the hypothesis of a
(call it as
you
of
like best
!)
act of Einfuhlung, at the
hypothesis
the
projection
of
mere
ideas
of
it
movement and movement's
modalities, because
seemed to me that what I afterwards learned to think of under that convenient and misleading name of Einjiihlung was not a purely mental process, and
that at the base of aesthetic preference there lay not mere ideas of a motor kind, but actual muscular sensations and even objective bodily movements. In the sentence already quoted from p. 228 of this volume (p. 682 of the Contemporary Review,
* In Archiv fiir systematische Philosophie, Neue Folge, VI. Band, Heft 3, Berlin, 1900, pp. 385-390, Professor Lipps connects our essay, Beauty and Ugliness, of which this is a review, with the Spiele der Menschen of Karl Groos (containing a quotation from us). Professor Lipps returned to the charge in Die tssthetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst (1906), pp. 431-441. For detail see " Professor Lipps on Êsthetic Empathy," p. 19, footnote.

90
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
October-November 1897), the " attribution of direction and velocity to the lines perceived " had been described by me as the result of " muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye.'^^
On
a previous
page (545)
(p.
158) I wrote that

. .
.
" In the opinion of the authors of this paper the subjective by the objective terms height, breadth, depth, by the more complex terms round, square, symmetrical, unsymmetrical, and all their kindred terms (can) be analysed into more or less distinct knowledge of various and variously localised bodily movements."
states indicated
On
page 673
of
(p.
speaking
the
211) my collaborator wrote, difference between the mere
recognition of real objects

artistic shafes
and the contemplation
of
"
We are usually satisfied with
the mere optical perception of real
figures, or
as labels.
even the mere recognition of them by qualities which serve But when we come to works of art we demand certain
senses of adjustment in our otan bodies ;
that the fact of lifting
up and
pressing
and to obtain these we require down, like the facts of bulk,
should be strongly realised in the painted figures."
Again, p. 6'j6
(p.
216),
my
collaborator wrote
" For the movement of an arch consists of the balance of its two half-arches, and this balance we follow by shifting our own weight from one foot to another "
And
p.
678
(p.
220)
" In this way do good antiques improve our consciousness of existence by literally forcing us to more harmonious movements. But there are other ways also in which our necessity of miming by our own muscular adjustments the forms and figures which we focus," etc.
consists very largely collaborator proving the existence, in her case at least, of so-called sensations of movement, and even of actual objective muscular
of self-observations of
Indeed Beauty and Ugliness
my
activity, as
accompaniments of intense contemplation
of visible shapes.
91
Here, therefore, we had got, thanks to experimental self-observation of my collaborator in which

explain at length) I refused to share auto-suggestion, and thanks also to accidental observations (like those of the muscular sensations connected with architecture) in which I
(as I shall later
for
fear
of
did share, we had got to a hypothesis by which the aesthetic perception of visible shapes is dependent not any longer upon motor images or ideas, but upon muscular adjustments, inner or outer, upon a bodily process to which, as the last quotation exemplifies, I had allowed my collaborator and myself to attach the convenient but disastrous name
" miming." Thus Beauty and Ugliness contained not merely a psychological hypothesis analogous to the one which Lipps developed under the name of Einfilhlung (Empathy), but also, with the result of much confusion and a good deal of ridicule, a hypothesis coincident in many points with the one to which my friend Professor Karl Groos had given the
of
name
of Innere
Nachahmung*
This hypothesis, which I shall call, for convenience' sake, the mimetic or muscular hypothesis, is not necessary for the Einfilhlung or psychological hypobut it presupposes Einfilhlung and attempts thesis to explain it. The second part of these pages will attempt to shed a little of the light of fact upon this mimetic (Nachahmung) element as well as upon the supposed Einfilhlung (Empathy) process, or at least attempt to show that both these hypotheses, aesthetic Empathy (Einfilhlung) and aesthetic Mimicry, must be tested empirically. For the moment it is sufficient that the reader should hold the two
;
* Spide der Menschen, 1900.
92
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

Empathy
in his
") and Nachahmung mind, and thus save himself much of the confusion to which my collaborator and myself, together with every other sesthetician dealing with Innere Nachahmung, have
things, Einfuhlung ("
("Mimicry"), separate
fallen victims.
The same remark
applies to a third part of the
subject, always confused,
and sometimes directly con-
nected, with mimicry, and to which, using my Beauty and Ugliness as corpus vile of this logical demonstration, I shall now proceed. This third part of the subject has been treated of by Professor Groos in his recent masterly article (Zeitschrift fiir JEsthetik, 1909) under the name of Kincesthetic sensations, " Empfindungen aus dem KSrperinnen.^^ But the importance which I gave to the respiratory-cardiac (as distinguished from so-
" muscular ") accompaniments of aesthetic form-perception was due in part to the influence of Dolore e Piacere by the anthropologist Sergi, published in 1894, whose summing up of the causes of aesthetic pleasure will be found in a footnote to Beauty and Ugliness, p. 552 (p. 171).
called
IV
In the very first page of Beauty and Ugliness there occurs the following sentence which, although obscurely worded, sums up what was then my position regarding the relation of form-perception
and
kinaesthesia
facts
" Our
and
theories,
if
at all correct,
would
establish that
the aesthetic phenomenon ... is the function which regulates the perception of Form, and that the perception of Form, in visual cases certainly, and with reference to hearing presumably, implies

an active participation of the most important organs of animal
for the benefit of the total organism."
93
life,
a constant alteration in vital processes requiring stringent regulation
vital 'processes are summed 225) in the following manner (p.
These
up on
p.
680
therefore,
" The greater or lesser agreeableness of artistic experience is, due to the dependence of one of our most constant and
important intellectual activities, the perception of form, on two of the most constant and important of our bodily functions, respiration and
equilibrium."
This connexion between perception of visible shape and such bodily functions (to which the cardiac one should, of course, be added) is explicable by a sentence on p. 562 (p. 190)
:
the breathing works in closest connexion with the eyes . . widened way of seeing is necessarily accompanied by a widened and the respiratory expansion inevitably way of breathing, . produces a general sense of expanded existence."
.
" As
(this)
by
and, with reference to the equilibratory function, a sentence on p. 567 (p. 199)
"
We are indeed always {i.e. apart from form-perception)

more
or less
. .
.
balancing
ourselves
and we are therefore

it
so
to this fact as scarcely to notice
in ordinary
life.
accustomed But as soon as

to
we
see something else adjusting equilibrium, our

scale,
own balance seems

life
swing an a wider
and
this
wider balancing brings a sense of our
limits being enlarged in every direction,
and our
being spread over
afar wider area."
The very numerous experimental observations made by my collaborator, whose record constitutes
good half of the whole work, are illustrations of the various manner and combinations of manner in which the intense perception of visible form in its elementary details and in its most complex applications (for instance in an Italian Church facade, in the interior of a French Gothic Cathedral, and in
a
94
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Catena's St. Jerome as compared to Titian's Sacred and Profane Love) can produce sensations testifying to such connexion between ocular perception of shape and these respiratory and equilibratory
functions.
The
our
essay entitled
Beauty and Ugliness contains,
therefore, besides a recognition of the attribution of
own modes
of
movement
to
visible
shapes
(aesthetic
Empathy, Einfuhlung), and the
assertion
of the existence of " muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye " resulting in " a sense of direction and velocity in ourselves and a consequent attribution of direction and velocity to the lines thus perceived" (p. 682 [p. 228]), or in our unfortunate phrase a " miming process " analogous to the Innere Nachahmung of Karl Groos our essay contains, connected with this mimetic theory and intended as explanation not only of it but of the
Einfuhlung (Empathy) theory above mentioned, a third hypothesis to the effect that (esthetic perception of visible shapes
is
agreeable or disagreeable because
it
involves alterations in great organic functions^ principally respiratory and equilibratory, which are
themselves accompanied by feelings of more or less well-being or the contrary. In this way does the
" Lange-James " theory, identifying emotion with alterations of our bodily conditions, find its application to aesthetics.*
*
For the
rest,
this application, to aesthetics
had already been
made by
Cf. Principles of Psychology. P. 473 : " An object falls on a sense organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived ; or else the latter, excited inwardly, gives rise to an idea of the same object. Quick as a flash the reflex currents pass
Professor James himself.
dovrn through their preordained channels, alter the condition of muscle, skin, and viscus ; and these alterations, perceived, like the
original object, in as
many
portions of the cortex, combine with
it

I
95
have analysed at some length the chief headings work of C. Anstruther-Thomson and myself in order to distinguish between the various connected (but not necessarily dependent) theories
of this joint
of Einfiihlung, Innere
Nachahmung and Lange-James

which what
participation of organic functions, into
Karl Groos now * calls eesthetisches Miterleben ought to be analysed for the purposes of investigation. But this is only part of my present purpose. Having, as I hope, put some order into the theoretic
from an object-simply-apprehended No new principles have to be invoked, nothing postulated beyond the ordinary reflex circuits, and the local centres admitted in one shape or another by all to
in consciousness
and transform
it
into an object-emotionally-felt.
exist."
Vol. ii. p. 468 : " iEsthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain masses, and combinations of colours and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them there may, it is true, be added secondary pleasures ; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a great part." P. 470 : " These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up." " In all cases of intellectual or moral rapture we find that, P. 470 unless there be coupled a bodily reverberation of some kind with the
:
mere thought of the object and cognition of

unless
its
quality
unless
we
actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or witticism

thrill at the case of justice, or tingle at the act of magnaniour state of mind can hardly be called an emotion at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of how certain things Such are to be called neat, right, witty, generous, and the like. a judicial state of mind as this is to be classed among awarenesses of
we
mity
truth ; it is a cognitive act." * In his article in Zeitschrift fur /Esthetik, " Das eesthetische Miterleben."
; ;
96
of
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

the
facts
side of the question, I desire to
upon which
founded
;
theories
are
examine the nature three connected to examine what further

these
theoretic distinctions these facts should lead to and, finally, to examine into the probability of
obtaining data sufficient to accept or reject some or all of these hypotheses. And here I again find it simplest to treat my own work in the domain of aesthetics as the corf us vile of my demonstration. I have just alluded to the three theories the (more or less Lippsian) Einjiihlung (Empathy) ; the (more or less Karl Groosian) Nachahmung (Mimicry), and the Lange-James theory of bodily emotion, as being founded upon facts. I do not mean by this that they will be proved true by facts ; but merely that they have been suggested by observation which may be confirmed or invalidated by observation on a larger scale and accompanied by more rigorous analysis. The Einjiihlung (Empathy) theory appears to have been suggested to Professor Lipps by purely mental facts united with examination of forms recurrent in works of art. The {Nachahmung) mimetic theory and the cesthetic amplication of the Lange-James theory have evidently been suggested to Professor Groos by his attention being drawn to mimetic processes (actual or merely " felt ") and to phenomena of what we will call " bodily resonance "
his
which have accompanied aesthetic contemplation own case. As regards Beauty and Ugliness,
in
all
these three theories (which neither my collaborator nor myself sufficiently distinguished) were suggested,
by my own introspection observation of the vocabulary of movement universally applied to motionless visible shapes
so far as EinfUhlung went,
and
my
97
and, with regard to Nachahmung (Mimicry) and " Lange-James " theory, they were suggested to my collaborator, C. Anstruther-Thomson, by accidental self-observation in the course of art-historical and practical artistic studies ; and confirmed in part by observations, as distinguished from experiments,
made by
myself.
it is well to repeat what ought to have been premised in writing Beauty and Ugliness, namely, that the experimental accounts refer, with few exceptions, to one person only. For, while encouraging my collaborator to push introspective experiment to the utmost and develop her capacity
And
here
for it to the highest point of lucid self-analysis, I did not attempt to make such experiments myself, well knowing that I personally should never be secure from auto-suggestion, and having remarked in myself a certain deficiency in spontaneous
consciousness of motor and respiratory sensations,
spontaneous accompanying phenomena (or, epiphenomena) in aesthetic conditions being connected rather with rhythmic-auditive peculiarities and with cardiac symptoms.*
if
my own
you
prefer,
* Dr. Richard Baerwald, who is at present making a great enquHe on the Motor Type as such, and without special reference to its alleged importance as an aesthetic factor, has very kindly summed up the result of the answers made by C. Anstruther-Thomson and
myself (separately, of course) to his very elaborate list of questions and experiments. Professor Baerwald says he is greatly struck by the similarity of result in both our cases, and sums us both up as belonging to the decided " motor type " with " motor representations of three categories." I will add in his own words : " Bei Ihnen beiden ist der verbale Typus vom Sachlichen ungewohnlich stark unterschieden. Bei Ihnen beiden scheint die reine motorVorstellung zu Giinsten der sie ersetzenden Bewegungs-Empfindung verkuinmert zu sein." But Dr. Baerwald adds that C. Anstruther-
98
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
I had ended the essay on Beauty and Ugliness by an appeal to psychologists and aestheticians to seek for whatever accompaniment of " bodily sensations we may discover to them {cesthetic and other -psychological phenomena) in the dim places of our consciousBut, although copies of Beauty and Ugliness ness.''"' were sent to a great number of psychologists, nothing came of this appeal except a brief but friendly notice of M. Arreat in the Revue Philosophique, a quotation (to which all subsequent notices ar6 probably due) in Professor Karl Groos's great Spiele der Menschen, and a scathing but most useful criticism by Professor Lipps in the Archiv fiir
systematische Philosophie.^
Nothing daunted by this silence, I appealed once more to the specialists who ought to have been interested in the question, and laid before the Fourth Psychological Congress a Memoire et Questionnaire sur
for those
sesthetics
le
role
de Velement
I
moteur
dans la
perception esthetique visuelle.
need scarcely add,
experience of the treatment of psychologists, that not the very smallest notice was taken of this summing up of the problems and hypotheses discussed in Beauty and determined to cease appealing to Ugliness. I
who have
by general
Thomson
is of more developed motor type, and that in myself a comparative poverty of " movement-representations " is explicable by probable diversion of my attention to an extraordinary copiousness of visual representations. Perhaps Dr. Baerwald's meaning may be connected with the fact that while my collaborator's " visual
representations " have been constantly
combined with the motor-
processes involved in all kinds of artistic technique,
my own
" visual
representations " have remained in isolated dignity, as I have never
been able
craft.
(or
indeed tried very hard
!)
to master any kind of handi-
* Cf. p. 65 of present essay
and Esthetic Empathy^

psychologists,
99
and
to
pursue
I
my
investigations
reprinted the Memoire et Questionnaire soumis au 4" Congres de Psychologies and circulated it privately among such of my acquaintances as were supposed to take pleasure in art, requesting them to answer as many of the questions as possible. This proceeding produced a collection of forty-eight written answers to the Questionnaire, and with these I am now going to deal, premising a few explanations about the
without their
assistance.
Questionnaire.
was the result of a suspicion which had (as it did in Professor Groos in a work which I did not then know *) that some of the phenomena described by my collaborator, C. Anstruther-Thomson, in Beauty and Ugliness, might be special to individuals belonging to what I then (if no longer) believed in as the " motor type," and
First, it
arisen in
me
that
susceptibility
dissatisfaction
to
preference,
to
satisfaction
connected with the perception of visible shapes might be confined to persons belonging to such a " motor type." My Questionnaire therefore attempted to ascertain the relation between the degree of aesthetic sensibility of my subjects and certain peculiarities which I supposed to belong to the famous " motor type." The
and
questions were grouped with this in view.
The
degree of aesthetic sensitiveness was tested by a " L'arrangement des single question (Question 9) divers plans d'un tableau, la convergence ou la divergence des lignes qui s'enfoncent plus ou moins, vous donjient-ils soit un sentiment de soulagement, d'attraction et de bien-etre, soit (dans l'arrangement contraire) un malaise vague, une
:
* Der asthetische Genuss, 1902.
100
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
espece d'oppression et de degout, presque de " Pantipathie et du chagrin ? I need scarcely say that this question was quite insufficient for its purpose, as it left out pleasure and displeasure at mere two-dimensional lines, and made many people think that I was talking about questions of technical perspective of which they knew themselves to be ignorant the differentiation ought to have been obtained by asking " Do you care for pictures independent of the subject represented and the technical interest, just for the pleasure " of lines and composition ? The majority of the questions were intended to discover whether the person interrogated belonged to the motor type or to the purely visual one. This was tested by questions suggested by the experiments detailed in Beauty and Ugliness^ and bearing upon the subject's habits of remembering scenery and persons (whether en 'pose or in motion), his habits of standing still or moving in connexion with real landscapes and of free standing statues and the interior of monuments, and by his considering (or
;
:
not) words and metaphors attributive of movement to motionless objects and forms as " literal " or " conventional " forms of expression ; and finally by asking whether he was conscious of states of motor tension independent of real objective movement. With this intention the questions were grouped together in a manner calculated to connect them for my purposes, but also, as I soon found, to confuse them almost inevitably in the minds of the persons interrogated. To these essential mistakes, due to inexperience and thoughtlessness, and rendering my
added that having been
Questionnaire very practically ineffectual, must be originally intended for the
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF iESTHETICS
loi
psychologists of the 4th Congress (who paid no attention to it) its text was bristling with technical expressions and began with a question calculated to
frighten off laymen, the almost (as I now think) unanswerable question : " Avez-vous des indices qui vous rattachent a vos propres yeux au type visuel ou " au type moteur ? I have gone into detail about the badness of this Questionnaire because this badness may account, to some degree, for its failure, and leave hope for better success if an inquiry were better conducted.
But the failure was only partial. Despite much confusion and more refusal to answer, certain facts did come out, and facts which shed some light, I think, upon the three hypotheses of Einfiihlung, Nachahmung and Sergian application of the Lange-
James
theory,
and upon
their
relation
with one
another. It is for this reason that I shall place before the reader the results of a second scrutiny which I have now made of the answers to my Questionnaire sur le role de V element moteur dans la
perception esthetique visuelle.
This second analysis of the answers to my old Questionnaire has been made aft^.r nine years, and when my views respecting the problems of aesthetics,
their formulation and relation, have been changed, not only by additional knowledge of general psychology and by the illuminating study especially of the work of Lipps and of Karl Groos and of Professor Miinsterberg, but also by my constantly noted down observation of psychological conditions spontaneously accompanying {i.e. not obtained by deliberate experimental introspection) such famiHarity with works of art as is constant and habitual in the life of a person living in the midst of
102
galleries
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
and monuments (Florence, Rome, Venice, London) and chiefly known to the general public as a writer on art. Such additional study
Paris,
has convinced me not only of the existence of a theoretic separation between the hypothesis of Einfilhlung and those of Nachahmung and Sergian
application of the Lange-James theory, but moreover, independently of the answers to my Questionnaire,
to
as
which
I shall
soon return,
it
has placed before
me
several extremely suggestive facts.
The
first is
that,
regards myself, there is evidence of the attribution to lines and shapes of modes of movement, energy, and vitality occasionally approximating to such
" delusions " as thinking that a mountain rises up as we go towards it rapidly in a boat, a motor-car,
or
on
bicycle
(a
delusion
*
already
poetically
described by
vol. 43).
Wordsworth
and admirably studied
by Richard Hamann
I find
my
in
in the Zeitschriftfiir Psychologies myself in absolute agreement with former collaborator, C. Anstruther-Thomson,
ascribing
planes, to
to mere arrangements of lines and mere two-dimensional or three-dimensional
like rising up, lifting, pressing down, expanding, going in, bulging out, balancing, and all the other actions employed in the descriptive parts of Beauty and Ugliness. But I also recognise that in my own case the attribution of such qualities of movement is so complex that it would no more occur to me that the movements were in my mind than it would occur to me, except as a result of scientific teaching, that what I call colour is a phenomenon
" forms," actions
lines
extreme instance of such " movement attributed to " will be found in Esthetic Responsiveness, Diary for April 29, 1904. I earnestly request the reader to refer at once to that example, which lack of space prevents my reprinting at this point (p. 319.)
*
An

103
taking place in my eye and nerves, or that what I call a musical tone is, similarly, not in the vibrating body or the air but in my own organs of perception. In other words, these qualities are, in my case, thought of and perceived as really existing in the external shape or object, however much my reason tells me that a motionless object or a mere two- or three-
dimensional form cannot be performing any of the

actions
which I attribute to it ; in fact, I seem to distinguish between two kinds of movement outside of myself the movement of things which are
:
moving
in space, occupying different parts of space
(covering other objects) and presenting different portions of themselves to my eye ; and the movement of things which are not shifting place in space and which do not present different parts of themselves But, in my individual consciousness, to my eye. these two different kinds of movement are equally I independent of any participation of my ego follow them because they seem outside of me. And here, while taking this opportunity of protesting against Professor Lipps's formula of projection of the ego as distinguished from attribution of states of the ego, I must point out a slovenliness of
:
thought of which C. Anstruther-Thomson and myself were guilty at the time of writing Beauty and Ugliness, and of which even so acute a critic as Karl Groos is not entirely free. Throughout Beauty and Ugliness we talked of " following lines " we also
;
talked of miming the balance, miming the movement of an arch, of " perception of the grip of the ground by a fagade's base^^ and of " downward pressure of the mouldings and cornices " ; of " involuntary imitation of
the legs of the chair pressing hard on the ground " when in reality a mere visible form cannot press,
104
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
cannot gripy cannot balance, except in so far as we imagine it to do so, nor can lines move except because we attribute to them the movement by which we, as we express it, follow them, whereas there is nothing to follow since there is nothing that moves. In fact we were guilty of explaining a movement or action on our own part as " miming,"
that
is,
as called into being,
by
a previously existing
" movement " which we had previously (and correctly,

I think) explained as being attributed to motionless form because it accompanied that form's perception.
I shall
have to return later to this logical overconnexion with the theory (and the facts) of Êsthetic Mimicry (JSfachahmung). What I wish to insist upon at this moment is simply that examinasight, in
tion of my own aesthetic experience has shown me that whatever activities oi J allowing, or miming, or liking or dishking certain two- or three-dimensional shapes may take place in myself, there is always a primary fact of certain shapes seeming to possess movement which is entirely objective the sense of thought of without reference to myself. The shapes, as I correctly stated it in p. 568 (p. 200) of Beauty and Ugliness, ^^ seem to balance and move," and I am not in the least aware of this seeming being
dependent upon any thought or act of my own thoughts and acts come in secondarily, and
my
as
very different result, of the " seeming " balancing, moving, or other proceedings of the lines and shapes. My personal experience here confirms the behef in Empathy as a purely "mental " phenomenon, requiring no bodily " sensations," no definitely or vaguely locaHsed " feeHngs of activity." And it
result, often a
seemmg

seems to
105
me
that the very wording of
many
of
my
an
collaborator's
experiments
takes
for
granted
unlocalised, a wholly unperceived act of
Empathy
preliminary to the localised phenomena and the objective movements by which the movement attribution is explained in those experiments. Now let us return to my Questionnaire sur Velement moteur and see whether the answers to it can throw any light upon the question about which I have just been consulting my own experience, namely, " Does such a process as Einfilhlung
(Empathy)
really
exist
Do
most
persons,
or
any, except professional sestheticians, habitually attribute modes of their own movement " and life to motionless and inanimate shapes ? This can be examined by considering current modes of speech. Forty-five persons, of whom I was one,
or
literal
many
were asked whether they could attach any kind of meaning to such expressions as " lignes qui s'elancent," " toit qui s'abaisse," " groupes qui
movement applied to motionless objects, or whether they considered these expressions as purely conventional and without intrinsic truth. Of these forty-five persons, fourteen gave no answer, nine answered No, while twenty-two, that is to say only one less than half, answered Tes. Considering that the abstentions
s'equilibrent," or other verbs of
from all answer, whether accidental or intentional, cannot be counted to the Noes, it seems to me that we may conclude that at least half of the persons interrogated presented cases of Empathy pure and
simple.
io6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
The most important evidence obtained by my Questionnaire is on the subject of what Professor Groos has accustomed us to think of as Inner
Nachahmung
states
of
(" Inner Mimicry ") meaning thereby muscular strain which accompany or
emphasise the aesthetic phenomenon, and which vary from faint and only vaguely localised sensations to actual beginnings of movements which are sometimes carried out ; muscular states in confirmation of whose existence Professor Groos has more than once done my collaborator and myself the honour of quoting from our joint work on Beauty and Ugliness. It is, I repeat, upon this subject that the answers to my Questionnaire are the most important
They are so, strange as it may at appear, exactly because they are utterly contradictory to one another and even contradictory in themselves. On the questions referring to such phenomena, out of forty-five persons interrogated thirty-nine have answered. But of these thirty-nine
and
instructive.
first
answers only a small proportion can be put under a Only rubric of yes or no. Ten answer not at all. two answer yes or certainly. Twenty-seven answer
with provisos and distinguos which sometimes conSix limit the imistitute apparent contradictions.
tative impulse to remembering or describing (A.
when
memory
is
lively
B. rather
when thought
describing;
D.
in recalling only;
it, etc.).
of; C. in E. as result of
thinking about
Another group of five answers (of which myself) speaks of dramatic imitation or imitation of the human action of a work of art (F. only or especially
if
the attitude represented
is
forced
G. only in the

body
107
case of inferior or badly restored statues; H. if a picture is lifelike, but enjoyment is greatest when
is
at rest).
(not myself) discriminate still further, saying (L) that outer imitation distracts the attention, and that imitation brings home the "human quality (J.) of a represenetd gesture " but that this " does not affect the aesthetic appreciation." now come to another group of answers to which I wish to draw particular attention. I will put these answers in a crescendo of suggestiveness. K. speaks of slight indication with his body of the pose of a statue. This is ambiguous, but L. leaves
Two
We
no doubt that he means Mimicry {Nachahmung) not

necessarily of a dramatic sort, speaking of impulses
to imitate " braced or languid attitude." This distinction between mimicry of the action represented (dramatic mimicry) and mimicry connected
with mere shafe becomes accentuated in our series. M. speaks of " tending to draw the work of art in imagination." N. thinks that " a beginning of
muscular imitation must be connected with lines." O. has only very slight unlocalisable " feelings of direction," and these are connected with lines and " planes. P. and Q. speak of mere " inner tensions and " innervations," and Q. adds but " outer
imitation disturbs aesthetic pleasure." The significance of this group of answers is made clearer by details in other answers. That there is no mimicry in connexion with statues or works of art is affirmed very distinctly by R., S., T., and V. ; and W., X., Y., and Z. declare bodily "ease" (that is, no attempt at assuming the position of a statue) as most favourable to aesthetic enjoyment while yet another subject
;
io8
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

is
remarks that aesthetic enjoyment

forgetfulness oj one's
accompanied hy
The groups
in
own body. which I have placed these answers
are intended to suggest
my own
discriminations,
contradictions,
explanation of the and incoherences
contained in them.
own gallery diary during ten years succeeding the publication of Beauty and Ugliness has made
this meaning clear to me. This diary (large extracts from which will be found in the essay on Esthetic Responsiveness) gives * overwhelming proofs that in dealing with Inner Mimicry we are dealing with two phenomena, sometimes connected and intermeshed but frequently in violent contradiction, but which other sestheticians (Professor Groos, Mr. Berenson, and even Professor Lipps when he passes beyond the limits of his Raumcesthetik) have usually mixed up together, and which some of the vocabulary of Beauty and Ugliness was not calculated to discriminate as clearly as it ought to have done. For the entries in my diary show that, as I myself
My
answered to the Questionnaire
it
is
(i)
only statues
and pictures lacking definiteness and harmony of lines, owing to their being by inferior artists or to having been badly restored, which provoke in my own case any vivid realisation, such as might produce incipient imitation of the action which they are intended to convey, and (2) that it is only on days when aesthetic enjoyment is difficult and the attention easily diverted by the presence of real
people
action
that
such realisation
of
the
represented
becomes dominant to the amount of an
obsession.
verified in
The
my own
explanation of this curious fact, case during several years, and
* See p. 254 et seq. of this volume.

verified also
109
pupil, Dr. Maria Waser-Krebs, testimony of the Questionnaire, answers and explains the apparent contradiction of persons speaking of non-imitative positions being the most propitious to artistic enjoyment, others
by
my
agrees with the
expressly stating that imitative sensations are called forth only in response to works of art being lifelike, that imitative sensations are called forth mostly in remembering or describing, that imitative sensations
aesthetic enjoyment, and finally that, one of the interrogated persons puts it, aesthetic enjoyment makes one forget one's own body while, on the other hand, a group of answers informs us that there are " beginnings of muscular imitation connected with planes," " feelings of direction connected with lines," statements which may be further illustrated by the statement that one of the subjects " tends to draw in imagination the work of
do not favour
as
art before him." These muscular sensations provoked by the sight of the lines and planes, the mere shapes contained in or constituting a work of art, are of a different nature from the muscular sensations provoked by the realisation of a gesture or action which those lines and planes, those mere shafes suggest to our mind, that is to say, to our stored-up experience. And they are, though sometimes connected, on the whole opposed to one another. For an action or gesture requires change or a series of changes of visible shape (as is proved by the cinematograph), and the thought, the realisation in ourselves through muscular sensations, of such alterations of shape must necessarily divert the attention from thorough contemplation of the unchanging relations of lines and planes constituting
a definite visible shape.
We may
indeed (and often

no
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
do) think in rapid alternation of the aspect which a picture or statue presents and of the aspects which would be presented if the action or gesture suggested were carried out, but the one process cannot be dwelt upon without checking the other. Thus, if we think of the horse of Marcus Aurelius as reallywalking, if we think of (and, in some cases, bodily feel) the next positions of the horse's legs and the rider's arm, we are diverted from the full realisation of the interplay of lines and planes constituting the shape of the horse and rider as they are ; and vice versa, if we are absorbed in following (I use the verb purposely, meaning thereby that our attention takes time to pass from point th point) this interplay of lines and planes, then the realisation of what action is intended to be suggested, or, in other words, the imaginary going on to the next moments of that action, is in so far impeded. I shall give (cf. p. 255) numerous extracts from my Gallery Diaries, recording (i) my frequent difficulty in deciding whether a good antique is walking or standing still (compare Taine's remark that an antique does nothing, but merely exists beautifully) ; (2) the annoying emphasis or suddenness of the gesture of painted or sculptured figures, whose lines do not combine into a sufficiently unified pattern, and the disagreeable feeling " There he is still at that Why doesn't he do " due to my motor imagination something else ? being first excited and then frustrated. (Compare the common belief, formulated by Lessing, that painting and sculpture should not take sudden,
transient, or violent
re-presents
movements
as
for their subject, a

itself,
view contradicted by the Laocoon
which
as
sudden, transient, and violent one can choose, but does so in a particularly
movement

elaborate
iii
pattern which
dwell
upon and return
forces the attention to to the same points, thus
producing a sufficiently restful aesthetic impression.) I have insisted at great length upon this difference between the motor images (Empathy) and the muscular sensations (Inner Mimicry) provoked by (i) the suggestion of locomotion or change of
position
inherent
to
all
objective
movement
in
and (2) the suggestion of motordynamic images accompanying the perception of motionless shapes and due to our attention moving across them in the acts of measurement and comparison and to our tendency to attribute to what we see the modes of our unlocalised activity of seeing. In other words, I have insisted on the difference
re'presented things,
my Questionnaire as well as personal experience reveals) between dramatic mimicry and that process which is most unluckily called mimicry oj shape and pattern in the essay on Beauty and Ugliness ; and I have done so because this latter is the only sort of Inner Mimicry referred to in that essay, and also because the failure to see the difference between the two processes has not only diverted aestheticians from the central problem of aesthetics, namely, the problem why some shapes {independent of what they represent) are liked and called beautiful and other shapes disliked and called ugly ; but has also contributed to confuse this central aesthetic problem with the subsidiary problem how shapes can be made most representative or suggestive of things or actions extrinsic to themselves, and has thus led speculation to erroneous " explanation of the " vitalising " or " life-enhancing powers of artistic form. I shall illustrate this confusion by reference to the writings of Mr. B.
(which the answers to
my
112
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
them rather than others because, possessing aesthetic experience and acumen besides
Berenson, choosing
incomparably superior to that of nearly every other writer on the subject, and hence speaking with far greater authority than even the most distinguished psychologists, Mr. Berenson's works contain some of the earliest, most independent and therefore genuine and important testimony to the existence of motor processes in connexion with aesthetic phenomena ; his Florentine Painters., in which he first put forward his theory of what he calls " Tactile values," having been written most certainly without knowledge of my own essay, also written without knowledge of his theories, on Beauty and Ugliness, and also, to all appearance, without knowledge of the cognate ideas Indeed, I have chosen of Messrs. Lipps and Groos. Mr. Berenson's work as an illustration of the practically universal confusion between the two kinds of Inner Mimicry (and indeed of Lippsian
Einfilhlung also) because it enables me to add, without interrupting my exposition, Mr. Berenson's
extremely valuable authority to the other evidence first hand (that chiefly of Lipps, Groos, C. Anstruther-Thomson and myself, and the subjects of my Questionnaire) to the existence of such phenomena as Empathy (Einfiihlung) or of Inner Mimicry
{Innere Nachahmung). I must premise that in the following quotations the words tactile sense appear to be employed with the meaning of muscular sense, and, even occasionally, in connexion with realisation of the third dimension, with the meaning of sense of locomotion of the whole or part of the body.
Tuscan Painters, p. 9 " The stimulation of our tactile imagination awakens our consciousness of the importance of the tactile sense
:
'
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF iESTHETICS

in our physical
113
and mental functioning, and thus again, by making
we are aware of being, gives us heightened sense of capacity." P. 14 " Our eyes scarcely have had time to light on it a (Madonna by Giotto) before we realise it completely, the throne occupying a real space, the Virgin satisfactorily seated upon it, etc. Out tactile imagination is put to play immediately, our palms and fingers accompanying our eyes more quickly than in presence of real objects, the sensations varying constantly with the various projections represented as of
us feel better provided for life than
a
:
face, torso, knees, etc."
strongest stimulation of
never see them (Masaccio's paintings) without the my tactile consciousness. I feel that I could that touch every figure, that it would yield a definite resistance . . I should have to expend thus much effort to displace it, that I could
P. 9
:
.
"I
walk around it." P. 86 : Speaking of the nude, " For here alone can we watch those tautnesses of muscles and those stretchings and relaxings and ripplings of skin which, translated into similar strains in our own
persons,
make us
fully realise
movement."
is the rendering of P. 35 : " The essential in painting tactile values (see above for definition of these), including the sug-
...
gestion of walking round and pushing away, that of locomotion and of muscular effort, such as
sented, because
is
'
to say, suggestions
finger
and palm
sensations cannot represent (except symbolically) of the forms repre-
by this means, and this alone, can art make us realise forms better than we do in life." " We realise objects when we perfectly translate them into P. 84 terms of our own states, of our own feelings . because we keenly realise the movement of a railway, speak of it as going or running,
: .
.
instead of rolling
on
its
wheels.
it
(our object) with
human
attributes, the less
The more we endow it we merely know, the
more we
realise it, the
more does
approach the work of art."
P. 69 et seq. : " Those of us who care for nothing in the work of art but what it represents are either powerfully attracted or repelled by
Cf. Wolfflin's Klassische Kunst der Renaissance (1899), pp. 250 and 254. Professor Wolfflin has very kindly answered a letter in which I asked whethA his words should be interpreted in the physical
or the psychical sense " In speaking of the Innervations called forth by a drawing of Michelangelo's," he writes, " I mean physical phenomena, although the effect may not always be so strong."
114
his
if
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

are such as have
(Botticelli's)
we
unhackneyed types and quivering feeling ; but an imagination of touch and movement that is
. .
easy to stimulate, we feel in Botticelli a pleasure that few, if any, Imagine shapes (of hair) having the other artists can give us. . Ibid., supreme life of line you may see in the contours of licking flames take the lines that render the movements of the tossing hair, the take these lines fluttering draperies and the dancing waves . . alone with all their -power of stimulating our imagination of movement,
.
and what do we have

unconnected
Pure values
of
movement
.
abstracted,
Imagine an art made up entirely of these quintessences of movement values. Tactile values were translated (in Botticelli) j into values of movement and, for the same reason and to prevent the drawing of the eye inward, to prevent it and to devote itself to the rhythm of the)line, the backgrounds were either entirely suppressed, etc.
with
any
representation
whatever.
allusions
(i)
In these quotations it seems to me that there are to two wholly different things, namely,
to visible shapes which suggest objective moveof the re'presented objects and call forth in the spectator feelings or " sensations " of strain such as he would have if he made those movements himself ; and (2) visible shapes made up of lines and combinations of line which awaken in the spectator /^^/zg.f oj movement abstracted^ unconnected with any representa-
ments
tion whatever, movement to which, in the next sentence, Mr. Berenson attributes the formal, the Nay, the aesthetic, quality of rhythm of the line. abstract, non-representative quality oj this movement
(which produces rhythm oj the lini) is made more unequivocal by the remark that in order to enable us to devote ourselves to the rhythm oj the line, the backgrounds were (sometimes) entirely suppressed, that is to say, that the imagination oj movement ojthe represented thing in real space was refused a great part of the third dimension without which the movement of represented objects cannot be thoroughly realised. This transition from (i) the interest in represented

or suggested
115
movement
(i.e.
of
movement imply-
body and change in that body's aspect) to (2) interest in the movement (including, of course, rhythm) attributed by us to motionless and bodiless lines and shapes, is hidden under the expression " translating tactile values into values of movement." I will add one more quotation which, while
ing
constituting an additional repetition of so experienced an sesthetician's testimony in favour of motor processes and Inner Mimicry, will serve to show how this confusion between the motor accompani-
ments of aesthetic form perception and the motor accompaniments of mimetic sympathy with the actions of represented beings has forced Mr. Berenson into explaining aesthetic pleasure as due to facilitated thought about circumstances connected with the represented object as distinguished from the visible form by which it is represented (or suggested), and has thus led him to overlook or evade what I call the central aesthetic problem, viz. the problem of the preference and antipathy inspired by visible shapes entirely apart from any object or action which they may (as in the case of decorative
patterns of architecture) or may not suggest ; the problem dealt with in Lipps's Raumcesthetik, and to which he has applied the hypothesis of Einfiihlung
(Empathy).
" I see," writes Mr. Berenson (Tuscan Painters, p. 50), . . " two men wrestling ; but unless my retinal impressions are immediately translated into images of strain and 'pressure in my muscles, of resistance to my weight, of touch all over my body, it means nothing to me in terms of vivid experience, although a wrestling match may, in fact, contain many genuinely artistic elements. Our enjoyment of it can never be quite artistic ; we are prevented from completely realising it not only by the dramatic interest in the game, but also by the succession of movements being too rapid
.
ii6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

and too fatiguing
if
for us to realise each completely,
realisable.
Now
way could be found of conveying to us the realisation of movement without the confusion and the fatigue of the actuality, we should be getting out of the wrestlers more than they themselves
if
us, the heightening of vitality which comes to us whenever keenly realise life such as the actuality would give us, plus the greater effectiveness of the heightening brought about by the clearer, intenser, and less fatiguing realisation. This is precisely what the
can give
we
succeeded in representing movements achieves ; making as we never can actually y he gives us a heightened sense of In words already familiar, he extracts the significapacity. ... cance of movement just as, in ^rendering tactile values, the artist What a extracts the corporeal significance of objects. pleasure to be able to realise in my own muscles, in my own chest, with my own arms and legs, the life that is in him as he is making how after the contest his muscles will relax his supreme effort . and rest trickle like a refreshing stream through his nerves."
artist
who
us realise
it
In the same way that Hildebrand and his follower Cornelius * identify beauty of form with the easy and satisfactory suggestion of corporeal qualities and locomotor possibilities of the object represented (what Mr. Berenson calls " extracting the corporeal significance ") so Mr. Berenson here explains our pleasure in an arrangement of visible shapes (Pollaiuolo's Herakles and Antceus) by the increased facility with which our attention wanders off from those visible shapes to the realisation of a dramatic action and of successive moments (even the rest after the contest !) which must present totally different visible shapes to our perception, very much as if we identified the pleasure afforded by a picture with its being the starting-point for a cinematographical performance. I hope by this time to have distinguished between
* Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst, 4th edition, 1903. (English translation exists.) Cornelius, Elementargesetze der Bildenden Kunst, 1908 (253 illustrations).
117
such dramatic mimicry as this and those imaginary or incipient or actualised movements to which my collaborator and myself referred whenever, through-
out Beauty and Ugliness, we applied the fatally misleading word miming to the " lifting up " and " pressing down," the " gripping of the ground," the " balancing " of symmetrical sides of the mere
shapes of pottery, furniture, architecture, and accepted from common usage the scarcely less misleading word following as applied to the " move-
ments of
lines
" in pictures.
Beauty and Ugliness, p. 566 " These movements of lines are, in fact, our movements in looking at the lines, movements in most cases so slight as to be hardly perceptible, or like the faintly sketched out movements which accompany our hearing of dance music while staying at rest."
The
mind,
difference
as is
is
difficult to
keep steadily in the

as
shown by even so acute an analyser Professor Groos and I am afraid that at the time
;
of
writing Beauty and Ugliness there was an occasional confusion even in my mind on the subject of the " miming of the gesture " of a statue, in consequence of the experiments of my collaborator having shown that " we cannot satisfactorily focus a stooping figure like the Medicean Venus if we stand before it bolt upright and with tense muscles, nor a very erect and braced figure like the Apoxyomenos if we stand before it humped up and with slackened muscles." The observations on myself contained in my gallery diary have convinced me that the realisation, whether or not accompanied by bodily tension, of the action or gesture of the human being represented in a work of art is in inverse ratio to the realisation, accompanied or not by bodily tension, of the movements attributed to the lines and shapes
ii8
of that
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

work
of art
;
and that what
must
call
the
translation of the visible shapes into terms of human locomotion, gesticulation or such proceedings as produce
(compare the cinematograph) a succession of different

is in vaj case frequent only when there is (from artistic inferiority, mutilation, or mistaken restoration in antiques) a lack of defined and unified " movement of lines," or else when I have not yet had time to be absorbed in such a scheme and quality of line movement, and am still busy with the initial question which occurs in every new act of visual perception What is the thing of which I now see the shape ? Or what thing does this shape represent or suggest by
visible aspects,
resemblance ? It will be remembered that some of the answers to my Questionnaire spoke of tendencies to assume a tense or slack attitude according as the " pose " of
the statue was braced or
slack, and apart from any tendency to mimic its represented action. This observation has been confirmed to me in conversation by one of the most important writers on the laws of sculpture. And it is to such conformity of our own bodily tensions (whether definitely localised or not) with the dynamic suggestions of a statue's shape, that my collaborator and myself now limit the remark (Beauty and Ugliness, p. 677), "When we adjust our muscles in imitation of the tenseness or slackness of the statue's attitude the statue becomes
a reality to us."
In order to remove any ambiguity lurking in these words or suggested by the perhaps defective wording of Beauty and Ugliness, I have obtained from my collaborator, C. Anstruther-Thomson, a summingup of the experimental self-observation made by

joint essay:
119
her previous and subsequent to the writing of our
" No, I dotCt feel the movement of the statue as human movement I feel inclined to copy. " / have not the slightest inclination to adopt the attitude of holding up a child when I look at the Hermes, nor to scrape oil off my arm when I look at the Apoxyomenos, nor to sit on the ground when I look at the Dying Gladiator. None of these statues strike me as doing solely what they are represented as doing. My interest in them as human beings is engulfed by my interest in them as works of art. " To explain my meaning, here is an instance. My eye falls on the Venus of Milo. I don't say to myself, Here is a beautiful woman ! What a pity she has no arms.'' What I say to myself is, ' She moves like a sailing yacht,' and my balance slews a little to the left and right,
that
'
following the lines of the inclination of her body. right side while she balances with her left side.
(I balance with
my
My way is the opposite
of course, as we are face to face ^ I find my pleasure in a complex image she presents of being both a woman and a vessel in full sail, for the combination gives her a stateliness, almost a
way
her
to hers,
is
due
to
look of majesty.
connexion with her is through my motor impulses, and so I feel much connected with her drapery as with her body ; both of them balance and have movement. She does not look like an alive woman who is wearing inanimate drapery ; but she and the drapery are one. The connexion that I do feel with her shape is that which I spoke about
just as
"My
in a previous answer.
" The pressure of my feet on the ground is pressure that I see in a marked The lift-up of my body I see done more degree in the feet of the statue. strongly and amply in her marble body, and the steadying pressure of
my
head I see in a diminished degree in the poise of the statue's beautiful These movements I may be said to imitate, but I should find them and imitate them equally in a Renaissance monument or a medieeval
head.
chalice.
^^
They are at
the basis of all art.
Another connexion that I feel with her is by the balance and shifting of my weight from side to side in order to follow her balance.'' C. A.-T.
These words leave, I think, no doubt as to the nature of the motor processes and muscular sensations of which my collaborator spoke in Beauty and Ugliness. They are of the nature, not of dramatic mimicry, but of what, on its purely psychological

120
side,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

Professor Lipps has described in his Raumunder the name of cesthetische Einfiihlung
cesthetik
or
mechanical
(dynamical)
interpretation
of form.
processes can really be detected in our aesthetic experience, whether such muscular
Whether such motor
come up to the surface of our consciousness during aesthetic apperception, or can be detected in its obscure undercurrents by trained self-observation, is a question upon which answers to these questions would shed a very necessary light. Meanwhile I am able, thanks to the generous helpfulness of Professor Karl Groos, to lay before my readers the personal evidence of the founder of the Innere Nachahmung theory himself. Here are the questions put by me to Professor Groos, with his admirably clear answers.
sensations accidentally
(i) Is Innere Nachahmung (Inner Mimicry) in your experience always or ever accompanied by (a) Sensations localised in your body ? or by
Actual objective changes of position, from one foot to another, or by moving hands, or balancing ? (2) Or is Innere Nachahmung (Inner Mimicry) merely a vague bodily state not localisable and not manifesting itself externally ?
(i)
Or
is it
a purely mental (geistig) state
dramatic miming ? For instance Do you feel (either with or without localisation) as if you would like to put yourself into the attitude of a painted figure or a statue ; or {h) Does the feeling of activity (localisable or not) follow rather the lines, the architectural shafe of a figure or a group ? (4) Have you ever observed whether you feel the action (the dramatic action, the action represented) more in inferior or badly
(3) Is {a)
Innere Nachahmung at
all a
restored statues or in " masterpieces "

I
speaking not oi following lines and feeling their dynamic quality, but of a mimicry of the action which a figure is supposed to be doing. Do you see a sitting figure better when you yourself
are seated, a figure drawing
yourself
itself
am now
up
Does the
sight of the
?
up better when you yourself draw Dying Gladiator give you
any wish not to stand erect
":
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF AESTHETICS

Such are my questions ; here kindly given by Professor Groos
(i)
121
are
the answers
body " and principally and breathing. Possibly also innervations of the muscles of face and nape of neck. Sometimes also of the muscles of upper body, particularly of the torso, legs
of the nature of
" Inner sensations localised in
my
movements
of the eyes
only
when
there
(2) I
am
is musical measure (Takt). unable to say to what extent
all this is
" externally
manifested."
participation)
At any
is
rate,
my
inner
motor Miterleben (mth-living,
never " purely mental."

is
that in
art).
my
I
case there
whenever
(3)
am
In other words, I believe always " kinsesthetic accompaniment " mitgerissen " (" carried away " by the work of
On this point compare R. Vischer's Optische Formgefiihle. confirms what I have said in No. l that my " inner mimicry," so far as bodily position is concerned, particularly refers to the head, neck, and torso of the represented figure. Or, more precisely at this moment, when I search in my memory, it is these parts of represented figures which occur chiefly to me. I have no wish to assume the attitudes of the figures in question ; I am merely aware that I do so with very faint indications. Far more important than such
He
indications of imitation of attitude is for me the accompanying or following or re-creating (Nacherzeugung, literally after-begetting of seen forms through movements of the eyes and of the organs of speech including respiration. In this matter of the breathing exists
in
experience the connexion between the enjoyment of visual With reference to this, what interests me in pictures is not the single figures but the ensemble of lines and general
art
my
and of music.
composition.
confirm from my own (4) The above facts explain why I cannot experience that of C. Anstruther-Thomson. The attitude of the Dying Gladiator does not produce in me any tendency to leave my own upright position, because I mime (Nachahme) principally with the eyes and the respiration. Unintentional experiments have shown me more than once that the mimetic indication of the represented attitudes by means of my own body, at least of ray eyes and
upper body, that such mimetic indication tends to make aesthetic enjoyment easier, so that I become a little excited (gepackt, literally taken hold of), a thing which does not usually happen in voluntary
experimentation.
My intense
delight.
aesthetic
it is
But
enjoyment is rarely of the nature oi jubilant not a " cheerful reposefulness." It is a being-
122
oppression
it is
still,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

saisissement) which partakes both of and of pathos (poignancy, melting mood). In music adagios which act most on me, all movements which are legato,
laid-hold-of (Ergriffensein,
solemn, subdued.
do not in the least think that all real emotional phenomena daring aesthetic enjoyment are emotions of " Miterleben " ii.e. sharing the life of) or of inner miming. What I refer to is merely particular conditions, which some persons know (not perhaps always from their own experience) and which I myself know only in intense and uncritical moments. Such conditions become rarer as I grow older and more reflective ; they are commonest in my case with
I
regard to the beauties of nature.*

* I am now able to add the result of a few more answers to the above Questionnaire, some of these answers being by persons having taken part in the " Wiirzburg Experiments " described at p. 148. A. answers that " Inner Mimicry " is usually, perhaps always, accompanied in his case by sensations, chiefly " muscular " and
organic, although eye-movements and respiratory changes are occasionally felt.
The
organic sensations are rather diffused than
localised, e.g. a general contraction of
muscles rather than faintly, a wish to put himself in the attitude of a painted or sculptured figure. A. has not noticed whether such sense of activity accompanies perception of the lines and architectural shape of a work of art, thinks that the " Inner Mimicry " of the dramatic {i.e. represented) action is greater in case of good works of art. But the whole process does not play a great part in A.'s aesthetic appreciation. B. knows " Inner Mimicry " and organic accompaniments only in connexion with music, and thinks that its absence may account for the " coldness " of his enjoyment of visual art. C. premises that " Inner Mimicry " is a rare occurrence. C. has experience of a wish to imitate the attitude of a statue or a painted figure, but considers such a phenomenon as merely preparatory to aesthetic enjoyment. What really interests C. is following the lines and the architectural shapes. C. finds that the tendency to imitate the dramatic or represented action is greater in dealing with inferior works ; in great works " the dynamic quality of the line " is what dominates. " Inner Mimicry " may result in actual change of attitude, but C. cannot say that such a change of objective attitude
of any special ones.
many
A. has
rarely,
and then only
would facilitate aesthetic appreciation. D. is unconscious of any wish to alter his position or balance, and finds no difference in looking at a standing figure while seated
123
Leaving it to other observers and experimenters to determine this question of facts, I shall examine what interpretations may be put upon such pheno-
mena of Inner Mimicry {Innere Nachahmung) as have already been brought to light.
part of
so I must pass on to the third subject the question of organic accompaniment or resonance of aesthetic apperception of " visible shapes, in other words, to that " Sergian application of the Lange-James theory which attributes aesthetic emotion, pleasurable and the
But before doing
my
reverse, to " the perception of
active participation of the
form implying an most important organs of
animal life, a constant alteration in vital processes requiring stringent regulation for the benefit of the total organism." (Beauty and Ugliness,^. ^/\.^ [p* IS?]-) I have already remarked that, owing to the defective drawing out of my Questionnaire sur Velement moteur, the evidence obtained on what I must call " Empathy (Einftihlung) as such," namely, the attribution of movement and modes of activity to motionless objects and shapes, lost much of its value. For the answers referred not merely to the question whether certain common expressions like lignes qui sêlancent were to be taken as merely
or vice versa
;
but D. is conscious of " Inner Mimicry " by movements
of the hands, both in presence of works of art and in recollecting them. Finally, E., a well-known and very aesthetically gifted archaeologist,
unable to remember any " Inner Mimicry " in the presence of works of art, and knows imitative tendencies only in speaking of works of art, in which case the gesture is merely an adjunct to verbal description, and may exist equally where no art, but only real persons
is
or objects, are in question.
The student can sum up these answers for himself, and compare the result with that given by the " Wiirzburg Experiments," as
on
p. 148 et seq.
"
124
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

or
as
conventional
reality,
corresponding to some
literal
but also to other questions grouped under the same heading owing to their dealing with language and " metaphor," but which were really quite separate judged from the point of view of an inquiry into Empathy (Einfuhlung) as such. These questions were
:
" Vous rendez-vous compte de ce que nous entendons par sentiments de bien-Hre organique, quelquefois vagues, quelquefois localises
dans la region cardiaque et respiratoire et dans la tete (pas dans les muscles de I'oeil) lorsque vous vous trouvez en presence des tableaux et des paysages reels qui vous plaisent ? . Quelque chose en vous meme semble-t-elle repondre a ces verbes de mouvement appliques a des objets immobiles ? Et pour les etats plus complexes et deja affectifs, rattachez-vous un sens en quelque sorte litteral aux mots " une voute qui ecrase I'ame " " les arceaux gothiques qui donnent I'essor a I'imagination " " une coupole sous laquelle on respire a I'aise, on se sent la poitrine gonfler " " un paysage peint (ou effectif) qui nous fait le ccEur leger, qui nous delivre du poid des soucis, qui accelere ou regularise le rythme de la vie ? " ces expressions vous semblent-elles des formes de pure convention,
.
.
sans verite intrinseque ; ou vous semblent-elles accuser des etats physiologiques dont vous avez vaguement conscience dans vos
experiences esthetiques
Among the twenty-two affirmative answers respecting the literal or conventional nature of the " metaphoric " or Empathic (Einfuhlung) expressions grouped confusedly in my Questionnaire, ten answers contain the additional information that " something in oneself answers " or that " there is something bodily, physiological " in the case ; or that there are " dynamical sensations." But the answers to my Questionnaire contain other evidence on this " Lange- James " part of the subject.
To the question whether arrangements of lines and planes in pictures, in nature, and in architecture produce organic bien-etre or malaise, nine give no
125
answer, JZAT answer No, and the rest assent in various ways, two limiting this to natural scenery, one specifying particularly architecture, two speaking of a sense of organic restfulness, one speaking of " heightened vitality," one answering " highly physical," two adding " not localised," /owr mentioning sensations connected with the heart or respiration, one speaking of a muscular sense of uplifting, and one of beautiful forms seeming to caress one. But the subject of bodily accompaniments or resonances of aesthetic perception is further illusQuestionnaire asks trated by a negative test. (Question 13) "La depression physique, la fatigue, I'indisposition avec malaise ou tiraillement, vous empechent-elles de jouir pleinement d'une ceuvre d'art ? Ou bien la vue de celle-ci a-t-elle, h. un degre plus ou moins prononce, le pouvoir de refouler momentanement votre etat penible ? " To this question eighteen of the forty-five subjects give no answer, ^wo, both of them priests and who have previously disclaimed all interest in artistic form as distinguished from subject or moral suggestion, answer that only moral and intellectual satisfaction can overcome fatigue or slight pain ; eleven persons answer that fatigue and depression stand in the way of artistic pleasure ; eleven that it is a matter of degree of previous fatigue or malaise. Only three answer that the presence of beautiful things is " always restorative " (one answers " unless deadly ill "). One makes it a question of novelty acting as a stimulant, and three, of which one myself, remark that a degree of initial unwillingness due to physical depression may sometimes be overcome by an effort ; these latter groups of answers testifying to the confusion existing in people's mind between
My
126
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the partial or total impeding of artistic pleasure (and indeed attention) hy physical depression or malaise and the physically restorative action of such pleasure once it has been awakened. To this evidence in proof of the existence of bodily conditions unfavourable to aesthetic pleasure there may be added, by those who accept the LangeJames theory independently of aesthetics (as I understand Professor Groos to do in his latest publication), another indirect piece of evidence five or six of my subjects answer affirmatively (and with detail, leaving no doubts) to the question whether, after the visual image of a work of art has disappeared from their memory, a sort of emotional
:
its name and revives a slight emotion According to the Lange-James theory such a stored-up and revived emotion would answer to a revival of the bodily condition without which (always according to the Lange-James theory) no real emotion can exist. Now such sense of hien-etre and malaise provoked by the lines and planes of pictures, statues, architecture, or natural scenery does indeed suggest that lines and planes have a direct influence upon our but they do not in the least explain why vitality they should have it. " Organic hien-etre " feelings of expansion about the chest, of increased stature and improved balance, or particularly of diminished weight, are one or all an accompaniment of all sudden or great happiness, whatever its cause, but their existence does not explain why one kind of visible shape should provoke happiness plus hien-etre and another kind of visible shape provoke dissatisfaction and malaise, and it is just this latter problem which the " organic accompaniments " detailed in
halo clings to of pleasure.
127
C. Anstruther -Thomson's experiments in Beauty and Ugliness attempted to solve by an application of the Lange-James theory to aesthetics. Professor Groos describes an experiment of his own which he seems to consider as crucial
breathe in very slowly, steadily, and deep, you the sensation of the gentle pressure of the in-streaming air. At the same time give your head a very faint tendency to slow movement upwards and backwards (by the way, this attitude has become a common one of modem painters in their representation of ideal feminine beauty, from Herkomer to common posters, etc.). These movements result in a slow motion of the thorax and diaphragm ; and they are accompanied, so far as the circumstances of the experiment will allow, but with astonishing clearness, by a psychic condition which has usually something both of being oppressed and of being touched. The oppression arises from the chest ; the feeling of being touched (Riihrung) is due to a slight movement above the muscles of the brow {einer Kleinen iiber die Stirmuskeln hinstreichende Regung). We receive a quite similar, but much completer, complex of feeling when we are profoundly afFected by the beauty of a quiet evening landscape or by a slow and legato {eine Getragene) melody.
;
" Close your eyes
so that the nostrils, in a state of slight tension, give
taking
But such a manner of holding the head and of and emitting the breath may indeed be
mingled with a
characteristic of aesthetic delight
certain nostalgic clinging to the passing moment, as it is certainly characteristic of other delight and
clinging not at
of lines
determined by the peculiarities but such carriage of the head and such breathing are not those which could
all
and shapes
act of perceiving visible exploration and of measureform (an act of ocular ment and comparison), still less those differentiating the perception of such form as gives pleasure from the perception of such shapes as give dissatisfaction it is certainly not because of any such holding of my head or holding and emitting of my breath that I
possibly
accompany the
128
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

impelled to
alter, if I
am
can
alter,
dress, the balance of a hat or the angles
the lines of a and curves
presented by a group of plants or of furniture. Above all, it was not such bodily changes and emotional conditions which were dealt with in Beauty and Ugliness and brought forward in explanation, not only of aesthetic pleasure, but also of aesthetic displeasure. Our " Sergian " application of the Lange-James theory to the central problem of aesthetics {i.e. that of the differentiation between beautiful and ugly visible shapes) did not deal with bodily accompaniments of delight in things already
recognised as beautiful, but with
what
my collaborator
claimed to be the bodily accompaniments (normal though not normally perceptible) of the movements made by the eyes and the head in the process of exploring visible shapes, and they can be exemplified by the following quotation from Beauty and Ugliness " adjustments of bilateral breathing, of (p. 559), equilibrium transferred with regularity from one
side to the other, tensions of lifting
up and
pressing
downwards, as
the eyes
move along
the symmetrical
outline oj the jar.^^
Now the question is Do such adjustments of the balance and alterations in the breathing really take place ? Let us first examine the answers of my Questionnaire. One subject speaks of " tending to draw in imagination," but this may refer to tensions accompanying the thought of reproducing the lines with a pencil, tensions connected with the movements of drawing with the forefinger, and of modelling with the thumb which we have all of us noticed in painters or sculptors when describing visible objects. Several allude to " inner tensions,"
:
129
one to a beginning of muscular imitation connected with lines, another to very slight unlocalisable feelings of direction connected with lines and planes. But not one has answered Tes to any question of shifting the balance, nor have I been able to find any indication of alterations in breathing. As regards myself, I have not, in ten years' registering of my gallery experience, observed in myself any such following of lines with the breath, the balance, or the muscular sensations. What I have observed on the surface (beyond which I have deliberately refused to penetrate) of my consciousness have been
phenomena of altered breathing particularly in the nostrils distinctly connected with the output of attention, but rather as a matter of degree than according to the nature of the shapes perceived ; and analogous, as it seems to me, to the respiratory changes of which I am aware while talking, thinking, writing, in fact giving my attention to other things than visible shapes and lines ; respiratory changes often, perhaps always, accompanied by sensations of palpitation, " rat in the chest," and, generally speaking, of alterations in cardiac action, to which medical examination shows me to be morbidly subject. On the other hand, my self-observations possibly afford some negative evidence about the respiratory and equilibratory and muscular accompaniments of ocular movements in the fact that such alterations in the rhythm of the heart seem to make it easier in my case to attend to certain visible shapes than to others (as I have ascertained after going up flights of stairs), while, if the sensations of palpitation or heart irregularity become very strong, all attention to visible shapes, like all attention to trains of thought, in fact all regular grasping or
130
holding
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
with the attention, becomes extremelyand sometimes impossible. Now what is such grasping and holding with the attention, or rather, why do we apply to perception, to memory, and to logical concatenation words suggesting motor experiences and even muscular processes ? And if we feel that we hold or grasf without any sensations in the hands or arms (for I am not alluding to anything resembling in the least Mr. Berenson's sensations in the palms and fingers), with what do
difficult
we
feel
?
that
we
steady)
sion hold
Remark that we employ the same to our breathing. Does this not
grasf or hold (particularly hold expressuggest
that there is an element of muscular tension common to prehension with the arms, hands, and (as regards the ground) the feet, and prehension (or, as we call it, comprehension) with the eye or mind, and that
this common element may be an ill-localised sensation of holding, of gripping, or of letting go in the respiratory regions, sensation testifying to some real alteration in the taking in and giving out of our
breath ? Is not the breath connected, by immemorial usage (far more than any cardiac action), with the life ? In short, may our attribution of life to inanimate objects, to mere bodiless shapes, often to mere two-dimensional patterns of lines, not be connected with our attention to such objects and shapes being accompanied by sensations, vague or clearly localised, which we are accustomed to think of as the sensations of our own life ? As regards my own inability to detect such sensations of respiratory adjustments as accompaniments to the perception of visible shapes, I may put forward one or two suggestions, (i) That alterations in the heart's action swamp everything except very strong and

clearly localised bodily sensations (as they
131
tend to divert all attention to themselves), and that persons who, like myself, are excessively subject to cardiac
sensations, probably cease to perceive the far
more
delicate respiratory sensations (except, as I said, in the

nostrils), nay, that the respiratory changes may in such individuals (and they are probably numerous among nervous, hence among aesthetically sensitive subjects)
tend to be translated immediately into cardiac changes, which dominate the consciousness by their insistence, and which heighten a factor (too much neglected by Einfuhlung and Nachahmung and Miterlebung hypotheses equally) in all aesthetic experience, the factor of rhythm. I make this suggestion because, while my Gallery Diaries give no direct evidence upon such respiratory and equilibratory sensations as my collaborator, C. Anstruther-Thomson, has discovered by dint of highly trained introspection, these Gallery Diaries of mine (in which, as remarked, I have never noted down anything which did not spontaneously offer itself on the surface, so to speak, of my everyday aesthetic consciousness) testify to the existence in myself of a very curious idiosyncrasy the greater or lesser vividness of the perception of various visible shapes due to the accompaniment of various musical themes. As the account of this peculiarity contained in the Revue Philosophique (1905, Nos. I, 2) * has not been clear enough to prevent a decided misapprehension on the part of Professor Groos, I wish to explain myself better. The tunes or rhythms corresponding to given visible shapes, or rather to their easy and complete perception, are not, as Professor Groos has imagined, evoked in me by the sight of those given shapes.
*
Reproduced
in Esthetic Responsiveness.

132
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
are tunes which happen to be already in my head (I am nearly always aware of a fragment of melody performing itself in me, particularly when moving about) and also other tunes which, on noticing that the spontaneously haunting one (with which I have come armed into the presence of a work of art) somehow impedes my aesthetic seeing, I have purposely rehearsed in my mind until I have found one (often after much trying) which seems to allow or even favour my full visual attention. A great many observations have convinced me without
They
a single exception that
The tune by which I happen to be haunted and which might be supposed to be connected with my momentary condition is by no means calculated to favour the perception of every work of art upon that occasion, nor in particular that of the work of art with which I happen to begin my day's round. (2) That the tune, whether brought with me to the gallery or obtained after much trying, which favours or impedes the seeing of a given picture or statue on one day, nearly invariably favours or impedes the seeing of that particular picture or statue on other occasions, although I should not be aware of the fact if my notebook had not recorded it. " expression " of the tune is in no (3) That the relation whatever with the " subject " or " expression " of the picture or statue, and that the attention which is favoured (or impeded) is one dealing
(i)
exclusively with the visual form, that is, the lines and planes of the general composition and the
the graphic quality of the lines along which the eye can travel, whether these coincide or not with the outlines of represented
particular quality
objects.
CENTRAL PROBLEM OF .ESTHETICS 133 A similar phenomenon has been verified by my

pupil, Dr. Waser-Krebs, and, without any methodical observations,
to a certain extent
-
by
my
col-
laborator,
C.
Anstruther
Thomson.
similar
facilitation of the perception of
one given picture
during the objective performance (on the piano) of a given piece of music with a corresponding impeding of the perception of another picture was observed
presence by a painter, who of my then quite unpublished observations on this subject, and who happened to be listening to music in a room hung with a number of water-colours by different painters. But I have never found any other person to whom this phenomenon was known, nor any person who would take the trouble to make observations on the subject ; and it can probably only be verified by individuals who are, like myself, most often accom-
upon
had
accidentally in
my
certainly
never
heard
panied by some remembered fragment of melody. I mention this idiosyncrasy because the existence
of characteristics of tempo, rhythm, and accent, of something corresponding to the muscular span of a
musical interval * common to given visible and given audible patterns may possibly represent in my case the existence of respiratory and equilibratory as well as muscular accompaniments to the only sensations of adjustment of which I am conscious during visual perception, namely, adjustments in or about the eyes. And here I wish to quote a passage from Professor
to
A very musical friend, telling me how all her impressions tend " translate themselves " {i.e.^ find accompanying equivalents) into musical sounds, mentions that she habitually estimates distances, when walking about, in musical intervals, which she hears
*
internally.
134
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

it
Groos's recent essay, because
represents the result
of self-observation entirely uninfluenced, I believe,
by the experiments and theories contained in Beauty and Ugliness.

" As
it
already suggested, the explanation of the emotional effects
contemplation) does not require that we should base upon such emotional ' values ' as are peculiar to the mimetic muscular adaptations above mentioned. It is probably far more important (in this matter) that such muscular adaptations constitute the means by which the (already existing) excitement is propagated to the Inner portions (German : ins Innere, doubtful whether in sense of visceral or cerebral), until, particularly in the field of visceral sensations, this excitement produces those emotions which have been previously connected with similar movements of the limbs, of the torso, and the face. This being the case, mere suggestions and analogies of the really executed objective proceedings might suffice. Such suggestions and analogies might awaken the underlying emotional processes in the same manner that, during sleep, a slight muscular tension can produce the liveliest emotions of the dreamer ; a phenomenon which Robert Vischer already pointed out (in his Optische Formgefilhl) as comparable to what
(of aesthetic
principally
am
talking of.
" I have said that mere suggestions and analogies would suffice. This remark leads us to two other mediators of kinaesthetic epiphenomena. Considerable evidence seems to show that in the case of visible objects mimetic-ocular movements are of very essential service. We must not, however, imagine that movements
. . .
of the eyeball are sufficient to follow adequately the detail of the

visible
shapes
...
it
is
probable that imaginal
(reproduktive)
tactile factors
conduce in completing the sensorial experience. The eye itself sweeps (wischt) with suitable movements round the forms of the object, and has no more need to follow its outlines slavishly than a housemaid requires to make an octagonal sweep with her arm when she is wiping an octagonal tray. The close connexions established during infancy between the exploring (tastenden) hand and the " following " eye are sufficient for such modifying and enriching of our motor images (Bewegungsvorstellungen).
Is
such an accompaniment of ocular movement
by
respiratory or equilibratory adjustments a constant factor in the aesthetic perception of visible
135
form ? The question remains for the present an open one. For it is necessary to point out that, as was especially stated in Beauty and Ugliness (p. 687), this phenomenon is hidden, can be watched only in especial experiments like those made by my collaborator as the result of specially trained attention, and is, by the very fact of normal aesthetic attention, being withdrawn from the perceiving subject and fixed upon the perceived object, translated at once into qualities of the visible shape
{Beauty and Ugliness, p. 546).

ourselves productive of the sense of height, or roundness, or
" Our attention has become engaged, not with the change in symmetry, but with the objective external causes of these changes ; and the formula'of perception has become, not ^Î feel roundness, or height, or symmetry," but " this or that object is round, or high, or
symmetrical."
There
is
yet another reason
why
the absence of
is
knowledge of such alleged phenomena
no argument
against their real existence, viz. (and here comes in the importance of the motor type which Professor
Groos once connected with
aesthetic sensitiveness)
that there is great difference between individuals with regard to their power and habit of attending to their own movements and still more in their
power
of localising
any attendant sensations
hence
a great difference also in the recollection of localised sensations, and (by a vicious circle) in the recognition
of
them when, by some chance, they come
surface.
The
localisation of sensations of
to the muscular
strain, etc.,
depends partly upon
a visualisation of
people scarcely possess, partly upon some schematic sense of the relation of various sensitive tracts of the body, a probable sense of unvisualised geography of one's body, which in
one's
own body which many
136
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
most of us is excessively imperfect, as is shown by the extreme difficulty many of us have in knowing " how " they accomplish the simplest muscular function, and the still greater difficulty of finding the parts which are to accomplish any unusual movement, for instance, to set the vocal parts and to breathe with the full lungs under the order of a master of " voice-production." There is, for instance, a difference toto ccbIo between the power of localisation of muscujar processes possessed by my collaborator, C. Anstruther - Thomson, and myself in my collaborator, skilled from childhood in every kind of bodily activity and possessing every kind of dexterity of hand, an athlete, rider, coachman, dancer, painter, modeller, cutter-out,
:
constant interest in locomotion as such, a thinking in terms of in myself, neither facility nor training in bodily activities, incapacity of learning a piece of music except by ear or eye, incapacity of learning (despite rather remarkable visual memory) to draw ; conscious life concentrated, so to speak, on the eye and the literary faculties, translation of everything into visual images and into words ; and moreover, as before remarked, liabiHty to very frequent sense of cardiac changes such as must swamp other organic sensations by their insistence and their rhythmical quality. Now consider that the " moter subject " is, very probably, an imperfect visualiser and deficient in the habit of turning experience into words, while the visualiser and the verbaliser (who could visualise the parts where they
etc. etc., there
is
and manipulation bodily movement ;
feel
movement and
store
up and communicate
experience in words) are probably deficient in observation and storage of muscular experiences
CENTRAL
PROBLEINI
OF ESTHETICS
137
consider all this and you will understand why it will always be difficult to obtain information about
phenomena, which, if they exist, are normally subconscious and, by the very nature of aesthetic perception, are translated into qualities attributed to the visible objects, qualities thought of as existing
outside ourselves,
and
for
which we have
as little
the habit of looking inside our bodies as we have the habit of looking for the colour red in our eye, the middle la of the violin in our ear, or the smell of a flower in our nose. But although I thus insist that absence or insufficiency of testimony to the existence of the bodily
accompaniments
(or partial constituents) of visual
shape perception does not in the least militate against their real and constant existence, I desire to make it clear that I do not think we have a right to accept their real existence, still less to make it (as I was guilty of doing in Beauty and Ugliness) the basis of explanation, unless we obtain evidence of a kind totally different to that of any introspection. And about this matter I found all my hopes upon objective investigations such as can be carried on by physiologists and psycho-physical experimenters. It seems to me that it ought to be possible to invent some graphic apparatus which should register any bodily alterations which may attend, not the simple (and quite artificial) states of aesthetic perception studied (to no purpose that I can see) by men like Fechner, but the bodily alterations changes in heart action, respiration, contraction, and in muscular tension (if possible) in the organs and equilibrium, during normal aesthetic experiences (say repeated visits to galleries and monuments or magic lantern exhibitions) of whose " intellectual " and
138
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
" emotional " sides the subject of experiment should keep a record ; so that we should know, by a perfectly automatic process, not what the subject of experiment felt to he going on in his body while he looked at works of art, but what actually was going on in that body at moments when the very existence of his body was forgotten in the intensity of aesthetic attention. For, after all, in attempting to explain
variations in aesthetic consciousness
by
alterations in
bodily processes, we must surely suppose that what exists in consciousness is not the knowledge {knowledge which is itself a psychological fact !) of bodily processes in themselves, but some sort of translation or transmutation thereof into well, into those mysterious things which we can only, for the
modes oj consciousness, and among " knowledge," " locali" sensation," etc. etc., which alone tell us sation," of our bodily existence ; for we are in a vicious circle we can know our bodily states only in, or through, or by, what we call our mental ones.*
moment,
call
which
exist those very terms,
* Titchener, Feeling and Attention, p. 292 " Affective experience is the obscure, indiscriminable correlate of a medley of widely diffused excitatory processes. The excitatory processes will report the ' tone ' of the bodily systems from which they proceed, and the report will vary, and can only vary, between ' good ' and ' bad.' At this point, of course, the theory takes account of ' mixed feelings ' . and lastly, the theory explains . the introspective resemblance between affections and organic sensations. Genetically, the two sets of processes are near akin, and it is natural that they should be intimately blended in experience. . .
. .
It seems to
{i.e.
me that it is better policy to look at the affective processes

manner here
outlined, than to think of
pleasure-pain) in the
them
as apperceptive reactions, or as centrally aroused
concomitant
sensations, or as indices of the state of nutrition of the cerebral
cortex, or as symptoms of the readiness of central discharge. But every one cannot be right ; and where our positive knowledge is practically t7, there is no disgrace in being wrong. . . . Let
139
I shall now attempt to define my own present attitude towards the three hypotheses dealt with in the foregoing pages. I
will begin
it.
with Inner Mimicry
in
order to
it
dismiss
Not because the phenomena
alleges
are unverified, since they are,
on the contrary, those
whose existence reposes upon the greatest amount of evidence. But because, as I have endeavoured to show, only one of the two kinds of so-called
or mimicry can be applied to explain our interest in and our Hkings and disHkings in the matter of mere visible shapes as such, namely, such mimicry, such actual movements or muscular sensations siS follow the movements of the eye, and correspond to peculiarities (height, breadth, depth, bilateralness, symmetry, etc. etc.) of the shapes as such and correspond also to characteristics (slackness, tension,
swiftness,
Nachahmung
weightiness, Hghtness, etc.) which we attribute to lines and shapes absolutely independent
of what
objects or
to
movements
these lines
and shapes are
intended
suggest to our mind.
As regards the other kind of actual movements or muscular sensations provoked by the thought of
such represented objects or actions, such as prehensile and locomotor sensations of the sort alluded to by Mr. Berenson and by Professor Groos in part of his evidence, these, or the mental states which produce or are produced by them, no doubt play a part, perhaps an important part, in the excessively complex and varying group of phenomena connected with works of art. But although they may enhance or diminish, although they may influence in a dozen ways the output of our aesthetic attention and its
us take it as agreed that affection is an independent mental process, inherently obscure, and evincing a qualitative duality."
140
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

or
is
pleasurable
their origin
painful,
in
its
" emotional,"
effects,
an act of recognition of what the visible shapes resemble or suggest, and their existence cannot explain preferences for peculiarities in those shapes independent of any such act of recognition. I am the first to admit that " aesthetic pleasure," or, as I should prefer to call it, " artistic
pleasure,"
contains
intellectual,
moral,
dramatic,
and many other important
factors besides the factor
of perception of visible form. But these I wish to keep out of the present discussion, which is the same as that which I had previously headed with the words, expressive of the intrinsic qualities of
form. Beauty and Ugliness. The other half of the alleged mimetic movements and muscular sensations is directly connected with the hypothesis that the agreeable or disagreeable effect of certain shapes is due to their perception being accompanied by alterations in the breathing and the balance and in whatever vital functions may be intimately connected with these. And here again I wish to put in a proviso, namely, that I am as deeply persuaded as any one of the pleasure and displeasure due to mere perception of visible shape being enormously heightened by all manner of organic resonances which are intrinsically dependent on totally different functions (Mr. Santayana has pointed out the increase of aesthetic sensitiveness connected with sexual development). Indeed I think it is conceivable, though not probable, that the central aesthetic phenomena of form-preference and aversion may owe nine-tenths of its emotional quality to organic resonances * connected, by some
Titchener, Feeling and Attention (1908), p. 159 : "Now I personally believe that the organic sensations play an
141
grouping of functions, with the mental characteristics, perhaps the muscular accompaniments of " the states of mere " preference " and " aversion as such, and that the " poignancy " of certain
aesthetic experiences may be due rather to a psychical (or perhaps a physical) gesture of seeking, grasping, clinging to, what we have already preferred
than to the act of preference itself. But that act of aesthetic preference, even if we imagine it to have
but little emotional quality of its own, would remain to be accounted for, and the hypotheses brought forward by C. Anstruther-Thomson and myself in Beauty and Ugliness all bear upon alleged or possible concomitants, intrinsic and constant, of form-perception in itself, and not upon any secondary and connected phenomena of dramatic mimicry and organic " radiation " by which aesthetic formpreference may or may not be compHcated. As regards, therefore, this central aesthetic pheno-
menon
of visual form-preference, there arises the

:
question
Is
accompanied by
the act of ocular perception of shape (i) muscular adaptations other
important part, not only in feeling and emotion, but in many other departments of the mental life in the formation of sensory judgments, in the mechanism of memory and recognition, in motives to action, in the primary perception of the self. Well I believe that organic sensations are responsible for the dimensions of excitementdepression and tension-relaxation. When I observe a differ. ence of pleasantness-unpleasantness in everyday life a difference
:
on the
level of the sense-feeling
seem to find a reason
for it in
concomitant organic sensations. * Dr. Legowski, a pupil of Kiilpe's who has {Beitr'dge zur exferimentchen jEsthetik, 1908) recorded a most interesting series of experiments with simple geometrical figures, considers that " the personal participation (MiterUben) in suggested processes (t^. mimetic interpretation of geometric shapes V. L.) depended upon the setting up of instantaneous organic sensations and movement-impulses."
142
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

itself
;
than those of the eye
in the functions of respiration
and (2) by adjustments and equiHbrium, and

?
other consequent organic changes
In other words,
are the bodily phenomena described in Beauty and Ugliness and the cognate bodily phenomena described
on ^sthetische Miterlehen, the cause, or the result, of the aesthetic preference for certain lines and shapes ?
in Professor Groos's recent article
This question remains open, and, after considerable fluctuation of opinion on the subject, I confess that I am at present in absolute uncertainty, and that it seems to me that this matter of the bodily origin or bodily results of the psychic act of aesthetic
form-preference requires to be submitted not only
to much and rigorously compared introspection, but even more to physiological or psycho-physical scrutiny. This question is interdependent with the Lange-James hypothesis in general ; and, while the hypothesis of a connexion of body and soul in the aesthetic phenomenon will share whatever fate is reserved for the Lange-James hypothesis, that hypothesis may, I think, be ultimately accepted or
rejected largely as a result of investigations of the aesthetic phenomenon. This is, I think, a question less of aesthetics than of psychology, or rather
psycho-physiology. But putting aside all such questions of the parallelism or perhaps the dovetailing of " bodily " and " mental " processes, there remains the question of our interest in visible shapes for their own sake and of our satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and the explanation thereof by the hypothesis of the attribution of our own modes of dynamic experience (" motor ideas " as distinguished from " muscular processes ") to the shapes whose perception is a result not merely of the bodily
143
activity of our eyes, but of the " mental " (perhaps ultimately bodily) activities of measuring, comparing, combining of the visual data ; and is accompanied by the reviviscence of motor experience as distinguished from muscular sensations in what we call our " mind." Such a hypothesis as this in many respects answering * to the psychological nucleus round which Professor Lipps has spun the metaphysical phraseology of his Einfiihlung I wish once more to accept as the only one which tackles the central problem of aesthetics and does so in accordance with the facts and theories of modern mental science. Such are the hypotheses contained in that essay on Beauty and Ugliness, the amplification and correction of whose facts and theories will continue to afford work to my collaborator and myself, and will, I
* Although this book

of the results of
is
already in the printer's hands, I cannot
refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting Professor Kiilpe's
summing up some of Stratton's experiments (Gegenwartige Stand
der Exferimentchen yEsthetik, 1907), because I find in it the corroboration of my own views, not only by Mr. Stratton, but by Professor
Kiilpe himself
aesthetic object only as a psychic depends far more upon attention and fancy, active comprehension and sympathy, than upon bodily sensations. The thought of Life and Life's forces, of unifying laws and self-enclosing wholes, Empathy and the love of participating
(geistig)
"
We
must therefore regard the

or central creation.
It
in co-ordinated activity
spatial forms.
these
are the aesthetic appreciation of
which we experience in mimicking the seen shapes (das Gesehene) are only subsidiary means of^ making the impression more personal and more lively. They may be compared to the drums and cymbals of an orchestra. It is very satisfactory," adds Professor Kiilpe, " to find these views more especially in the case of an American investigator." I may therefore accept them as Professor Kiilpe's own views, and point out that they really agree both with Lipps's hypothesis and with
sensations
The
Professor Groos's present attitude.
144
trust,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

profit,
be carried on by younger sestheticians who not only by whatever we have achieved, but by the very mistakes we have committed.
may
APPENDIX TO ''THE CENTRAL PROBLEM''

Quotations from Hugo Miinsterberg, The Principles of Art Educa(New York, 1905), p. 82 et seq. :
*'
tion
Every curve or line or space division is thus psychologically eye-movement sensations. Is this enough to explain why certain combinations or divisions of lines and spaces are agreeable or disagreeable ? Certainly not. . The motor impulse of the brain may radiate to other muscle groups of our organism. The light points on the right may stir up not only the eye muscles to move our eyes to the right, but may excite our whole organism to turn to the right side, extend the arms in that direction, to grasp with the hands for the object. The brain mechanism for this transmission of stimulation into bodily action does exist and must exist, for it is clearly the condition for the local adjustment of our actions in practical life. Whenever one object in the field of vision demands our practical action, perhaps our grasp of it, the locally related system of movement-impulses is brought about through the optical impression. The object high in the field of vision turns our whole body upwards, the low object downwards. " Now there are three possibilities, three cases, which we can clearly separate theoretically, although practically no sharp demarcation line exists, and endlessly many combinations and transmissions between the three schemes are found. The first case is that in which the motor impulse to the body finds the organism engaged in other activities under the control of more vivid impressions or ideas or
a system of
. .
thoughts. The new excitement is thus inhibited ; that is, the eyes follow the outlines of the visual objects, but the body as a whole remains unmoved. That is, of course, the most frequent case. see in every instant plenty of forms, but they do not engage our organism outside of the eyeballs, and the result is that the forms are
We
merely local distances and directions.
The
second case
is
that in
which the objects in the visual field demand from us an action whether we approach the thing or escape from it, whether we change

it in
145
one way or another is, of course, determined by the qualities of the object, but the general local adjustment depends necessarily upon its local forms ; we grasp the thing by its handle, we put the
In this second case the optical foot to the side-walk, etc. ... impression does produce a bodily movement, but the corresponding movement sensation is felt as a state of one's own personality, as indication of the subjective reaction. We perceive the thing and we perceive ourselves as performing the action. . . . We may say in general : whenever the given optical impression connects itself
with the idea of a future effect or change, the resulting motor impulse is felt and interpreted as our own activity, directed towards the future
end.
But
a third case
is
possible.
at present
and
for itself alone,
The optical impression, as it is may absorb our mind then the motor
;
impulse to the organism will discharge

tensions
itself
and lead to
localised
and movement sensations. Here the impulse is not, as in our first case, checked by motions in the interest of other objects, for the presupposition was that one object alone filled our mind.
On the other hand, the impulse cannot now lead to a practical action,
our second case, for we saw that every practical action involves the idea of an end to be reached ; thus leading beyond the present impression which, according to the presupposition, fills the whole mind. The suppression and inhibition of the idea of practical future end thus creates a suppression of the real external movement, an effect which is produced in the organism by an innervation of the antagonistic muscles. That which the motor impulse produces is thus not an actual movement, but a system of tensions and conas in
tractions
which gives us subjective
feelings of strain, of effort, of
But further, we have assumed that nothing beyond the idea of the optical impression was to be in our mind ; thus we are not thinking of ourselves as objects, as empirical personalities ; every thought concerning ourselves and our actions would lead us away and would link the visual impression with something else. (A)* The result must be that thefeelings of strain and impulse which go on in ourselves are not projected into our body, but into the visual impression; just as the optical sensations were all the time joining themselves with the movement sensations of the eye muscle, so, in this case, optical sensations and eye-muscle sensations are fusing with sensations of bodily tension, and while the
tension, of direction, of movement-intention.
is intended to draw the reader's attention to between the passages thus marked and my own words in The Central Problem, p. 105, and Êsthetic Responsiveness, p. 334.
This letter (A)
similarity
Cf. also p. 353.
146
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

and
strain give to the optical forms
relations to the light-impressions
muscle-sensations of the eyes give the local values and distance and thus build up ideas of geometri-
cal forms, these sensations of impulse
an element offorce and energy.

hut
pressing
;
We ourselves are contracting our muscles^
we feel as if the lines were pulling and piercing, bending and lifting, down and pushing up in short, as soon as the visual impression is really isolated, and all other ideas really excluded, then the motor impulses do not awake actions which are taken as actions of ourselves,
. . .
hut feelings of energy which are taken as energies of the visual forms in the as the tic apperception . . and lines . the lines mean energies, while in every practical relation or scientific apperception
the lines
mean
distances only.
If
" But we can go further.

psychological reasons
others do not.
. .
the energies which
we
feel in
the
the
lines are external projections of our
own
energies,
we understand
why
certain combinations of lines please us and They ought to he such that they correspond to
own organism and represent the harmony of our own muscularfunctions, because every interference with the natural
the natural energies of our
innervations of our system would turn our attention to our own hody and would destroy thus the isolation ; the movement impulses would
beings, our natural
For instance, we are symmetrical movement tendencies are equally distributed to the right and to the left ; the result is that we demand from the play of lines that they balance each other. On the other hand, our organism is not symmetrical as to the upper and lower half ; we feel in our muscular
appear again
as states of ourselves.
energies that our lower part has to give us stability, while the upper
vertical
half has the free mobility of action ; the result is that we do not want a symmetry in the energies of our optical forms ; they, too,
stability in the lower, the freedom and ease in the upper part. In every case the interest, and thus the beauty, must grow with the complexity of energies involved ; the bilateral balance of rigid geometrical symmetry is thus less interesting than the balance of unequal combinations of lines where, for instance, the length of the lines on one side is balanced by the strangeness of the curves or by the outward bending of the line, or by the heaviness of the line combination on the other. The richer and more manifold the motor impulses which reflect in our consciousness, the higher is the cesthetical
must show the
beautiful because
value of the form, but even the simple symmetrical design is completely it corresponds, by the energies which its lines express,
completely to the energies of our own personality. . . . The optica), impressions of the framing lines work as stimuli for motor impulses
to push us towards the centre ; they indicate the regions beyond which we must not move, and this motor influence, exerted from all

sides at the
. .
147
same time, must concentrate our whole motor energy to the centre, so that every movement-impulse gets a reinforcement from its nearness to the centre, etc. . There is no form and no
combination of lines whose formal beauty cannot he understood psycho^ logically by their correspondence with the natural motor energies of our body. But we must never forget that all this is true merely for the
one case in which the optical impression is the only idea which our mind in complete isolation ; as soon as we connect the impression with ideas which lead beyond it, the motor reaction becomes interpreted as our activity and not as energy of the lines . simply because in such a case the lines (in a geographical map) do not come
fills
. .
in question for their
own
account."
As
Professor Miinsterberg mentions, in answer to a questionnaire
(similar to
that answered as above quoted by Professor Groos), that such questions could be answered only " on the basis of careful
experimental analysis,"
it
seems probable that the above remarkable
sentences are also the result of
much
personal investigation.
But
even
if I
letter,
were mistaken in this inference from Professor Miinsterberg's and if the passages quoted should prove to be mere restate-
ments in psycho-physiological terms of statements made (independently of one another) in Lipps's Raunuesthetik and in my own Beauty and Ugliness, it seems to me that even the mere adoption of these notions by one of the most eminent psycho-physical investigators would constitute a most important confirmation of their
scientific value.
II
Quotations from Titchener, Psychology of Feeling and Attention (Macmillan, 1908), p. 262 :
" Whenever in the state of attention two stimuli are given simultaneously or in immediate succession, they form a connected whole."
Titchener, Feeling and Attention, p. 313
" We may assume that attention, in its beginnings, was a definitely determined reaction, sensory and motor both, upon a single stimulus. As sense organs multiplied, two or more disparate stimuli might, each in its own right, claim the organism's attention ; here, in senserivalry and the conflict of motor attitudes, we should have the birth of active attention. When, later on, image supervened upon sensation, conflict and rivalry were largely transferred to the -field of ideas, and we find in consequence that separation of the receptive, elaborative, and executive attitudes, of which I spoke just now."
148
I
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

italicised a sentence of Professor Titchener's
have
because
it
has reference to Lipps's and
my own
view of Empathy.
:
Titchener, Thought Processes, p. 20
was not sure whether or not I possessed free kinaesthetic images. I could not decide whether my kinaesthetic memories were imaginal, or whether they involved an actual reinstatement in weaker form of the original sensations. ... I had hardly recorded my difficulty when the criterion was found . it may be roughly phrased in the statement that the actual movement always brings into play more muscles than are necessary, while ideal movement is confined to the precise group of muscles concerned. You will notice the difference at once ^provided you have kinif you compare an actual nod of the head with aesthetic images the mental nod that signifies assent to an argument, or the actual frown and the vnrinkling of the forehead with the mental frown that signifies perplexity. The sensed nod and frown are coarse and rough in outline ; the imaged nod and frown are cleanly and delicately traced. ... I seem to find (also) that the kinaesthetic image and the kinaesthetic sensation differ in all essential respects precisely as visual image differs from visual sensation." It is these kineesthetic images thus distinguished by Professor Titchener from kinaesthetic sensations which probably underlie, in my opinion, the phenomenon of formal-dynamic empathy.
as
" As recently
1904
Ill
THE WURZBURG LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS

des Msthetischen Wirkung, in V. Band, Hefte 3 und 4, 1910. Fraulein von Ritook's admirable analysis and tabulation of aesthetical experiments (made with magic lantern) in Professor Kiilpe's laboratory
Zeitschrift fiir /Esthetik,
Emma
von Ritook, Zur Analyse
and on himself and nine of his students, contains some suggestive evidence and some important generalisations on Einfuhlung, Nachahmung, and kineesthetic sensations, although, as her paper is a survey of all the psychological data connected with artistic impressions, it would be desirable to analyse the whole mass of answers from my point of view, instead of examining only the fragments
given by Fraulein von Ritook and placed under headings of her
own. In the first place, Fraulein von Rito6k divides Empathy {Einfuhlung into subjective and objective, or rather objective and subjective, according as the mode of being is merely attributed to the visible form
149
or recognised object or is experienced secondarily by the subject of the experiment ; and this implies that the Empathy I am studying in explanation of our preference in the domain of mere form, is not sufficiently separated, for the purposes of my study, from the or dramatic kind which attributes our emotional experience to the person or thing recognised as represented by those forms. Making this reservation, I think it useful to quote Fraulein von Ritook's second paper, p. 524 : " It became evident that the
lung.
Empathy of a human
motor reaction does not invariably stand In the case of ' motor subjects '
(i.e.
in causal relation to Einfiih(of
experiment) this motor
reaction served to help out the insufficient indication of the expressive
movement
there
viras
represented expressive
movement
^V.
L.).
Where
greater artistic habit the
portance, as in these cases a attitude was understood without mimicry." This generalisation of Fraulein von Ritook's would therefore, by analogy, suggest that the
of motion and energy to visible forms, what I Empathy, can exist without the accompaniment of motor reactions, and that such locomotor processes (whether actually externalised or merely felt) may be a means of helping out, elucidating, or emphasising insufficiently developed aesthetic empathy, i.e. the empathy which makes us describe lines and planes in terms of movement and volition. This is borne out by the fact that Fraulein von Ritook's Experimental Subject No. II., a person of quite exceptionally formal-asthetic interest, never mentions any kind of Hnaesthetic sensations or even refers to such a thing as " following the lines " : his accounts of the works of art exhibited and of his
motor reaction had not this imforeshortening or a more complicated
attribution of
modes
call purely cesthetic
feelings
relations (composition) of the
about them are always in terms of the linear and plastic work itself. The only reference to his own activity consists in the remark that he is " the whole time busy trying to bring one of the figures of the picture more forward." On the other hand. Experimental Subject No. III. speaks of " a
contrast of directions, the mouth {i.e. in the picture) pulled downwards, the eyes upwards, which has a certain charm " ; also of *' very distinct sensation (Empfindung) of something gay, free, of iomQthingvfhich. opens upzoardsj" . . . "I go down with my glance" ..." contrast with the height. I have objective empathy." Again,
First impression of a braced (Knapp) attitude ; followed the line upwards right and left I projected the involuntarily produced (motor ?) representations into the Figure. ..." Also, in a very charming aesthetico-sentimental description of the Diadumenos this person says, " alternate attention to the line and to the suggested
"
action.
There
is
a certain
amount
of kinaesthetic representa-
150
tion as
if
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

one inclined one's body in a similar way, a kind of a
is
faint
promise or gentle consolation in it."
Now it
opinion
art
this
Experimental Subject No. III.
who
volunteers the
in a
the subordination of the artistic means to the thing intended to be represented,^' a remark which shows, to say the least of
^V.
" What
is
I consider the principal point
(i.e.
work of
L.)
a minor degree of cesthetic empathy, if aesthetic empathy can be measured by interest in form. Another Experimental Subject (No. VIII.) tells us, speaking of a lantern-projection of the Parthenon Horsemen : " Much pleased.
it,
A feeling all over my body like intensified organic sensations, a feeling

of delight, perhaps also bodily, but so vague that I can't be sure. This first impression was produced by the lines. How lightly, naturally, one of the riders sits 1 " But this same Experimental Subject No. Vni. shows himself unable to take any satisfaction in the mere form and composition of Holbein's Dead Christ, begins his account with " terror as of something dreadful ..." and winds up with horror at the suggested thought of people buried alive, and " indignation with the artist who can represent such things." In striking contrast to which combination of tendency to kinesthetic sensations with overwhelming interest in the thing represented as distinguished from the visible form, another Experimental Subject (No. VII.) says of the same Dead Christ by Holbein, " Experienced nothing except continued enjoyment of the stretchedoutness, the flattening-dozanness. No sensations of movement. I did not think of Christ at all." An answer showing very vivid aesthetic empathy unaccompanied by kinaesthetic or mimetic sensa-
tions.
All this may be pure coincidence; and specially instituted and varied laboratory experiments are required to settle whether it is a purely accidental one ; but the coincidence, so far as it goes, confirms
my
suspicion that mimetic and kinaesthetic sensations will be found
to be cceteris paribus, in inverse proportion to aesthetic or formal
empathy.
For how do I explain the apparent contradiction by the case of my own collaborator, who evidently has both aesthetic empathy and kinaesthetic and mimetic sensations to the highest extent, since it was she who first made me understand the existence of either phenomenon ? The case of Miss AnstrutherThomson is, I am inclined to think, as follows : There is a high degree of aesthetic, .^. puidy formal aesthetic, empathy (its purely formal nature proved by singular indifference to the subject or thing representei), deveJopcd by artistic training in drawing, modelling, and
Cceteris paribus.
offered

analysis of pictorial composition,
151
and by the habit of very long,

empathic interest naturally
steady ocular attention

of direction,
and
this trained
leads to habitual thinking of works of art in terms of
movement, and of every variety of output of energy and attention.
On the other hand, the coincidence of easier contemplation of given works of art, when accompanied by given peculiarities in taking breath, having made a great impression on a mind constantly
speculating on the explanation of form-freferences, there would have sprung up a habit and a power of attending to, and perhaps producing, any kinaesthetic phenomena which could possibly accompany aesthetic attention. In other words, I think that my collaborator is probably naturally given to mere objectified empathy, like Subjects II. and VII. of the Wiirzburg experiments, but that she has, owing to an accident suggesting a long-desired hypothesis, trained herself by intensive and very prolonged (minutes where the Wiirzburg experiments count seconds) introspection into those habits of kinsesthetic and mimetic accompaniments which normally belong to a more rudimentary aesthetic type and are replaced, in cases of developed formal empathy, by the awareness formulated in " the
composition does, the work of art does,^' etc., instead of the kinaesthetic and mimetic formula, " in looking at the work of art / do or / am," etc. The ninth person in the Wiirzburg experiment has the following answer, which is fairly like the wording of some of my collaborator's experiments. " Very fine ; pleased me much ... an involuntary following of the lines upwards, and with this following comes immediately the feeling (Gefiihl) of being raised, of going into heights. I make a movement backwards ; deeper breathing. Saw the lines cross. It was as if I bent backwards, as if I were in it, and in the last moment, as if I were in a little corner and followed the beautiful lines." This Experimental Subject No. IX. (who says elsewhere, " I involuntarily mimed the attitude, but the picture did not become more alive," and " I can't bear symmetry ") is by no means among the more aesthetic of the Wiirzburg experimental subjects, but, on the other hand, apparently the most careful in his introspection, and the richest in introspective details. Does not this coincide with my explanation of how my collaborator came to possess so
line does, the
much
kinaesthetic
and mimetic experience
PREFATORY NOTE TO " BEAUTY AND UGLINESS"

The present
more of making it
condition of aesthetic theory, and even
aesthetic
experiment
difficult to foresee
and observation, what may remain, or
become, valuable suggestion for future students, the essay Beauty and Ugliness is here reprinted without alteration as it appeared in the Contemporary Review, October-November 1897. The portions contributed by C. AnstrutherThomson have been enclosed within initialled brackets, and it may be taken for granted that they are still in accordance with her views and experience, any alteration in these being expressly stated in a foot-note similarly initialled and dated 191 1. As regards the remaining portion of the text which was furnished by myself, I have added footnotes only in correction of detail statements, as the rest of this volume, and particularly the essay entitled The Central Problem of Esthetics, contains sufficient evidence of the modifications in my views since 1897. These modifications, as has been, I trust, made clear to the reader, consist in a different valuation of organic and mimetic sensations in the explanation of the phenomenon of aesthetic formpreference. While admitting the secondary importance of such organic and mimetic sensations, I am more and more inclined to consider that mere
153
154
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
formal-dynamic empathy as such, that is to say, considered as a mere mental phenomenon (whatever its physiological origin or connexions) is the direct, the primary explanation of the aesthetic phenomenon ; and, in taking up this position, I have evidently followed along the lines of Lipps's h}'pothesis of Einfiihlung, collaborator, on the contrary, adheres to our original point of view as expressed in the following pages ; and in so far she must be grouped rather with Groos and those more recent aestheticians who, like Schmarsow, also lay stress especially upon mimetic processes and organic
My
accompaniments, in fact upon what Professor Groos

originally called Innere
Nachahmung.
have constantly repeated, probabiHty necessary for a complete and physiologico-psychological explanation, the divergence between my collaborator and myself being concerned with the comparative importance and relative position, primary or secondary, of the two hypotheses. But I wish to point out, as I shall do at more length in my summary, that my own present theory of Êsthetic Empathy is the offspring, or rather only the modified version, of the theory set forth in the following essay, a theory due mainly not only to my collaborator's self-observations, but, as the initials will show, to her own generalisations
are, as I
Both hypotheses
all
in
upon
it.
Having spoken of this modification of my attitude, I may mention a merely detail question upon which my collaborator and I have exchanged sides, namely, that mentioned on pp. 221-2 of Beauty and Ugliness, concerning the more or less realism of antique
sculpture
as a
:
my
collaborator, as
is
development of her distinct preference
perhaps explicable for the
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
155
hypothesis of organic and mimetic processes, having given up her contention that antique sculpture is radically unrealistic ; while I, on the contrary, have followed Hildebrandt to a recognition of the essential differences which, consisting in a rearrangement of lines and planes and culminating in so-called frontal composition thereof, necessarily separate all great sculpture from the representation of any human models as such, however much those models may themselves be perfected in their tensions and
movements.
Vernon Lee
Easter
191
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

BY
VERNON LEE
AND
C.
ANSTRUTHER-THOMSON
Reprinted from the Contemporary Reviewy 1897
The
facts
and theories we are about to exhibit
from that furnished by recent mental science, but an explanation more really consonant with the psychological thought of our day. These facts and theories will allow us to discard, as mere side issues, the doubtful assumptions concerning association of ideas and the play instinct, as well as the various attempts to account for notions of beauty and ugliness by reference to transmuted recognition of utility and inutility, to sexual selection, and to the survival of obsolete primeval activities, and they will also render superfluous all recourse to a mysterious ultimate principle of supersensuous, not to say supernatural, origin. For our facts and theories, if at all correct, would estabhsh that the aesthetic phenomenon as a whole is the function which regulates the perception of Form, and that the perception of Form, in visual
156
constitute an attempt at giving to the of aesthetics an explanation different
phenomena
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

cases
157
certainly, and with reference to hearing presumably, implies an active participation of the most important organs of animal Hfe, a constant
in vital processes requiring stringent regulation for the benefit of the total organism. After giving a summary indication of the results of their observation and reflection, and before entering on the detailed exposition of these views, the joint authors of these notes are desirous of premising that their object in publication is considerably to invite criticism, correction, and amphfication
alteration
; and this not merely from physioand psychologists, but likewise from all persons who possess the faculty and habit of aesthetic
of their ideas
logists
In the present condition of aesthetic problems it would be unreasonable to hope for thorough knowledge of facts or complete validity of hypotheses, so that the following notes are expected to prove only that the subject demands a new method of study, and that its problems admit of new solutions in other words, that aesthetics, if treated by the method of recent psychology, will be recognised as one of the most important and most suggestive parts of the great science of perception and emotion. Moreover, before proceeding any further, the joint authors judge that it is well to forestall one of namely, the validity of the their own conclusions theory advanced by Dr. Lange, by Professor Sergi, and above all by Mr. WilHam James,* according to which various bodily sensations, hitherto regarded as
introspection.
;
Lange, Les Emotions, translated by
Dolore e Piacere, 1894;
Dumas ; Giuseppe Sergi, William James, Larger Psychology, vol. i.
pp. 300, 437, 503 ; vol. ii. pp. 137, 322, 449. Some of these pages contain passages referred to in later parts of these notes.
158
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the after-results of various psychic conditions, are themselves the conditions which we recognise as In the same way, and with their supposed causes. the same initial mystery concerning the fact of
recognition, that certain sensations of movement in ourselves can be identified as constituting what we
call a state of grief, of joy, of anger, or of tenderness,
nay, perhaps, as Mr. James's remarks seem to suggest,* as constituting what we might call the state of but, of and, of because, or of notwithstanding ;\
so, in the opinion of the authors of this paper, can the subjective states indicated by the objective terms height, breadth, depth, by the more complex terms round, square, symmetrical, unsymmetrical, and all their kindred terms, be analysed into more or less distinct knowledge of various and variously localised
bodily movements. This indication of the nature of our more elementary results may serve to introduce a brief account of the method by which they are obtained ; or rather it suggests ifso facto what that method must be. This method consists, even like the method evidently employed by Mr. James, in bringing under observation, by means of isolation, diminution of rapidity and repeated repetition and comparison, processes in ourselves which constant repetition and constant connexion with other processes have made so swift, so blurred, and above all so subordinate to an objective synthesis, that we have in our normal condition no clear notion of their
Psychology^ vol. i. p. 240 and following. Mr. James indeed them excitements of brain parts, but he describes them in motor images. t Cf quotations from Titchener in Central Problem of /Esthetics^
calls
.
andÂppendix thereto.

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
nature or even of their existence.
159
For
it
must be
of life
remembered that the
practical necessities
tend constantly not merely to shorten every conscious process, but also to direct our attention away from our subjective phenomena to the externalised summing up of our conditions which we conceive as the objective cause of those phenomena. Instead of being conscious as such of changes of condition in our eye and ear, we have long since become incapable probably utterly incapable of knowing them otherwise than as objective quaHties, colour or pitch, of the non-ego ; and similarly, though to a less degree, our attention has become engaged not with the change in ourselves productive of the sense of height, or roundness, or symmetry, but with the objective and the formula external causes of these changes of perception has become not " I feel roundness, or height, or symmetry," but " this or that object is
round, or high, or symmetrical." It is only the rarer and more sudden alterations of our condition summed up as emotions which, on account of this rarity and violence, have preserved obvious traces of their real nature, though even in this case so rooted is the habit of summing up and separately naming the objective factors of what we call mental states that it has required the boldest psychological glance to identify the emotion with what had hitherto been separated as its after-result. It must, therefore, surprise none of our readers if they are unable to recall, and even, perhaps, to elicit, any of the bodily sensations * which we shall enumerate
* I no longer consider such sensations as explaining or even necesaccompanying the activity of form-perception. Cf Êsthetic
.
sarily
Empathy, p. 70, The Central Problem of xaA Esthetic Responsiveness, pp. 334, 353.
/Esthetics, p.
96
et. seq.^
Vernon Lee
(191 i).
i6o
as
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
accompanying, and, in our opinion, originating, the various perceptions constituting Form. Practical or thoughtful habits have diminished, to an extraordinary extent, that full perception of Form which alone can enter into the aesthetic experience, and most of the business of life, and the work of reasoning, is carried on through the mere recognition of a few qualities in objects and the labelling them accordingly for use, so that the majority of persons go through existence with comparatively few
Form, and few occasions and displeasure by which such realisation is attended while, on the other hand, highly aesthetic natures, and artists more particularly, are undergoing a constant training which makes the phenomena of perception so rapid, contemporaneous, and homogeneous as to defy all analysis. Such specially developed persons are in
thorough
realisations of
for the aesthetic pleasure
the position of a fencer or pianist of
whom we
should
ask for detailed description of the
minute adjust-
ments constituting some perpetually repeated series Students of psychology may judge of movements.
of the difficulty of obtaining these data of aesthetics
by
asking themselves
how many men
of letters could probably confirm,
experience,
the details
of science and from their own which Fechner and Mr.
William James have given us of the psychical sensations accompanying or underlying certain of
their intellectual cognitions.
So much
over,
for our
method.
It
is
necessary,
more-
to limit our subject. The explanation we Why should a hope to give refers to the question specific kind of condition, either agreeable or disagree:
able,
qualities
accompany the recognition of those co-related of form called respectively Beauty and
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

:
i6i
Ugliness ; and this explanation itself rests upon the explanation of a previous question What is the process of -perceiving Form, and what portions of our organism participate therein ? Now, we all know that visible and audible Form is a grouping of elementary impressions furnished by the senses of sight and hearing ; and we all recognise that these sense impressions are themselves liable to the distinction of agreeable and disagreeable, in
common
parlance, beautiful and ugly.
In so
far,
therefore, as these sense impressions enter into the
perception of Form,
its
there is given to Form a quality of agreeableness or disagreeableness due to
elementary constituents ; and this emotional quality of sense impression has often been made to explain in large measure the agreeable or disagreeable quality of our aesthetic experiences. But this
explanation has invariably broken down (many far-fetched items being used to fill up the gap) because it is a matter of universal experience that a sense impression, the quality, for instance, of a colour or of a sound, exists quite separately from that of the Form into which it enters ; and that elementary visual or audible qualities of undoubted beauty may enter into a Form which is nevertheless admitted to be ugly, and even vice versa ; nay, that the chief qualities of the Form, its beauty or ugliness, may remain unaltered despite a change in its constituent sense elements, provided the relations of those constituent sense elements remain unaltered for instance, that the same pattern may exist in red, orange, and white, or in blue, violet, and white ; or the same musical phrase preserve its identity despite a change in pitch, let alone a change in timbre, so that we recognise it and are pleased or displeased by
i62
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

call its
what we
fore,
beauty or ugliness.
quality zohich
There
is,
there-
specific
may
he agreeable or
disagreeable in certain facts of relation which, united, And it is into the reason for the constitute Form.
various qualities of Form, or, in other words, for the various conditions produced in us by various arrangements of the possible relations of sense shall impressions, that we are about to explore. exclude from consideration the peculiarities of more elementary sense impressions, first, because all that is known of the structure and function of the special
We
sense
organs seems sufficient explanation of the agreeable or disagreeable nature of these impressions ;* whereas, on the contrary, the pleasantness or unpleasantness of Form has never been properly accounted for. And, secondly, because while the elementary impressions of the eye and ear are in no way more connected with the creative power of man and with the higher problems of man's soul than the impressions of taste and smell, the problem of Form is at once the problem of art and the problem also of perception. It is therefore to Form, to its reasons, and to its effects that the joint authors of these notes would limit the meaning of the aesthetic phenomenon.
II
And now let us proceed to examine what happens, apart from the stimulation of the special sense organ, when we perceive visual Form that is to say, what phenomena, besides the mere sense impressions, can
* I
must apologise to
all
readers versed in psychology for this
cocksureness of extreme ignorance.
^V.
L. (191 1).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

be detected in ourselves
as
163
the raw materials of an
be this chair. It about four feet six inches high, an oblong about half as wide as its height. It has curved arms, rather a high square seat and a square panel on the back. The two top corners reach some inches higher than the panel and are terminated hy carved foliated clumps. While seeing t this chair, there
is
aesthetic cognition. * [The object of perception shall
happen movements of the two eyes, of the head, and of the thorax, and balancing movements in the back, all of which we proceed to detail, following
the
attention
(whatever
the
attention
may
be)
which accompanies these movements. The chair is a bilateral object, so the two eyes are equally active. They meet the two legs of the chair at the ground and run up both sides simultaneously. There is a feeling as if the width of the chair were pulling the two eyes wide apart during this process of following
the upward line of the chair. Arrived at the top the eyes seem no longer pulled apart ; on the contrary, they converge inward along the top of the chair, until, having arrived at the middle thereof, they cease focusing the chair. Meanwhile the movements of the eyes seem to have been followed by the breath. The bilateralness of the object seems to have put both lungs into play. There has been a feeling of the two sides of the chest making
All the parts of this essay contributed, like the present, by
C. Anstruther-Thomson, will be enclosed between initialled brackets. t It may be well to state that I was originally trained as a painter, and I have since acquired a power of long and concentrated attention in looking at works of art, as such. I do not imagine that what is descsibed in the text could be observed by persons not similarly trained, although I believe that a similar training would result in other persons becoming aware of similar facts. C. A.-T. (1911).
i64
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

;
the breath has been begun low sides of the chest ; a slight contraction of the chest seems to accompany the eyes as they move along the top of the chair till they got to the middle then, when the eyes ceased focusing the chair, the breath was exhaled. These movements of the eye and of the breath were accompanied by alterations in the equilibrium of various parts of the body. At the beginning the feet were pressed hard on the ground in involuntary imitation of the front legs of the chair, and the body was stretched upwards. At the moment that the eyes reached the top of the chair and moved inwards along the line of the top, the tension of the body ceased going upwards and the balance seemed swung along the top of the chair towards the right. At this point the movements of balance seemed to help out those of the eyes and the breath ; for, during the time of expiration, the eyes do not focus the chair so completely. During this partial interruption in the form-perceiving movements of the eyes and the breath, the balance seemed to alter, and the weight to swing across the top of the chair downwards to the right side till it seemed to land in the right foot. The weight seemed thus to have followed the oblong shape of the chair going up the left * side, swinging across the top and then descenda sort of pull apart
down and
raised
on both
Cf. Central Problem. such dramatic mimicry
hope to have distinguished between and those imaginary or incipient or actualised movements to which my collaborator and myself referred whenever, throughout Beauty and Ugliness, we applied the fatally misleading word miming to the lifting up ' and ' pressing down,' the gripping of the ground,' the balancing of symmetrical sides of the mere shapes of pottery, furniture, architecture, and accepted from common usage the scarcely less misleading word
I
.
.
"
'
'
'
'
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
165
ing on the right side. All these changes have taken place during one breath, inspiration and expiration, and they have answered to a knowledge of the general shape of the chair.
With the next breath comes the recognition of the chair's details. Recognition of the height of the chair, begun with pressure of both feet on the ground, is accompanied by an upward stretch of the body. This stretch upwards seems suddenly checked by the sight of the heavy clump of ornament on the chair's two top corners ; there is a sudden sense of the head being weighed downwards ; and the size of the chair seems limited within this pressure and the previous stretch upwards ; the interest seems to concentrate itself within those limits and the height of the chair to he measured, o-ff on the body of the spectator. The width of the chair seems meanwhile again to be felt by a swing of the balance from left to right the two feelings, being simultaneous, seem to
establish a ratio
between each other. Meanwhile, in accompanying the movements connected with height, the breathing seems limited by
the limitations of the height ; the breath does not rise as high as it can, but follows the rise of the eye to the top of the chair and then changes direction. There seems to be a pull sideways of the thorax, and the breath seems to stretch out in width as the balance swings across and the eyes alter their movement across the chair ; then follows the The breath has thus given, first, a expiration. sense of going up, then one of width; and the two senses, begun between an inspiration and an
following as applied to the
'
movements
of lines
'
in pictures."
V.L.
(191 1).
i66
expiration,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

do not die out but continue to be
felt
subsequently.*
The movements of the eyes have been too rapid to be separately felt, and they do not seem to leave any traces behind, whereas the movements of the breath seem to remain conscious ; and there is a double sensation in one breath of height and width going on in relation to one another. The recognition of the chair's seat is given by the eyes running all the way to the top of the chair, accompanied by the breath as described, after a long inspiration ; while, in the next breath's length the eyes run up only as far as the seat, and the expiration takes place about half as soon as the previous time ; by this means, apparently, this second short movement is felt
width of the not accompanied by a stretch of the breath, perhaps because the breath, having stopped short with the eyes, is rather too low down to be stretched very easily. But a shifting of the balance replaces the stretch of the breath, and the lateral movement of the eyes across the seat is accompanied by a change of equilibrium from one foot to the other. It is to be noted that the ocular movements seem
seat
is
as half the extension of the first. The ocular movement across the
Karl Groos, Das cesthetische Miterleben, p. 177. " In my case, Inner Mimicry by the organs of respiration and speech does not stand alone in producing feeling, but it certainly stands In my case the large movements of inspirain the first place. tion and expiration adapt themselves to the perceived optical or acoustic forms by help of the most varied processes in the larynx and the mouth, processes such as have become familiar to us in ' I am inner (i.e. silent) speech ' and ' inner song.' ... convinced that during intense Miterleben (t.e. empathy) we are dealing with real sensations, and that such kinaesthetic sensations are more favourable to the propagation of the excitement than would be mere memory images of movements." ^V, L. (191 1).
own
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
167
accompanied sometimes by both breathing and balancing movements, and sometimes by one or the
The
other as circumstances make it more comfortable. shifting of balance usually replaces or ekes out the alterations in the breathing when the latter
would produce
a disagreeable effort.
to the third dimension. The bulk less impressive than its height or its width. But there is a feeling, apart from the ocular adjustment, different from those accompanying what we call height and width underlying the they seem perception of the two arms of the chair to come forward, and the weight of the body is shifted involuntarily a little backward (away from Moreover, the breaththem) as they are focused. ing is not the same as during the perception of
We now
come
is
of the chair
much
There is a sense of being able to lean upon the breath in expiration altogether there are more changes in the non-ocular movements than the ocular movements would warrant. C. A.-T.] This mass of details will show, we think, that the act of perception includes, besides the intellectual recognition which remains as mysterious as ever, elements of bodily alteration far beyond any chemical or muscular change in the eye. It is true that readers to whom the identification of emotional phenomena and of certain senses of relation with bodily phenomena is either unfamiliar or repugnant will object in this case also that the altered breathing, senses of tension, and altered balance enumerated in the foregoing experiment, are not a part of the
either height or width.
perception of Form, but a reaction (on the same principle as the thoracic changes said to result from grief) produced by the perception itself. To this
i68
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

the objection takes perception
either as explicable
we would answer that of Form for granted,
by ocular
changes which are insufficient and cerebral changes *

of which there is no evidence, or as a generally inexplicable process. [While, on the contrary, although it is of course impossible to establish the identity of these non-ocular adjustments with the factors of form-relations, it is yet possible to prove
experimentally that the perception of such relations as height, width, and bulk are impeded by voluntarily contrived bodily adjustments of opposed character, so that we not only perceive Form better by deHberately making these corresponding adjustments of breath, muscles, and balance, but see it much worse by deliberately counteracting them ; t indeed, it seems probable that if we could rid ourselves of all previous form experiences and the consequent recognition, so to speak, by labelling^ we should not see Form at all. C. A.-T.] Various coincidences could be enumerated which point, moreover, to the fact that these adjustments of breathing and balance are the actual physical mechanism^ for the perception of Form, the sense
* Here again I can only humbly apologise. The only " insufficiency " was in my own knowledge and modesty. ^V. L. (191 1). f To such an extent that if while trying to visualise an object with shut eyes we refuse to let ourselves breathe, the act of seeing
the form in memory becomes impossible. C. A.-T. (1897). t Titchener, Feeling and Attention, -p. 307. "The typical form of attention, if one induces it for purposes of introspection, is voluntary attention. Consciousness in the state of voluntary attention is composed, in part, of ' muskulare Spannungsempfindungen.' When, then, one seeks to introspect the attentive consciousness, one comes naturally upon these sensations of strain ; they are made
focal
' ; and in the process of their focalisation, a * feeling of activity must, on Wundt's view, be struck out. Hence it is impossible to
"
169
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
of relation having for its counterpart a sense of bodily tension. Of these coincidences two seem especially to the purpose. The first consists in the fact that, while the renewal in memory of a sensory impression, a definite colour, tone,* timbre or elementary sweep of the eye seems impossible save through an accidental stimulus and beyond the control of our wishes, the vivid remembrance of the forms into which these sensory impressions are grouped, of the relations in space, time, and pitch which they constitute, can be obtained by any person of sufficient visual or musical power, after Now the sufficient familiarity has been gained. sensory apparatus of the eye and ear are outside our control and require stimulations from outside ; but the muscular system of the breath and equilibrium is as much in our power as that of the arms and legs. Indeed, it seems likely that the fact of our being able to think in terms of relation, relation spatial, temporal, and perhaps even logical, may be due to
introspect the state of voluntary attention without discovering a
Thatigkeitsgefiihl.'
This remark of Professor Titchener's analogically corroborates in my suspicion that the part played by breathing (and even bodily tension) in aesthetic introspection may be due not so much to any specifically aesthetic process as to our voluntary attention. V. L. (191 1). * The revival in memory of a musical tone seems, in our experience, always to be accompanied by a more or less complete adjustment of the vocal parts in fact, a silent performance of the tone. As regards timbre, our own experience limits its reproduction in memory to such qualities of sound as we could audibly imitate. It seems more than doubtful whether two notes are ever heard in memory as absolutely contemporaneous and not in extremely rapid succession merely. ^V. L. (1897). This astounding statement means merely that I happen to be incapable of such harmonic reviviscence. I am simply an imperfect auditive. ^V. L. (191 1). I am not sure about colours.
me
170
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the accident which has placed the muscular system

in our dominion, while the special sense organs have
remained outside
it.
other coincidence consists in the fact that, while the sensory satisfactions those of smell, taste, colour, and timbre require an interruption, corresponding to a repair in the sensitive special organs, and the large bodily pleasures, of eating, drinking, going to sleep, etc., are due to a want which is deadened by satisfaction, and can recur only after a still longer interval ; the pleasure derivable from the perception of Form can continue with great constancy and unintermittence ; even as we should expect to find if the pleasures due to Form were dependent upon processes which, instead of being intermittent, like the processes of sleep, food, etc., are as unintermittent as the processes of respiration and equilibrium. Having given our answer to the question, " What is the mechanism of the perception of Form ? " we can now approach the aesthetic problem as such, the question, namely Why should the perception ofform he accompanied, by pleasure or displeasure, and what determines the pleasure in one case and the displeasure in another ? Few psychological questions have received so many and various answers. A number of them are discussed in the late and much-to-be-regretted Mr. Gurney's very suggestive Power of Sound. The joint authors of these notes would wish to prove to their readers that among all these answers the most satisfactory is due, not to the scientific sagacity of Darwin or Spencer, but to the artistic intuition, the artistic experience of Mr. Ruskin, and would wish to afford an adequate explanation for his dogmatic
The

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
171
statement that " beauty and ugliness are as positive But in their nature as physical pleasure and pain." before proceeding any further we desire to call attention to the attempt at a similar explanation made recently by Professor Sergi ; and the more so that our own notions will gain in clearness and, we venture to hope, in efficacy by comparison with his. Professor Sergi, it should be mentioned, entirely shares, thanks apparently to original thought, the hypothesis of Dr. Lange and Mr. William James concerning the identity of the emotional process with those bodily changes which have hitherto been accounted its result ; and his interesting book, Dolors e Piacere, maintains that aesthetic pleasure, like every other, is a phenomenon, not of the cerebral, but of the organic life of the big viscera mainly the heart and lungs. Professor Sergi maintains that, owing to the close contact and, so to speak, mixing up of the sensory nerves with the nerves regulating respiration and circulation in certain tracts of the medulla, what we call intellectual conditions and the impressions of the special senses produce alterations in the action of the heart and lungs, which alterations are perceived by us as pleasure or pain, according as they assist or impede the life of the organism.*
* Sergi, writing in 1894, really forestalls all that is crudest and least tenable in the present essay. " Se il colore, la forma e il movimento,
tutti insieme riuniti, possono agire sui nostri organi sensori e produrre direttamente cio che ciascuno di essi produce separatamente, eccitando cioe sensazioni muscolari e viscerali per alterazioni, per quanto lievi, cardiache e respiratorie, il sentimento che ne nasce misto e complesso piacevole ed attraente, e quello che dicesi estetico." Dolore e PiacerSy p. 356. I read Sergi's book in the course of the experiments and discussions which resulted in this essay, but I cannot now say with certainty to what extent my views and my collaborator's
172
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Leaving to physiologists to pronounce upon the

validity of Professor Sergi's theory of interaction
sets of nerves, we must point while explaining the phenomenon of pleasure and pain in general, this theory explains why certain aesthetic experiences should produce the cardiac and respiratory alterations underlying pleasure,* or the cardiac and respiratory alterations underlying pain, only by the old and, as it seems to us, quite inefficient coalition of chemical and mechanical processes of the special organs with intellectual judgments and inherited or acquired
between the various

out
that,
and prejudices, which has done duty in the essays of Mr. Spencer, the manual of Mr. Grant Allen, and the psychological fantasies of the late M. Guyau. In other words, the special problem of aesthetics has been left behind, however much the general subject of pleasure and pain may have been helped forward. Now, could we establish that the perception of the relations constituting Form implied the activity not merely of the special sense organs, but also of functions as important to animal life as those of
associations
equihbrium and of respiration of respiration which, with its inevitable companion, circulation, accounts, according to Lange, James, and Sergi, for emotion in general it would become easy to understand various perceptions of Form have various why emotional qualities, and why, to vary Mr. Ruskin's
were suggested, or merely corroborated by bis. I have not opened Sergi since, and had forgotten how explicit he was. ^V. L. (191 1). * In his volume on The Sense of Beauty (A. and C. Black, 1896), Mr. George Santayana has a paragraph on " breathing related to the sense of beauty," whose important suggestion he has unfortunately not himself followed up. ^V. L. (1897).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
173
dictum, beauty and ugliness should be positive in their nature and represent positive physical pleasure and pain. We have experimented so far on form perception as such, independent of any question of agreeable or disagreeable. Let us proceed to watch what bodily changes can be perceived to diiferentiate one sort of perception from another. [This series of experiments begins with the sensations accompanying the act of looking at a blank wall, which it is convenient to call a white void. The space in front of us seems to come forward as if We feel as if our profile were to swallow us up. and as if in some extraordinary way we flattened, had lost identity. Our breathing is a mere drawing in and running out again accompanied by a sHght disturbance of the heart. Breathing takes place very low down in very short weak breaths, at times barely perceptible. Our temperature is lowered, we feel depressed. Holding the breath produces no optical change. In the second experiment we look at a blank wall which happens to be terra-cotta-coloured impossibility of focusing ; the fovea does not seem to play a more active part than the rest of the seeing eye, whereas in looking at objects the eye seems to conOne centrate the act of seeing on to one point.
:
One breathes shorter breaths than in looking at objects ; there is, however, only a very slight disturbance of the heart (much Breathing or less than in looking at white blank). holding one's breath produces no difference in vividness of perception. From blankness we proceed to confusion, or, more expressively, from void to chaos on our journey towards Form. One's eye now concentrates and
feels one's profile flattened.
174
focuses.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

There
is
of one's begins to have command over one's expiration ; the breath no longer merely escapes, but issues quite steadily. There is, however, no advantage or disadvantage to perception in breathing or not breathing. Small tracts of confusion with spots in them one can focus while one counts two or three, after which one can keep hold of them no longer the eye has to run about and return. One binds several dots into a sort of group by moving the eyes between them and letting one's balance follow the movements of the eyes. face being flattened.
no longer the sensation
One
Rudiments of Form. ^Two straight lines meeting (but not crossing) at an acute angle can be seen while following the eye with the breath, but with an uncomfortable sense of sudden contraction ; note that such an angle has a character already of regularity. Two straight lines crossing each other at random and irregularly are followed by the eye and the equilibrium, but not by the breath. Speaking generally, both confusion and irregular form, or irregular rudiment ofform, produce too exasperating a sense, if we attempt to follow the eye's movements along them with the lungs ; these movements of
the eyes are generally followed by shifting the equilibrium and moving the head, which processes do not involve the same discomfort as movements of the breath. A triangle one can focus as a whole without moving the eye perpetually about. The thoracic movements come into play, and seem to make three little pinches at the three corners. There is a sense of resistance being offered all round, and of the chest having something to lean against.* We have now got
*
We
purposely give these sensations with the nomenclature
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
175
And with Form we get to the to comflete Form. possibility of aesthetic agreeableness or disagreeableThis ness, in other words, of beauty or ugliness. triangle, un-cubic and isolated, happens not to be remarkably agreeable as form ; we have noted that while looking at it there are contractions of the thorax, and that these are rather uncomfortable.
for Form di-fferentiated as agreeable. Here is a jar, equally common in antiquity and in modern peasant ware. Looking at this jar one has
Let us hunt about
a specific sense of a whole.
One's bodily sensations
are extraordinarily composed, balanced, co-related To begin with, the feet press on in their diversity.
the ground while the eyes fix the base of the jar. Then one accompanies the lift up, so to speak, of the body of the jar by a lift up of one's own body ; and one accompanies by a slight sense of downward pressure of the head the downward pressure of the widened rim on the jar's top.* Meanwhile the jar's equal sides bring both lungs into equal play ; the curve outwards of the jar's two sides is simultaneously followed by an inspiration as the eyes move Then expiration up to the jar's widest point. lungs seem slowly to collapse as the begins, and the curve inward is followed by the eyes, till, the narrow part of the neck being reached, the ocular following of the widened out top provokes a short inspiration. Moreover, the shape of the jar provokes movements of balance, the left curve a shifting on to the A complete and equally left foot, and vice versa.
which they suggest. Any attempt at physiological terminology would disturb the perfect sincerity of the experiment. C. A.-T.
* For criticism of such descriptions, V.L. (191 1).
cf.
The Central Problem.
176
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
distributed set of bodily adjustments has accompanied the ocular sight of the jar ; this totality of movements and harmony of movements in ourselves answers to the intellectual fact of finding that the
a harmonious whole. C. A.-T.] such are the adjustments in highly vital processes implied by the perception, the thorough realisation, not the mere recognition, of Form, if these adjustments can be thus favourable to the processes in question, it becomes easy to understand that a special instinct should have evolved which forces us to court or to shun those opposite quahties of Form which we call beauty or ugliness. Herein lies the explanation of the definition with which we began these notes ^namely, of the aesthetic function as the function regulating perception of Form. jar
is
If
Such
all
a definition
would
at first sight
seem extra-
ordinarily narrow to readers accustomed, as
we have
been, to the notion of the play instinct, and accustomed, moreover, to the usual confusion between the aesthetic phenomenon and that special ramification and complication thereof which should properly be called the phenomenon of art. Having been considered rather by anthropologists than by persons of wide aesthetic experience, the aesthetic phenomenon has been supposed to involve the production of some sort of work of art ; and, moreover, a wish for neat classification has even tended to limit the recognition of a work of art or an artistic performance to objects and proceedings independent of practical utility ; hence the excessive attention given to ornament and to dancing, the identification of aesthetic feeling with the impulses of a play instinct, real or supposed, and the wearisome insistence on inutility and disinterestedness as the
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
177
The careful considerachief aesthetic differentia. tion of the facts we have alleged respecting the
connexion
activities of
of form perception with the great equiUbrium, respiration, and circulation, and the consequent division of such perception into that which is favourable and that which is unfavourable to our animal life, will show, as we hope, that so far from narrowing and lowering the importance of the aesthetic instinct, we are really widening and elevating it when we define it as the regulator of Form Perception. For while we refuse it the impulses towards making or doing things (by the old
theory) utterly useless in themselves, we attribute to it a selective and coercive power which fashions to its purposes the constructive and expressive impulses of mankind, and selects and rejects with the imperiousness of a great organic function among the experiments and possibihties of experience of daily life ; till, from claiming a merely negative influence in the work and the play of existence, it ends, in its highest power, with setting the active impulses of man to work for its sole and single gratification, and to create out of reality a world more consonant with the most deeply organised and most unchanging modes of man's bodily existence. It is not only the superfluous ornament, the practically useless dance or song, which testifies to the power of the aesthetic instinct in primitive man ; nor the merely decorative picture, the object of virtu, or the sonata or symphony unaccompanied by words and unconnected with rites, in times of high artistic development. The shape of the jar, the colour and pattern of the mat, the balance of handles, spout, lid, in every useful vessel, the proportion of benches and tables, the cut of garments,
178
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the movements and songs in religious and warlike ceremonies, the choice of metre and rhyme in declarations of love and chronicles of past deeds ; it is all this stringent insistence that necessary objects and actions should obey a law different from that of practical necessity which really teaches us the importance of the aesthetic instinct among rude civilisations of the past and the present ; and it is the perpetual transmutation into works of art of the buildings, records, liturgies, and dramatic shows of higher civilisations which testifies to the same. The aesthetic instinct is never so utterly the master as when art is described as the servant of utility. And, as usual, the deep intuition of Mr. Ruskin has given us the truth, when, answering the " art for art's sake " theories of this age which has learned to dispense with beauty in necessary things, he has declared, in apparent paradox, that no great work of art was ever begun without an ulterior object. It is in the cathedral undertaken for religious or civic reasons ; in the fresco or picture intended as an illustration of a story or an aid to devotion ; in the mass, or oratorio, or opera, intended, above everything, to be expressive, that we can see the unflinching selections, the imperious orders and counter-orders of the organic desire for beauty. In the realm of visual impressions we have watched already the inner processes which have forced the preference for one sort of elementary form rather than another. We desire to follow the same pro-
~^
'
'
'
'
'
more complex cases of what is called But before passing from the aesthetic imperative which controls the rudest potter to the aesthetic imperative which sways the architect, the sculptor and the painter before continuing to watch the
cesses in the
Art.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
179
workings of the aesthetic instinct in connexion with objects on to which it forces our attention, we would wish to point out its power in the negative sense, when it purposely diverts our attention or diminishes it to avoid displeasure. We have alreadyremarked on the tendency to substitute a mere act of recognition, often of only one or two peculiarities,
for the real perception of the objects and movements which concern us in daily life, a tendency referable to the mere laziness of the human mind and its refusal to do more than the bare necessary.* The greater part of most men's lives is thus too busy to more particularly be, in any sense, aesthetic
;
because, as we shall have further opportunities of noticing, the condition of pursuit, of running to a goal, of hurry of any kind is absolutely incompatible, on account of its special bodily adjustments, with the particular kind of bodily adjustment requisite
for full perception of Form. But besides this tendency, independent of all questions of pleasure and displeasure, to diminish actual perception of Form, the aesthetic faculty itself very frequently induces us not to realise Form because realisation would happen to be disagreeable. We are alluding to a phenomenon more important though less recognised than the condition of non-perception into which ugly surroundings end by forcing aesthetically sensitive persons, limiting their perception to mere signs of things, and resulting in a
sort of blindness
which explains why,
for instance,
is
a Whistler sketch of a dirty
recognised at all. [C. A.-T. We desire to call attention to the quite neglected fact, which has momentous influence on pictorial composition, that we prefer * Or to biological economy. ^V. L. (191 1).
London
street
scarcely
i8o
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

moving about than when we are standing For our bodily structure is such that standing
to get our notions of the exterior world, and particularly of what we call landscape, rather when
we
still
are
still.
brings into consciousness a
number
in a
of rather
uncomfortable tensions,
vague sense of not liking it all, rendering the adjustments necessary for Form perceptions arduous, and hence producing a greater or lesser degree of aesthetic dissatisfaction with objective facts. For when standing still we are conscious of the weight of the head on the neck and the weight of our body at the waist, and very particularly of the pressure of our feet on the floor, the whole resulting in a selfcentred condition to which the outer world is
summed up
But no sooner do we make a step into the outer world than we are relieved of half our weight by swinging from one foot to the other. Our own locomotion seems, moreover, to modify our feeling of our own shape ; instead of being disagreeably conscious of being perpendicular, and rather like a gate-post, we begin as we move forwards (whether on our feet, on horseback, or in a vehicle) to feel rather as if we were like a streak, and the faster we move the more streak-like do we feel our shape to become. This is due to the fact that, as we move, the foreground rushes to meet us, passing in two streams on each side of our head ; and these two streams, flowing continuously past, produce a perceptive adjustment which makes us feel smoothed and elongated into streak-shape as they flow. Our own movement gives us the further illusion that, step by step as we approach them, all high things in the landscape draw themselves up higher and higher, and that step by step as we get nearer the width of
foreign.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
i8i
things opens out into greater wideness, and that the ground comes forward and pushes itself under our All feet, distance turning into coming nearness. the three dimensions seem to expand and stretch themselves bigger, growing under our eye all the time as we move. And we, seeing them grow, feel
ourselves also to be growing, as
if
our boundaries
were being enlarged.
The
third dimension, con-
sidered as distance,* we see and feel as distinctly as we see and feel height and width, we realise the ground lying flat and stretching away, we see the projection of things (the third dimension as bulk)
really bulging forward or reaching backwards.
In
from the foreground and goes straight through into the background, and the scene This harmonious view of is realised as a whole. things comes to an end as soon as we stand still ; we
looking, the eye starts
*
as
We
and second appears to lie in our not possessing equal bodily facilities for adjusting ourselves to the third dimension. obtain the sense of height by stretching ourselves taller, and the sense of width by stretching our chest wider ; but, so long as we stand still, we have not to anything the same extent the possibility of stretching ourselves forward. Quadrupeds or babies crawling on the floor probably do realise the third dimension as well as or even better than the two others, because the position of their bodies allows them to stretch forward. But in becoming bipeds, we have lost our equal hold on this dimension, and we get it back normally only when we move about because we then do stretch forward. We shall frequently have to notice how art reinstates the third dimension in a very special manner. Indeed the sense of harmony obtained from architecture, for instance, is due largely to this reinstatement. C. A,-T. (1897). There is also, and besides an altered ocular adjustment like the one mentioned by Waldemar Conrad (cf. /Esthetic Responsiveness, p. 267), a psychological addition due to the third dimension being recognised so to speak, ocular, only after
first
The reason we realise the
of our not realising the third dimension as easily
Cf. also Esthetic Responsiveness, p. 298.
an act of recognition, a judgment of what exists or is represented. V. L. (191 1).
82
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
see the landscape better, but in reaHty we see it worse. We suddenly find that we have lost our hold of the third dimension. Instead of seeing the distance as distant flatness, it begins to look as if painted on a vertical wall. We no longer feel the bulk of the various objects, nor the projections of their different parts ; the trees tend to look flat like ferns. We no longer realise the landscape as a whole. The general effect has dropped to bits under our eye, and the bits are all we can quite satisfactorily see. Instead of looking into the landscape from in front, we find it more comfortable to lay our eye first on the background and travel back to the foreground. The ground no longer pushes eagerly under our feet ; we soon have only an intellectual conviction of its being solid ground at all. So far as inner sensations go, we feel that our weight, which had been partly handed over to the outer world while we swung along from one foot to the other, has returned in full, and oppresses us at the shoulders and waist. We no longer breathe out with any impetus, and inspiration seems to roll over into expiration without any edge ; life feels weaker and shallower, because the speed and volume of our breathing have very much diminished. We are changed beings, and beings changed for the worse ; and it takes us some moments to become once more acclimatised to this less complete mode of life. This analysis of some of the differences for we between our shall see anon that there are others mode of perception and accompanying physical conditions when walking and when standing still will exemplify the sort of selection which the aesthetic instinct makes in our perceptions. For, as a fact, our visual memory of things is gained during our
had expected to
moments
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS 183 of movement. We have no spontaneous
knowledge of the world as it looks when we stand in front of it, and the habit of seeing things from a single, motionless point of view is one of the most difficult and wearisome acquisitions of the student
of
drawing.
drawing
classes),
Children, simple folk nay, we ourselves

all feel a
(unspoilt
by-
when we
are
vague disappointment at a drawing of a familiar scene the landscape or room looked different in our memory.* The aesthetic instinct has, in a way, prevented our registering one-half of our visual
quite natural,
photograph or
realistic
for the sufficient reason that these experiences were not agreeable ; and we shall see, when we come to examine the composition of pictures, that the old masters, painting or, at least, composing from memory, have given us in their pictures not the scattered and feeble and fatiguing impressions we should have when standing motionless before the scene represented, but the efficacious, corroborating, and agreeable impressions we are accustomed to while moving about. C. A.-T.]
experiences,
* I
pictures
am now inclined to think that the " walking " perspective in may be explicable, when it exists, by our memory images
it
;
of landscape being got while going into or towards
also to
the
need of making up, by the acuter imaginative activity due to such perspective, for the lapsed sense of activity given by our owa locomotion. My own experiments show that in my case stopping is disagreeable when the landscape happens to be one of converging lines, anything of the nature of an avenue or street, but that in looking at interesting hill outlines I require to stop once I have decided upon the best point of view, exactly as happens in my case with statues. A great deal of interior architecture affects me like an avenue, forcing me to walk on but once I have got the best view, the diagonal one, of nave and aisles, I stop short. This requires to be examined into by collective evidence. V. L. (191 1).
;
84
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

III
[C. A.-T. The various fine arts are arrangements, spontaneously and unconsciously evolved, for obtaining the maximam of agreeable activity on the part of our perception of Form. But such a maximum does not consist in mere intensity of one particular kind of inner adjustment at one particular moment. We have already seen, in analysing the bodily sensations which accompanied the perception of the jar, that we require, for that pleasantness with which we associate the word Beauty, " a totality
of movements and a harmony of movements in ourselves answering to the intellectual fact of finding that the jar is a harmonious whole," adjustments of
bilateral breathing, of equilibrium transferred with regularity from one side to the other, tensions of
lifting
up and pressing downwards, as the eyes move along the symmetrical outline of the jar. This agreeable arrangement of agreeable movements* in ourselves, this harmonious total condition of our adjustments, is, moreover, not fugitive ; the presence of the work of art, its continuous or renewed perception, enforces the continuance of this agreeable total condition, obliging the simultaneous or
It
is
to such passages that Professor Lipps applies particularly
scathing criticism.
an obscure point in this theory. The aesthetic impresNow, does this feeling consist in the bodily sensations, or is it connected with them ? Is the .
is
" There
is
sion
a feeling of pleasure.
feeling of agreeableness different

selves,
or
is it
a quality of
them
from the bodily sensations them"
While recognising the educative value which Professor Lipps has had in making me clear up my ideas, I would point out that Der asthetische Eindmck ist ein Gefilhl der Ltist itself involves very
analogous confusion of thought.
V. L. (191
1).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
185
consecutive repetition of its whole or of its parts, and excluding thereby the possibility of any other mode of being. It is to this latter fact that works of art owe their strange power of ridding us of the sense of the passing of time. The stress of practical is existence forgotten, we are no longer being driven onwards. We are safe and serene in what seems like a little railed-off or mysteriously guarded circle of existence, the circle in reality of our own balanced organic functions, of a mode of life
complete and satisfactory in
itself.
The simplest of these artificial arrangements for inducing and prolonging such perceptive adjustments
as give the
emotion of
of
its
aesthetic pleasure
is
pattern.
The rudiments
power depend upon
the fact that any visible fretting of a surface gives the eye, so to speak, something to lay hold of, and thereby provokes some of the adjustments which accompany the eye's movements.* One's eye, for instance, moves slower and more deliberately across a square foot of wicker-work than over a square foot of brown paper, and the movements are steadier
and more appreciable.
To
this
quality of
mere
complexity of surface, pattern adds by its regularity the power of compelling the eye and the breath to move at an even and unbroken pace. Even the simplest, therefore, of the patterns ever used have a power akin to that of march music, for they compel our organism to a regular rhythmical mode of being.
These two qualities of making the movements of eye and breath deliberate and making them rhythmical are common to the most rudimentary as well as to the most complicated pattern.
Cf. Kostyleff
foot-note.
V. L.
on eye adjustments
(191 1).
in
Central Problem, p. 9,
86
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

upon the
For an example of the action of pattern let us take the so-called Greek honeysuckle. As soon as the
pattern, we are conscious of being the two equal sides of the pattern call both lungs into equal play.* With the sense of being bilateral goes a sense of expansion, and the two unite into a vague feeling of harmony, which is recognised as unusual but at the same time as eminently natural. We catch ourselves considering the pattern as in some way the most natural arrangement in the room, although of course we are intellectually aware of its being extremely artificial. This strange sense of something being thus natural and normal because it suits the constitution of the spectator is one of the most important differentia of the aesthetic phenomenon, and a chief ingredient in all artistic emotions. As the eyes move upwards along the pattern, the two lungs draw in a long breath and there comes a slight sensation of the sides of the thorax being stretched ; this sensation of width continues while the breath moves upwards, giving us simultaneously the sense of bilateral width and of height, the proportion between which being very pleasant to breathe, accounts for a sense of well-being while looking at the pattern. If we try to reproduce these sensations of harmony while looking at the irregular shapes in the room, we are met by impossibility ; we can no longer breathe equally on both sides, the very sense of having two lungs is gone, and with it the sense of being bilateral. But all these senses return as soon as we look again at the pattern. After this experiment one quite realises how decorative art may have originated in the pleasure
eye
falls
bilateral, for
* See note to p. i8i.
HONEYSUCKLE PATTERN FROM GREEK VASES

Drawn
by C.A. T.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
187
which some prehistoric man may have found in breathing regularly and without need for readjustment when he first scratched lines at regular intervals from each other. From pattern we can now pass on to that simpler category of architecture which might be designated as architecture as -pattern, to distinguish it from the more complex phenomena of architecture as spatial enclosure and architecture as suggestive of forces and movements. This simpler division of the art is the architecture of facades. Let us compare with what seemed to happen inside us while looking at the honeysuckle pattern, what we seem conscious of in looking at Alberti's facade of Santa Maria Novella
in Florence.
There is the same pleasant consciousness of our being bilateral. But to this is now added another pleasure due to the fact that the building is divided into three parts, and that the perception of the middle one (to which nothing corresponded in the honeysuckle pattern which was divided into two) involves an adjustment which prevents the thorax from collapsing as much as usual during the act of expiration, and thus maintains even then a certain sense of being expanded. Turning to the arcade opposite the church, and looking at two of its arches only, we at once lose this agreeable sense due to the division of the facade in three ; looking at four arches of the arcade does no better. But as soon as we look at three arches of the arcade, or five considered as a double group of two with one arch between, we get the same agreeable expansion of the thorax during expiration which we had while looking at the fa9ade. We now return to the latter. The great expanse of surface in front of us makes us
88
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
both widened out and drawn up far beyond ordinary life, for the act of seeing produces unusually long and wide breaths ; we seem to be breathing according to the proportion of the building rather than to our own. Moreover, the fagade elicits in our body sensations more complex than those of which we were conscious while looking at the pattern. For pattern has no bulk. It does not require a centre of gravity to keep it upright ; its lines are not boundaries of a solid form ; so we follow the lines of the pattern by slight movements of our balance, by a slight movement outward of the body above the waist or of the head, first on one side and then on the other, and these little swinging movements we feel as curves which balance one another. But the fagade, on the contrary, is planted solidly on the ground, and the perception of this
feel
fact involves a sense of
weight and
lifting
up
in
ourselves
we
feel a faint desire to enclose
the form
between the pressure of our feet on the ground and the very slight downward pressure of the head, and the two pressures result in a sense of resisting gravitation. They can be tracked to the perception of the grip of the ground of the fagade's base and the downward pressure of the mouldings and cornices. On the other hand, the arches and upspringing lines produce sensations of easy lifting up and of pleasant activity which more than counterbalance these downward pressures, so that the main impression is one of light-heartedness.* The mention of such various pressures, and the varying ratios which may exist between them, here
Professor Lipps has been expecially, and I think justly, severe
on
this passage.
Cf. also his ^sthetische Betrachtung, p. 427 et seq.
V. L. (1911).
o ^
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

leads to the consideration of
189
call
what we should
the
humanly emotional quality of the aesthetic phenomenon. For the emotion of harmonious completeness which we have found to constitute the main aesthetic phenomenon as manisecondary or
fested in every art is susceptible of variations, which, while leaving the primary characteristic quite undisturbed, add, according to circumstances, subordinate characteristics coincident with the various kinds of emotion incident in real life. These characteristics, which constitute the expressive powers of art, are due to the proportion in which various forms excite in us senses of gravity, or Hghtheartedness, of solitariness or confidence, and many more besides, quite independently of the main
emotion of complete and harmonious living. but we shall find that they exist in large though varying degrees in the arts which address themselves
aesthetic
They
attract exorbitant attention in music
primarily to the eyes, affording in all the arts the easy and often misleading nomenclature taken from well-known experiences of a non-artistic sort, and diverting the attention of criticism from the aesthetic quaHties which are strongly felt but only vaguely described to the emotional qualities which are felt very faintly but are immediately named and identified. We shall not separate the study of these
secondary phenomena, but add it, when suitable, to the analysis of the main aesthetic phenomenon, and give an account of some of the bodily conditions accompanying the perception of emotionally various qualities of form while continuing our investigation into the bodily conditions accompanying the perception of artistic form merely as such.
find
And we
shall
that
even
as
in
music the same emotional
190
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

two melodies, of which one and the other aestheticallyarchitecture, the power of
kind
of
characteristic pervades
is
aesthetically excellent
worthless,
so
a
also
in
awakening
definite
emotion
may be
common
to two buildings of opposite degrees of aesthetic merit, so that, for instance, the predominance of one set of dimensions over another will
produce the same religious emotion in churches so

different in everything else as the cathedrals, say, of
Amiens and
of Cologne.
This double phenomenon of aesthetic emotion, differentiated by what we must call human emotion, becomes almost inextricable as soon as we consider architecture as an art of spatial enclosure or, in other words, as soon as we cease contemplating the outside of a church and submit ourselves to the extraordinary forces of its interior. Let us see what currents of bodily sensation we can detect in ourselves beneath the obvious and well-known emotions thus awakened. Coming into a large church we are conscious of a sudden and total change It will be remembered that in our mode of being. while moving about in the open the sides of the landscape seemed to come forward towards one. But in a church this sort of wide, lateral view seems to have increased, and it persists even when we are
;
still, instead of being replaced by the narrow mode of seeing peculiar to standing still in the open. This important difference is due to our eyes having been caught on their outside by the
standing
aisles
of
the building,
so
that
instead of seeing
merely with the fovea, one seems to be using the whole of each eye. Now, as the breathing works in closest connexion with the eyes, this widened way of seeing is necessarily accompanied by a widened
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

way
191
of breathing in which both lungs are felt, and the respiratory expansion inevitably produces a general sense of expanded existence. Besides thus seeing wider on account of the aisles, we are also seeing much higher because of the roof.* We are no longer interested in the ground under foot, the interest is above the level of the eye, in the cornices, capitals, and particularly in the arches of the roof the breath is fetched much higher up than outside the church, and the higher breathing, producing an upward tension, makes us feel taller, feel the ground less under our feet than in the open. These senses of increased expansion and height are only enlargements of feelings we habitually have. But the
interior of a
church makes what
is
practically an
addition to our sense of dimension by a remarkable reinstatement of the sense of the third dimension, which, as the reader remembers, we had found to dwindle as soon as we stood still out of doors. We get back the realisation of the third dimension in architecture because the poise of our head over its
*
To
this description of altered sensations

first
and altered objective
can myself subscribe, except as regards the detail of ocular adjustments and of breathing. But of some localised respiratory change 1 am conscious. I may add that the high carriage of the head, answering to the higher lighting and the strongly felt perspective, brings about in myself a feeling of being tall and having no weight to carry and of having zaell-fitting shoes (as distinguished from shuffling), such as I have lately remarked while walking at large on days of unusual
least in a large church, I
movements during the
minutes at
days {cesteris paribus) of can also subscribe to the special feeling of rather excited lucidity due to very good French Gothic interiors. There is a reference in a letter of William Morris to the exciting quality of French Gothic. German and Italian Gothic, and French flamboyant, give me no such feeling. ^V. L.
physical energy,
also
I
which are usually
spontaneous aesthetic responsiveness.
(191 1).
192
centre
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
of gravity enables us to make balancing movements backwards and forwards, and thus to follow the movement of lines quite easily, provided
they are above the eye. So the roof of a church offers us a road into distance which we can follow with ease and pleasure.* The full equal possession of the sense of all the three dimensions brings with it a sense of completeness in ourselves, and at the same time of closer relation with the not-ourselves ; and a sense of isolation and lack of confidence, hitherto unnoticed, is removed and becomes apparent in its removal, whence a condition of satisfaction and of serenity. This realisation of the third dimension is accompanied by a change in the breathing. We feel during expiration as if we had something to lean upon, instead of the breath seeming to give way, and this sensation it is which gives that feeling of confidence in the outer world. Moreover, the distance down the church forwards seems to exercise a very decided attraction, like that of a weak magnet for a The three dimensions of the church seem needle. to stretch the respiration in three directions, and
* We have a facility in realising distance above the eye because our head balances on a sort of pivot held in place by muscles but allowed perfectly free play in every direction. By tilting the head a little back we poise it exactly over its centre of gravity, and in this position the smallest movement backwards or forwards gives us a very strong sensation of really moving backwards or forwards into the distance, so where we have to look high, we see the distance. But distance below the horizon or just above it we cannot realise, because in seeing it we do not tilt our head back on to its centre of gravity, but it comes forward and is held up by the muscles of the neck ; moving it backwards and forwards involves a muscular effort attended by fatiguing instead of an agreeable movement of balance. So in this case we refrain from trying to realise the distance, and are satisfied with knowing that it exists. C. A.-T. (1897).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
193
explain very largely that special sense of completeness and harmony given by architecture which encloses, while the particular dimension which happens to predominate decides the human emotional colour added to this real aesthetic feehng.
While
various
this
is
going on
senses
we become aware
of direction.
also of
subsidiary
We
have
already mentioned that it becomes difficult to pay attention to the ground underfoot because the interest is strongest overhead. The head begins to assert its existence : we feel that it is there, that it has a back to it, and it is flanked by ears ; there is a sense of living upwards and sidewards. These senses of direction seem to radiate from the centre of the head, outwards, and they are various and welldefined tensions ; indeed, the sensation of the chest
than those which tell us on soUd ground existence seeming to be concentrated as height, width, and
real
and head seem more
that
we
are walking
outwardness. The total effect is that of feeling the church as a larger circumference of ourselves^ and this is the specific sensation of architecture considered as spatial enclosure. So far we have spoken of the effects of the relative proportions of a building. Before proceeding to a few details of special emotional quaUties we must say a word of actual size and the way that it affects us. In ordinary life there is nothing to bring home to us a sense of our size ; but architecture does this very strongly by the stretches imposed on us in the process of perceiving a building. Size which the eye grasps easily and without passing the duration of an ordinary breath is such as we find agreeab^le and, in a manner, intimate. Size greater than this, which can just barely be grasped at one long glance
194
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
and one long breath, begins to affect us in a special manner. Size greater still we no longer attempt to measure by our breathing and tensions, for we should We compose a purely intellectual crack if we did. knowledge of the size, while feeling it as little as we should be able to feel the meaning of forty miles. This probably accounts for the fact that while, for
instance, the Cathedral of Florence
still
impresses us
by
its size, St. Peter's notoriously leaves us
without
the sense of size is very strong it, so to speak, engulfs the sense of the shape of a building. In such cases there is a curious sense, due to the increasing tensions produced by size perception, of being immensely expanded, and as if buoyed in deep water, for the sense of size has abolished the sense of our own weight.* The special or secondary emotional qualities of various architectural types can be experimented on very simply by passing from the nave of a domed church to the space under the cupola. The change in our feelings is instantaneous and extraordinary. So long as we are in the nave we feel an attraction forwards due to the strong realisation of the third dimension ; but, once under the cupola, all desire
to go
any emotion of magnitude.
Where
on
vanishes, for
we suddenly become aware
and protected by power. This is due to the realisation of the shape of the cupola by tensions along the top and back of the head, and by an excitement of the muscles of the scalp, and more particularly of the muscles between the eye and the ear, a portion of the head which we feel thereby very peculiarly alive. The secondary, or human, emotions connected with
of being surrounded, enveloped,
invisible
some
* In
my
case also
to
what
reasons,
V. L, (191
most
certainly, although I
1).
am
not sure owing
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

specific aesthetic
195
Gothic churches (and so independently of the emotion that we have them equally in Gothic churches which are not aesthetically satisfactory, at Cologne as much as at Amiens) are
a
commonplace
of
literary
description.
These
emotions are explicable by the fact that acutely pointed arches are perceived by an adjustment which feels as if the breath of both lungs were running simultaneously upwards in a point, with a consequent strain and contraction the reverse of that expansion, which is accompanied by the sense of serenity and fellowship with the non-ego. Moreover, the act of breathing far higher up, both by its unusualness and by the strain it imposes, produces a state of being analogous to that of solitary and Quixotic resolves, forced upon us by the very nature of our surroundings. It is correspondingly difficult to have such feelings, without appropriate real causes, in a low square room. In remarkably high and narrow Gothic churches, like St. Ouen, the breathing goes as high as it can, but it cannot go high enough to reach the roof ; this gives us at once a sense of a superior force above us. In such a church mystic ideas seem the only natural ones, for we have lost the sense of firm ground under our feet, and seem, in a way, to hang from the sky. In passing, as we now do, from the consideration
of architecture as spatial enclosure to that of architecture as expression of force and movement, we desire to warn the reader against the criticism which
explains the aesthetic qualities of architecture by a reference to the technicafities of building. This view cannot possibly be true, because we can take the greatest aesthetic pleasure in architecture without any knowledge of building ; and because our
196
aesthetic
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

a
impressions are often at variance with knowledge of building would reveal.* The question of carrying weight, however considerable its intellectual interest, is not a question which can so that, for give us any agreeable sensations instance, the distribution of vertical pressure on the different parts of the building is a fact which possesses no aesthetic attraction, and which we do Nay, we sometimes not, therefore, desire to realise. actually shirk such knowledge as aesthetically disThus we realist the weight of cornices agreeable. and capitals only enough to feel the steadying of but we do not the upspringing walls and columns realise this pressure beyond that, because such realisation would merely make us uncomfortable. It is only where the construction happens to do something which we can follow pleasantly with our bodily adjustments that we wish the construction to be made plainly visible. And here we enter the domain of architecture as an expression of forces and movements, of forces and movements which we can realise agreeably in our sensations. As an example of this, let us examine what happens in connexion with arches. The problem of how the weight carried by the top of the arch is counteracted by charging the spandrils, is one of which our sensations do not intuitively make us aware indeed But we if they did we should dislike it very much.
what
feel pleasant interest in the thrust of
of the arch, in their
them
the two sides which keeps both in position over the centre of gravity,
mutual
pressure,
* Cf. Lipps's Raurrussthetik, p. 13.
"That which weighs and presses down in material reality (pas thatsSchlich lastet) may be poising or soaring {schweben) or erecting
itself as
regards our aesthetic impression."

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
197
because we feel that in this case the construction is doing something which we, standing on our two We therefore want to feet, can also do pleasantly. have this part of the construction made visible, and in so far find pointed arches more comfortable than round ones, because the point, however sHght, shows that the arch is made of two separate halves which press against each other, a pressure of each half which we follow by pressing our foot down on that side, with a light swing of the equilibrium, and by an inspiration on that side of the chest, making the reverse movements for the other half and obtaining, through these opposing movements, the realisation of the movements of the arch's lines. These movements of the lines are, in fact, our movements in looking at the lines, movements in most cases so slight as to be hardly perceptible, or Hke the faintly sketched out movements which accompany our hearing dance music while staying at rest, yet strong enough to produce in us a distinct consciousness, in the case of the arch, for instance, a consciousness of soaring up and swinging across its twosides.* The round arch, as opposed to the pointed, does not show the mutual inclination of its two halves so, instead of reaUsing those two halves in
:
This following of the lines hy our own movements makes perception a slow process, for we can only do one movement at a time, and as each movement necessitates a special adjustment, there is a pause (sometimes of one or two breaths) between each adjustment,
during which the eye merely rests passively upon the object without focusing it. In all cases the eyes do not move about independently of the movement of our head, for the independent movement of our eyes would be much too rapid for our other movements to follow. We see satisfactorily, therefore, by keeping our eyes more or less steady while executing the necessary movement with the head. C. A.-T. (1897).
198
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
opposition to each other, we treat the whole as all of a piece, and follow its lines by a slight shifting of our weight from one foot to another, and by following the movement of our eyes upwards by an inspiration and the downward movement by an expiration.* We find the movement of the round arch pleasant and particularly so in arcades where we move freely from one arch to the other ; but we miss the opposition of the two forces which we felt in the pointed arch. An interesting corroboration
of this manner of seeing, and a corresponding invalidation of the notion that the aesthetic value of
architecture depends upon its structural excellence, can be found in the fact that although all books on architecture explain that Gothic, as a style, depends
upon complexities of vaulting and buttressing, the lay public insists upon recognising Gothic wherever
it
meets a pointed arch, for the pointed arch makes an impression on the most ignorant, while the
structural
*
peculiarities
are
visible
only
to
the
we
Owing
to our consciousness of breathing with both lungs,
possess a certain degree of volition over their separate action.
We
can at will breathe more with one side than with the other, and thus do something which feels like breathing in on the right side and breathing out on the left and vice versa. Whether these adjustments really take place in the lungs or only in the throat and nostrils is a question for physiologists. Be this as it may, this kind of breathing is automatically set up when looking at mountains or at rounded arches ; and it gives the sense of swinging the breath across, from one side to the other, which sense is singularly agreeable. Our volitional power in this matter seems due to the curious fact of a very close connexion between the right eye and the breath on the right side. And this connexion is so close that shutting the right eye greatly diminishes the breathing through the right nostril, while the same happens for the left eye and nostril. Conversely, if keeping open both eyes we stop breathing through the right nostril, the right eye no longer sees satisfactorily, and lets the left eye do all the work. The reverse is of course the case. C. A.-T. (1897).
GOTHIC ARCHES AT VENICE From a photogra/>h by Alinciri
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

initiated.
199
Again,
we
take but little interest in a
modern pointed arch with exactly equal sides, for the pressure of the two sides seems comparatively passive, and we feel as if nothing were taking place. But a slightly uneven-sided arch, like those of good
Gothic work,
affects us as
extremely interesting, for
we
see the
two
sides of the arch actively pressing
against each other,
and
this at
once
calls
up
in us
active sensations of equilibrium.
We
are indeed
always balancing ourselves more or less ; nay, but for this fact, we should not be bipeds at all, or possess most of our human characteristics, and we are therefore so accustomed to this fact as scarcely But as soon as we sec to notice it in ordinary life. something else adjusting equilibrium, our own balance seems to swing on a wider scale, and this wider balancing brings a sense of our limits being enlarged in every direction, and of our life being spread over a far wider area. It is upon this and similar facts that depends the aesthetic wonder and beauty of a great French cathedral ; for, great as were their feats as constructive engineers, the great Gothic builders did things even greater with the apparent, as distinguished from the actual, equilibrium of their fabrics. They juggled, so to speak, with visible lines and made the beholder realise a whole organism of active and opposing movements, quite independently of the constructive necessity of the case, as is shown by the fact that their modern imitators have been able to make churches of the same pattern hold together without making any In similar appeal to the beholder's eyes and nerves. a great French cathedral every part seems to be balancing actively and the whole building to be, in a way, swinging, a live thing, and, to use Vasari's
200
expression
built
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
more appropriately, " born rather than by masons." The columns carrying the arches seem to be balanced on their bases, and the bases to be really gripping the ground. No column is quite rigid there is always a slight deviation from the perpendicular, righted at once by a return to the perpendicular ; so one is made to feel that the perpendiculars are perpendicular in an active sense and as a living fact. The same with the horizontals. They curve up very slightly, as if overcoming the forces of gravitation, so that one feels the horizontal
;
movement as actually taking place. One is never allowed to take the direction once for all, and as a matter of course, as in modern Gothic, but the sensations of direction are actively brought home to one the whole time of looking. In such churches the arches of the aisles rarely have equal sides the push to one side of the arch is readjusted by a push back in the next arch, and thus all down the aisle, the whole of the arches forming a group bound together by the interdependence of their balance. Both inside and outside a great French cathedral this quaHty is shown in every part, from the main items of construction to the smallest piece of ornament ; everything seems to move and balance. This means, from the subjective side, that a strong appeal is made by such arrangement of lines to our sensations of equilibrium ; and that these, which in ordinary life are almost unperceived, are developed to an importance little short of constituting a sixth sense. We feel our balance in every direction, and we really are balancing in every direction, for we are quite unable, while looking about us, to stand evenly on both feet. We feel out of step with our surroundings, unless we put our weight almost entirely on
:
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

one foot
;
201
fully
and when we have done
so,
we can
perceive, and, so to speak, feel incorporated with our
surroundings. This very subtle equilibrium which has thus been forced on us by architecture, has moreover a very noteworthy effect on our head. It brings us a feeling of clear-headedness such as we rarely felt before, and we feel as if there were nothing we could not understand. This illusion of mental lucidity seems due to an unusual activity in the back of our head, produced by the unusual demand on our balancing powers ; but what is exactly taking place is a question for physiologists. With this feeling of clear-headedness goes a keen excitement ;* we seem to be living at twice our normal rate, and life, for no definable reason, seems twice as much
worth
living, t
This extraordinary manipulation of our sense of equilibrium is by no means confined to the structural features, arches, lintels, columns, etc. etc., to the purely architectural details of great Gothic, but constitutes the raison d'etre of all great Gothic sculpture, even when the figures or plants represented seem extraordinarily and exclusively realistic in treatment. Indeed, the sculpture of a fine mediaeval church is very commonly employed to counteract and compHcate the movement of lines of the merely constructed items. Thus, over the door of the Chapter House at Westminster the arch is steadied on one side, and its over-rapid curve is
note on p. 562 (p. 191). ^V. L. (191 1). space to examine into the painting of rapid (as dist tinguished from balanced) movement, we should find that the quality of art, as given pre-eminently by Botticelli, is extremely analogous in its effects to the best Gothic architecture and sculpture.
If
* Cf.
my
we had
C. A.-T. (1897).
202
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
counterbalanced by the female statue alongside. She stands in profile towards the arch, but leans away from it at such a curve that she would inevitably fall over backwards if the curve of the arch were not rapid enough to counterbalance and keep her in place. The rocking of our own balance as we look at her makes us feel the forces at work ; as at once resisting and balancing one another, and equally dependent on the mutual opposition which endures Again, we can take a similar example for ever. from the Christ portal at Amiens, and more particularly from the pointed arch of the side niche. The left side of this arch presses outwards to the uttermost edge of its capital, and so impetuous is its push that we feel it must inevitably topple over outwards. But it is held back and counterbalanced by the rapid movement in the contrary direction of the wild rose-tree carved in the inside of the niche. The topmost branch makes a swinging curve to the right, and the leaves and roses all turn over to the right also, and press against the inner side of the arch, the rapid spring of the plant's movement checking the outward thrust of the arch, and the two movements balancing one another. And in looking at them we swing over to the left with the arch, and are steadied by the rapid movement to the right which is initiated in us by the sight of the Thus while lines which exactly balance rose-tree. each other, as in the soulless imitation Gothic of
to-day, give us no sensation of force and reaction, the counteraction of unequal weight and speed of lines of the genuine Gothic constitute an eternal
equilibrium in which we never cease feeling the conflicting forces.* C. A.-T.]
* Restorations of
Gothic which attempt to imitate the irregu-
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

IV
203
As our dominant impression of a pic[C. A.-T. ture is that of an arrangement of colours,* we must begin our analysis of the perceptive phenomena in the domain of painting by an examination into the part played by colour. As we have aheady shown by our first two elementary experiments comparing the seeing of a white and a coloured blank, colour makes things easy Colour gives the eye a grip, so to speak, on to see.
its sHpping off ; we can look much longer at a coloured object than an uncoloured ; and the colouring of architecture enables us to realise its details and its ensemble much quicker and more easily. For the same reason coloured objects
shape, preventing
larities of line of
the original work without the dynamic principle which makes the parts balance each other, restorations in fact which are merely crooked, produce in the beholder an actual organic disturbance. In looking at them our equilibrium is upset and we are tormented by a sense of illogicality which no amount of arguing
can remove.
C. A.-T.
(1897).
cf.
quotations from Lipps in Appendix to AnthropomoTfhic Esthetics. V. L. (191 1). The question of colour-action would be easy to settle by laboragallery diaries contain some evidence on tory experiments. the immediate attractiveness (or the reverse) of colours compared with the slower effect of form. I have often noticed in myself the sense of suffocation due to preponderance of certain colours and of liberation and " being able to breathe once more " of other
For corroboration,
My
and various shades of lilac ; happen to coincide with atmospheric effects. I have also been told by some persons of the vivifying quality of much crimson, and by others of the intolerable excitement and sensation of blood to the head produced by the selfsame crimsons. A wellknown Paris physician, with large experience among artists and
colours, especially pale blue, pale green,
of course these
nervous subjects,
tells
me his belief
nutritive
that various colours act variously

processes.
on
different
types of
and circulatory
^V.
L.
(19")-
204
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
always feel more familiar than uncoloured ones, and the latter seem always to remain in a way strange and external ; so that children, in colouring their picture books, are probably actuated not so much by the sensuous pleasure of colour as such, as by a desire to bring the objects represented into a closer and, so to speak, warmer relation with themselves. The power which colour possesses of putting the beholder into more intimate relation with shapes is not explicable by the mere excitement of the eye. It is due to the curious action of colour on respiration, on the fact that, if we may use such an For, while expression, we seem to inhale colour. stimulating the eye, we find that colour also stimulates the nostrils and the top of the throat ; for a colour sensation on the eye is followed quite involuntarily by a strong movement of inspiration, producing thereby a rush of cold air through the nostrils on to the tongue and the top of the throat, and this rush of cold air has a singularly stimulating effect sometimes the sight of an extremely vivid colour like that of tropical birds, or of vivid local colour strung up by brilliant sunshine, has a curious effect on the top of the throat, amounting to an impulse to give out voice. Colourless objects, on the contrary, offer no inducement to draw a long breath. If one breathes in strongly, nevertheless, there results a sense of almost intolerable insipidity, like the taste of white of egg without salt. This connexion between colour stimulation and respiration can be tested by looking at juxtaposed colours while alternately breathing and holding one's breath. This experiment brings out the unexpected fact that when divorced from respiration the eye
:
loses
much
of
its
sensitiveness
crude colours, or
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

we
refrain
205
crude combinations, do not offend us equally while
from breathing. Let us take, for a trial, scheme of colour olive-trees on a pale russet hill-side; and let us fasten a red patch at one corner and a yellow patch on the other and a bright blue patch in the middle. Looking at this appalling combination while holding the breath,* we find that it causes us no kind of distress. But as soon as we resume breathing we find that we cannot endure to look at it any longer. For the moderate sort of even respiration instinctively adopted while looking at the delicate scheme of colour of the landscape is roughly disturbed by the patches of red, yellow and blue they force the breathing into violent inspiration, which is felt as a sudden over-stimulation of certain tracts in the region of taste and smell, almost as in smelling a rose we should be disturbed by the sudden intrusion of a pungent smell like that of smelling-salts. When we remove the three patches of colour and look at them together we have no sense of aversion, for, although they force us to inhale more air than normally, we no longer experience an uneven stimulation, excessive and insufficient alternately. If now we look at the picture without the patches, we experience a curious complex excitement of the nature both of taste and smell, and the air breathed
a picture in a delicate
:
in seems to have a sort of grain in it. picture forces us to breathe sharply
No part
;
of the
everywhere
we
breathe evenly and gradually, with the sort of harmonious evenness with which we inhale the delicate smell of a rose. Moreover, the agreeableness of this sensation causes us to breathe
* Cf. Msthetic Responsiveness
respiratory adjustment
for
more
observations
such,
and attention as
V. L.
on connexion of
(191 1).
2o6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
frequently while looking at the picture than we did It is further noticeable that the scheme of before. colour of a picture has the power of, so to speak, placing the respiration. Thus, gay colours place the field of respiration high up, and sombre colours place it low down ; and the emotions accompanying these adjustments of the breathing are such that we designate the respective schemes of colour as gay or
as serious.
The common
really
expressions, cool
and warm colour,

our temperacolours,
seem to be based upon
fact, for
ture
is
actually affected differently
by
and
one might almost say that great pictures have a climate. For instance, the rather strong, heavy colour of Signorelli heightens the temperature and gives a feeling of slight congestion, such as one suffers from when too much wrapped up on a warm day while the scheme of colour of a Perugino produces an immediate effect of cool peacefulness.
;
Harmonious colour keeps the respiration well in the same area while the eye wanders over the whole
picture, whereas the introduction of crude colour produces an unevenness of respiration, as detailed
above.
Our dominant impression

is
in looking at a picture
that,
therefore,
of an arrangement
of colour
whereas in the real world our dominant impression is that of recognition and, so to speak, naming of the For in the real world shapes shapes represented. are separated from each other by the air between them, and while the air lets the eye pass freely, the
solid shapes,
on the contrary,
is
arrest it
on
its
passage.
canvas with different shades of colour laid on it, all of which offer equal resistance to the eye irrespective of what the arrangea picture
But
merely
a fiat
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
207
ment of colour may represent ; the eye being held equally by the sky, and by a solid object, and the colour of the background being seen in the same manner as that of the figures placed against it. The colour is therefore presented evenly, and we see a picture at the first glance as an arrangement of colour rather than of shapes. Moreover, as a picture is a flat surface, and the sides of a picture can equally arrest the eye, one can, so to speak, lean upon the sides of the picture all the way into its centre. This is impossible with the landscape seen through a window-pane ; here the sides seem intangible, the eye drops through to the distance, and the whole looks a mere random fragment of the external world. This fact of the resistance offered to the eye by the sides of a picture is of far greater importance than might be expected, and than is suspected by the rank and file of modern artists, who disregard it in a slavish fideUty to reality, for it enables the painter to enclose and show us a whole
little
world complete in itself.
Moreover,
it
happens
that this enclosed appearance coincides, as we have before remarked, with the actual appearance of a real landscape when we walk into it, for in this case our movement causes the sides of the landscape to come forward to meet us ; we seem to be walking as through a corridor into the distance, and we have the sense of being in a special world of which we are the centre. It is on this agreeable impression that we base our recollections of real scenery, for this picture-hke arrangement drops to pieces as soon as we stop still, the sides of the landscape cease to belong to the background, and we lose all that sense of pleasant wholeness and enclosure. It is to be noticed that the old masters always represented
2o8
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
landscape as we can see it while moving, not as it appears when we stand and look at it through a
as the reader perceives, got into thick of the difficult questions of the dimensions the in painting,* and, before proceeding to the examination of the mode of perception of the third dimen-
window-pane. We have now,
sion in art,
we must premise
that
we
are departing
in a measure
as
from the phraseology usually adopted. The third dimension is usually called thickness. But
we
are treating dimensions subjectively, as per-
ceptive
our body,
modes corresponding to various we are obHged to treat of it as
stretches of
distance
and
bulk, distance referring to the flat
ground, and bulk
Similarly, we divide to objects occupying space. the first dimension, height, into height and defth, because the sensations accompanying the act of looking upwards are totally different from the sensations accompanying the act of looking downwards. The sensations derivable from what we call height are agreeable and raise our spirits, while those we get from what we call (that is, first dimensional) depth are depressing, owing to the opposite adjustments of breathing in the two cases. As regards the second dimension, width, we have not required to depart from the usual nomenclature, but have considered it merely as existing either on both sides or on one side separately, because we can obtain the
adjustment giving the sensation of width either
as
lished
sculptor, Adolph Hildebrand, has pubsome remarkable, though rather extreme, views on the importance of the dimensional sense in art in his book on The Problem of
The eminent German
Form, in the Plastic Art.
^V.
L. (1897),
Views with which, so far as their aesthetic importance goes, as distinguished from their psychological basis, I now entirely concur. V. L. (1911).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

unilateral
visual art
sional
209
works
of
or
bilateral.
The
effect
of
on the processes connected with dimenperception is very complex the region of

:
our breathing is placed higher than normally, the breathing apparatus is widened equally on both sides, and some automatic adjustment is initiated in the lower part of the thorax and the diaphragm which answers to the sense of distance by giving a support to the breath in expiration. In order to avoid tiresome reiteration throughout this section, we should wish the reader to keep in mind the following facts concerning the physiological and emotional phenomena connected with the various dimensions First dimension (which we call height and depth). Breathing high up.* Sense of lightheartedness our feelings rise without objective motive ; we feel hopeful. One might expect good or bad spirits to be almost producible at will by lifting up or lowering the breathing. Second dimension (breadth). Breathing with both lungs. A feeling of expansion and serene well:
One is tempted to recognise this sense of expansion as a principal factor in all conditions of happiness and benevolence, so inevitably does it bring these feelings in its train. Third dimension (thickness,t which we call distance and bulkt). Breathing backwards and forbeing.
I have spoken of " breathing high " because that
feels like.
is
The
feeling
is
probably produced by the
lift
what it up of the
ribs.C. A.-T. (191 1). t As a fact the third dimension is usually called not thickness but de-pth. It would be convenient for aesthetics if height were divided into up and down. ^V. L. (1911). X We have divided the third dimension into distance and bulkf not only because these two halves of the subject correspond to
2IO
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

A
sense of confidence in the reality of things. wards. Feelings of increased interest towards the outer world, and of an indefinable attraction resembling affection ; intimate and warm relations with things outside us. It will be well, also, if the reader will remember that, as all these modes of dimensional perception are united in painting as in architecture and sculpture, there must be present, during our perception of works of these arts, a combination or alteration of these modes of breathing. Having thus tabulated the relative aesthetic functions of the three dimensions, we can now return to the treatment of the dimensions by art, and more particularly of the first and third, having already had occasion to deal with the second in this relation.
but also because, owing to the difference between these adjustments, the aesthetic value of the two divisions of the third dimension are different and even opposed. For, whereas we ask from painting for an increased realisation of distance, because we enjoy going into the picture, we ask, on the contrary, for a lesser
different adjustments,
realisation of bulk than
we
obtain normally
when walking
about.
which we perceive to project forwards, we are obliged to begin with a sudden high inspiration which is fatiguing, and we therefore prefer that in pictures the projections should be flattened, and that we should be separated by a sort of neutral space from the objects which would otherwise bulge towards The greatest pictures are always rather flattened.-C. A.-T. us.
at objects
For when we look
This is, in simpler language, one of the essentials of Hildebrand's theory of the treatment of planes not only in painting and relief, but in sculpture, a treatment which is naturally connected with frontality. Hildebrand gives such frontality and unification of planes an absolute and normative value ; Lowy looks upon it as an historical phenomenon. Cf. H.'s Problem der Form and Lowy's Naturwiedergabe. Cf. also Hamann, Dekorative Plastik, in Zeitschrift fur JBsthetik, III. Band, Heft 2, 1908. There is, of course, a psychological reason against the bulging of some item of a picture or statue : it prevents our going into the composition and getting the feeling of enclosure. Also it often affects one like an aggression. ^V. L. (191 1).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
211
The first dimension, which we must divide into height and depth, or wpwardness and downwardness* is brought home to us by art in a far completer way
It requires a good deal of experito verify how comparatively little reality allows us to realise the facts of lifting upwards and pressing downwards. If we compare them with
than in reahty.
ment
figures in a good picture, we shall find that our fellow-creatures in the real world give us little sense of weight, they seem to stand on ground which seems to offer no resistance to their feet and scarcely
to be underneath them. are usually satisfied with the mere optical perception of real figures, or even the mere recognition of them by qualities which serve as labels. But when we come to works of art we demand certain senses of adjustment in our own bodies, and to obtain these we require that the fact of lifting up and pressing down, like the facts of bulk, should be strongly realised in the painted figures. And the old masters, untroubled by reaHsm on their side, were impelled by the same instinct to paint what they felt instead of what they saw ; or rather they thought they saw what they really only felt. Thus in Leonardo's memorandasketches churches barely two inches high give, by the treatment of perpendicular lines, the full sense of the pressure on the ground, the lift upwards of the walls and columns, and the pressure downwards of the cornices and lintels. These little drawings elicit in the beholder the sense of realisation which we obtain by feeHng the pressure of our feet on the ground, the lift upwards of our body, and the slight pressure downwards of the head, feeUngs of which
We
V.
These I would L. (191 1).
now
call,
with Lipps, " senses of directions."
212
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

are usually not conscious,
transfer to the drawings,*
we
we
results in a sense of gravity
and whose presence and importance which
can now pass on to the treatment of the third dimension in art.f It will be remembered that when we stand still we see the ground stretching away on each side of us as width pure and simple, but we do not see the
We
ground which stretches away in front of us as distance pure and simple ; it has, on the contrary, a certain likeness to height, and it is only when we walk forward that this appearance of height is replaced by
that of distance as such. have thus, when standing still, partially lost one sense of dimension ; and it is very probable that we unconsciously suffer from this partial loss and the consequent diminution
We
Owing
to this system of weights
and
pressures, composition
is
able to take fragmentary things and turn
them
into complete wholes.
Thus the
best Renaissance busts do not affect us as being the cut off head and shoulders of a full-length figure ; they are complete in themselves, owing to the arrangement of pressure on the ground, the lift up of the middle part and the slight downward pressure of the head. The same holds good of three-quarter-length portraits by great painters ; we cannot conceive the subject as being longer than we see him, and the addition of the legs would undo the unity of the whole. Good composition combines things into a homogeneous and complete unity which awakens in us a quite specific corresponding sense.C. A.-T. (1897).
Gallery Diaries (Aesthetic Responsiveness, p. 298) contain t evidence to the well-admitted fact that the recognition of the third dimension, unless obtained by locomotion or prehension, always presupposes the recognition of what we are looking at as intended to
represent so-and-so, or in real life, as likely to turn out to be so-and-so.
My
Hence many "

of recognition.
optical illusions." Kiilpe {Outlines, pp. 188-194) seems to suggest that the name helps us often or always in such acts
To what extent may not the third dimension be a multiplyingfactor

of the
(1911).
Einfuhlung connected with the
first
and second
^V.
L.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

of the corresponding respiratory adjustments
this
;
213
nay,
would account for the singular impression of harmony which results from the full reinstatement In architecture this of the third dimension by art. reinstatement is effected by the poise of our head over its centre of gravity, enabling us to make balancing movements backwards and forwards, and by the consequent ease with which we can follow
the movement of lines above the eye. In paintings we obtain the realisation of the third dimension by a different method. Various experiments point to the fact that while we stand still we cannot satisfactorily see the third dimension, either as bulk or as distance, in the ground -plane of the landscape ; but that we can see distance satisfactorily in a shelf placed about the level of the lower part of the chest, and that we can satisfactorily realise the bulk of the objects standing on such a This peculiarity seems due to special adjustshelf. ments of the thorax and diaphragm being elicited by the sight of the flat space on the level with the
chest.
The adjustments of the thorax are similar to those we make in walking about ^we breathe backwards our ribs and forwards, instead of up and down project forward while we draw our breath inward, and the simultaneousness of this outward movement of the ribs and inward movement of the breath gives
us the sense of stretching backwards and forwards at the same moment, and thus enables us to realise to a certain extent the notion of distance. This realisation of distance is greatly reinforced by the adjustments taking place in the diaphragm. do not pretend to explain what is really taking merely point out that in our place in our body.
We
We
214
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
consciousness we feel as if our breath had something underneath it supporting it during expiration, something which does not give way as it moves outwards^ and so it gains in strength and seems to move straight outward instead of dropping down. By this means we actually get a pleasant sensation from expiration, which under ordinary conditions gives rather a depressing sensation. We are able to realise bulk by breathing backwards and forwards in longer or shorter breaths ; breathing a short breath, for instance, up to where the object stands, and a much longer succeeding breath immediately beyond the object as the eye moves past it into the distance. It may be conjectured that we are able to realise bulk and distance on a plane above the level of the waist, but not on the ground plane, not on account of any difficulty in the mere visual apprehension of the lower plane as distinguished from the upper, but on account of the depressing sensations which accompany the muscular adjustment necessary for reahsation when they are connected with a plane below the level of for, as we have already said, we always the waist shirk realisation when the effect on the respiration would be painful. habitually imagine that we see the third dimension on the ground plane in the same manner as the two other dimensions when we really merely know that it is there. It is only when we get the realisation of it by corroboration of it by our bodily sensations that we recognise that we have not been realising it before. Now, painting has the power of making us thus realise the third dimension agreeably because it can place the ground plane rather in the relation toward us of the shelf opposite our chest than, as is the case
;
We
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

in
reality,
215
the ground underfoot. The old followed their instinct instead of being distracted by theoretic realism, lifted up the ground plane in such a manner that if produced towards the beholder it would meet him somewhere about the And the level of the chest instead of underfoot. greater part of the pleasure which such a realisation of the third dimension causes us must be explained, we believe, in the unexpected reinforcement of the respiration which it occasions in expiration as well
of
masters,
who
This backward and forward as in inspiration. breathing brings with it, as we have noticed akeady in speaking of churches, a heightened interest in the outer world and a warmer feeling towards things in general, both of which flag very noticeably as soon as we turn to a painting in which the third dimension is imperfectly realised. There remains for our consideration another important factor in the feelings awakened by painting, which we have met already under different circumstances in dealing with architecture. This aesthetic element is the power of lines to awaken senses of movement, which is universally recognised in such expressions as the movement of lines, their swiftness, their ascending and descending quaHties, And here we must premise that when we feel etc. movement in a work of art, it is not as the opposite We feel movement in art as of standing still. the contrast between opposing movements,* which we are forced to initiate in the process of seeing. For instance, we perceive a movement forward by balancing forward, and then moving back again ;
For Lipps's declaration to

volume.
this effect (though, of course, not to
that of our
movements being involved)
see quotations
from Lipps,
p. 41 of this
V. L.
(191 1).
2i6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

We
the rapid movement forward contrasted with the rather passive swing backwards gives us the sense pay attention only of having gone forwards. to the movement which we are, so to speak, miming that is to say, in the direction to which we become sensible ; the lesser movement by which we resume our previous state of adjustment escapes us. The movement of lines in architecture is in a
whole an arch and the rapidity or slowness of its curve within the given For the movelimits is all we have to deal with. ment of an arch consists of the balance of its two half-arches, and this balance we follow by shifting our own weight from one foot to another. Thus movement in architecture is a comparatively easily explained phenomenon whereas we shall find that
given direction course of the
;
we see, movement
for instance, the
of
movement
lines
in pictures
that
is
to say,
movement
going freely in various directions is a more complicated problem. For as a picture is not a set pattern, it does not present an unbroken movement all through it, but it gives us instead fragments of moving lines, often opposing each other irregularly, and constituting portions of the various shapes represented in the picture, fragments of lines which may be parts of hills, or figures, or draperies. As a result of this, we do not follow these lines with movements of our whole balance as we did in looking at the lines of architecture, because we could not mime, so to speak, all these fragmentary move-
of
ments ; so we follow these lines of movement in painting by a number of light, free movements of the head and shoulders, requiring no effort, and perceived by us as agreeable, and, so to speak.

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
caressing
217
gesture
movements.
These,
which we
shall call gesture movements, play a great part in the
aesthetics of painting. For as, in art, the forces of gravitation are not felt, we have no indication of
the actual weight of things, but feel only the amount of weight necessary to steady the upspringing of the movement. In this way most things in a picture are, so to speak, mimed by these gesture movements only, which, as we have seen, are effortless and pleasant. Indeed, we perceive even the active movements of painted figures rather as rapid gesture than as action. Even in the pictures of Lotto, one of the old masters who put most active movement into his pictures, the Virgin carries the child less by
a
fatiguing effort of resisting weight than

free gesture.
by
charming
Indeed, what we feel and think of as movement in painting is rather a successful arrangement of lines of movement than a correct representation of the muscular facts of movement as such. The reader will have no difficulty in remembering a dozen cases where figures are really upheld by the mere lines of their drapery ; and even where drapery, which, considered as stuff, would of course give way under pressure, is actually made, as Une, to support considerable weight.
C. A.-T.]
[C. A.-T. It will have become evident all through these notes that for complete appreciation the spectator must be willing to meet the work of art
half-way.
This
is
nowhere
so
much
the case as with sculp-
ture, because, as the scupltured figure constitutes
the whole work, unaided by any arrangements to
21
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
guide the attention, we can see it adequately only by ourselves initiating the necessary adjustments ; and, as the statue has the same general shape as ourselves, these adjustments involve a very considerable adjustment, not merely of our internal, but of our externally visible, movements.
We cannot, for instance, satisfactorily focus a stooping figure like the Medicean Venus if we stand before it bolt upright and with tense muscles,* nor a very erect and braced figure like the Apoxyomenos if we stand before it humped up and with slackened muscles. In such cases the statue seems to evade our eye, and it is impossible to realise its form thoroughly ; whereas, when we adjust our muscles in imitation of the tenseness or slackness of the statue's attitude, the statue immediately becomes a reality to us.f
That Greek statues, unaided by lines of direction and arrangements of colour, are thus excessively dependent upon the movements of the spectator, can be shown by one or two other details. Greek statues, for instance, do not stand as if rooted to the ground, but stand, on the contrary, by balance ;
we
therefore see
feet,
them
satisfactorily only
if
ourselves
and unconsciously miming, so to speak, their equilibrium with our own. This fact and the above-mentioned one can be experimentally tested
as
on our
easily as the fact
of being unable to
hum
or
whistle a tune with one

*
rhythm while moving our
This example, chosen by me, was rejected by my collaborator her statement in Central Problem, p. 1 19. ^V. L. t This passage is elucidated in Central Probleniy p. I18, "apart from any tendency to mimic its represented action. . . . It is to such conformity of our bodily tensions (whether definitely localised or not) with the dynamic suggestions of a statue's shape that my collaborator and myself now limit the remark." V. L. (191 1).
c.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
219
Again, as bodies according to another rhythm. Greek statues possess a definite equilibrium, it becomes necessary to walk round them in order thoroughly to realise them, because, although from some given point we might get a view of the whole figure, yet from no one point could we get the complete sense of the figure's equilibrium. We must therefore shift our position more or less continually
in order to follow each part of this balance to
its
point of stability ; * and as our own equilibrium is affected by that of the statue we feel dissatisfied until we have realised the position in its wholeness. In the unfortunately numerous cases, therefore, where an antique, intended to be free standing, is placed with its back against the wall, we are not only deprived of the sight of half of the statue's
I now think that all pre-Lysippian statues have lines of composition, and Michelangelo's with the exception of the Bacchus
and one or two others. Walking round such a statue destroys its composition and inhibits Empathy of its lines in my experience. Lysippian and other non-frontal statues give either imperfect points of view (owing to their limbs masking essentials) or leave confused memory images due to my being chased round them in the process of exploration. Statues of the pre-Lysippian (Hildebrand) type, I walk round in order to find the points of view ; but once the points of view found, I stop, and it is these points of view which furnish visual memory images, to which is added a sort of vague halo of knowledge that the statue had been seen from other points. V. L. (191 1). t We are here speaking only of antique sculpture. The sculpture of the Renaissance is partly an outgrowth of architecture ; it is
largely influenced therefore by architectural laws, and must usually be taken in connexion with a definite place and point of view. See a chapter on this subject in Vernon Lee's Renaissance Studies and Fancies (1897). This whole distinction between Renaissance and Antique art I now consider entirely mistaken in the light of Hildebrand's views. V. L. (1911).
220
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
form, but we are also deprived of the power of making the statue unwind itself^ so to speak, under our eye by moving round it, and obtaining the living realisation of its gesture. It is only by making the statue thus unfold itself that we can obtain the full sense not merely of its shape but of its organic totality. For, as remarked before, equilibrium is a vital matter to us bipeds, who cannot stand without balancing ourselves ; and we are, therefore, extremely sensitive to any check inflicted on those alterations of balance which are entailed in the perception of form. This fact will also explain our
indifference,
which,
and even aversion, to certain statues, though undoubtedly beautiful in bodily

whenever we get good balance from one point of view only and
it
is
structure, are unsatisfactory in their equilibrium.
We
are very grateful
in a statue, even
by accident
indeed,
possible that the perof
Milo as an original masterpiece of the greatest epoch may be due to the fact that the absence of arms makes her compose in the very happiest equilibrium when seen from
sistent belief in the
Venus
the front. In the best Greek figures the foot which bears the weight is placed so well under the centre of gravity that they can walk slowly without rocking, whereas real people at least moderns walk, so to speak, with a foot on each side, and therefore lurch Now, in looking at Greek as soon as they go slowly. are forced automatically to adjust ourstatues, we selves to their walk in order satisfactorily to focus them ; and this adjustment to a better balance in ourselves is extremely agreeable. In this way do good antiques improve our consciousness of existence by literally forcing us to more harmonious move-
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

ments.
necessity of
221
But there are other ways also in which our miming by our own muscular adjustments the forms and figures which we focus, gives
us the benefit of the finer organism represented in a work of art. An antique statue does not merely move better than a real human being, but it has also a much finer muscular system.* The real human being, even at its very best, possesses a bony
framework which would tumble down were it not tied into uprightness by the contraction of the muscles ; and no movement is possible save by the pull of the muscles on the bones and the leverage of one bone upon another. Moreover, the weight But of the body is perpetually dragging it down. very different from these outward arrangements of pulleys and levers is the muscular system of the great Greek statues. In them the muscles seem to act of their own free will, not as things which contract,
* Since writing the above, indeed since answering Professor
Groos
in 1909 (see p. 1 19), I have been taught by Mrs. Roger Watts a system view of the relation between the of athletics which has altered
my
Greek representation of the human body and the possibilities of that body, if submitted to a particular training. The training in question, as Mrs. Roger Watts, its inventor, has demonstrated in lectures in London and before the British
Archaeological School in
special muscular tension,
Rome,
consists in developing a state of

all
and thereby bringing
the various parts
into the closest and most voluntarily controlled connexion.

a facility in resisting gravitation,
Hence
and a consequent appearance of homogeneous existence and of freedom from weight such as we have hitherto considered the prerogative of Greek works of art. This convinces me that an originally very select model, if gradually developed by a training in high tension, would give us something much more like the Greek figure than I could otherwise have supposed And I should like to express my great obligation to Mrs. possible. Roger Watts as the inventor and teacher of a system of movements which is, in my opinion, bound to shed great light on the whole question of Antique Sculpture. C. A.-T. (191 1).
222 but
as
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
things which hold up freely and without The body and limbs rise up like a tree with branches; indeed, one might say that Greek its sculpture embodies the character of growing plants in forms imitated from human beings. Good antiques are not only more beautiful in structure than human beings ; they carry their weight with as much ease as human beings do so with difficulty, and the muscular adjustments elicited by the sight of this easy carriage of body is accompanied in the beholder by a sense of increased lightness and strength in himself.*
effort.
reaHty, the same only to such forms as can awaken agreeable feeUngs in the beholder, can be observed in the heads of good antiques. In the real human face we neither expect nor get complete harmony of lines and masses, and we accept as beauty what may, in many cases, be a look of intelligence, or goodness, or pathos ; we accept, moreover, not only the traces of moral wear and tear, but the indication of continually repeated ungraceful muscular effort, as in the movement of the jaw in eating ; now such indications of functions the antique sculptor simply does away with. Moreover the relation between the features is wilfully altered. The nose is, so to speak, tied to the brow and the mouth to the
fidelity
The same improvement upon
now add, to what my collaborator wrote above, that in opinion good antiques have also lines of pressure downwards, like those of the foot of vases and chalices and the base of Romanesque pillars. I now think that a sense of downward movement in the lower half of an artistic shape (like the downward movement of a roof) is, so to speak, the negative factor of pleasure, while the uprising movement of the upper half is the positive one. Some observations on the pressing down of lower limbs of statues vdll be found in my Gallery Diaries, This connect* with " Frontality." ^V. L. (191 1).
I should
my

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
223
cheeks in a closeness of connexion incompatible with The eye, which has exagtheir true functions. gerated prominence in reality, is kept quite low in interest, while the hair is given great importance the importance of freely growing vegetation, for instance by the separation into conventional strands and locks. The ear also, which in real life looks Hke an isolated rosette, is drawn into close relation with the rest of the features. Yet we accept this constant deviation, not merely from everyday reality, but from the structure necessitated by function, because such a harmonised pattern of features gives us a totality of delightful senses of adjustment, and that feeling of naturalness naturalness due to suitability to our requirements which we noticed already in mere pattern as one of the chief characteristics of aesthetic pleasure. For in such Greek heads as declare themselves, by inner evidence, to be original works of great masters for instance, the Aberdeen head in the British Museum the features are so intimately connected that we are able to see the mouth in relation to the hair, or the nose in relation to the ear, with delight-
ful ease, as if one's eye
were travelling in
a carefully
the sculptor had worked each detail into the rest as though he had been designing an embroidery or laying out a garden. The expressive quality of antiques is similarly obtained (even as we found it in architecture) by presenting us with forms whose perception entails adjustments in ourselves such as accompany various emotional conditions. Thus, in the bronze head of Hypnos, in the British Museum, the expression admirably hushed and sleep-compelling, but is
track,*
made
and
as if
For confirmation,
cf. JEjthetic
Responsiveness, pp. 261-2,
224
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
without the smallest suggestion of sleep in the god himself. And this effect is obtained by the ears being lowered, and thus giving the head a downward bias ; by the low brow weighing down the eyes, and the nose being slightly compressed, so that the breathing comes, as it does in the dark, through the mouth ; while the eyes are drawn rather near together, as they seem to be when we turn them slightly inwards at the moment that C. A.-T.] sleep comes over us.
VI
The consideration of sculpture, which we had therefore postponed to that of apparently more complex branches of art, has brought out with the
greatest clearness,
owing to its apparent realism and to the actual locomotion it demands from the beholder, two facts involved in all our previous examinations, which, when united, may constitute
the basis of a
new theory
of aesthetics.
:
summed up as follows that our pleasure in art makes us accept, and even unconsciously demand, a systematic divergence from everyday experience, substituting for reality, forms, motions, and suggestions of structure and function entirely unreal, and that this fidelity to the subjective requirements of our organism passes
One
of these facts can be
muster
world.
that,
as fidelity to objective
arrangements of the
as follows
:
the sensory pleasures of colour and ocular adjustment, the aesthetic pleasure in art is due to the production of
The second fact may be summed up when deduction has been made of
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
225
highly vitalising,* and therefore agreeable, adjustments of breathing and balance as factors of the perception of form.f The greater or lesser agreeableness of artistic experience is, therefore, due to the dependence of one of the most constant and important intellectual activities, the perception of form, on two of the most constant and important of our bodily functions, respiration and equilibrium. And the aesthetic instinct, the imperious rejection of certain visual phenomena as ugly, and the passionate craving for certain others as beautiful, is therefore no unaccountable psychic complexity, but the necessary self-established regulation of processes capable of affording disadvantage and advantage to the organ-
founded, of course, of the eye are accompanied by a variety, forming an evervaried unity, of bodily adjustments which, as a rule, have ceased to be apprehended as such, and have merged, even like the alteration in our tissues underism.
of this
is
The whole
view
upon the supposition that the movements
* In his remarkable volume on Tuscan painters (1896) Mr. B. Berenson has had the very great merit, not only of drawing attention to muscular sensations (according to him in the limbs) accompanying the sight of works of art, but also of claiming for art the power of vitalising, or, as he calls it, enhancing life. Mr, Berenson offers a different and more intellectual reason for this fact than is contained in the present notes. In a series of lectures on Art and Life, delivered at South Kensington in 1895, and printed the following year in the Contemporary Review, one of the joint authors of the present notes had attempted to establish that the function of art is not merely to increase vitality, but to regulate it in a harmonious manner.
-V.L.(i897).
Cf. l^he Central Problem of Esthetics, pp. 112-13. ^V. L. (1911). f For my present view of this question see Esthetic Empathy
and The Central Problem ;
also conclusion of the present
also /Esthetic Responsiveness^ p.
334
et seq.
V. L.
volume
(191 1).
226
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
lying mere sensations, into vague emotional conditions accompanying the recognition of objective peculiarities outside us. What these adjustments
to show by experiments on our seeking to detect and name the more easily distinguished among these incipient or actually realised motor adjustments. But as the accounts of them thus given have been necessarily incomplete, the joint authors of these notes are anxious to forestall a wrong impression which might easily result from the casual reading of anything so rough and ready. The repetition of the same formulae of adjustment, such as " shifting the or forwards," balance," " breathing backwards
are
we have tried own consciousness,
" senses of upward or downward tension,"
etc.,
without any specification of the amount of each such adjustment as compared with other adjustments, might easily leave the impression that the totality of adjustments is the same in the perception of every work of art belonging to the same category, and that the difference between individual works of art is perceived by some process indepena misconception all the dent of these adjustments more probable that the human emotional quality of works of art seems to vary very little from individual work to individual work as distinguished from category to category of work, so that ten different cathedrals may strike us as equally religious and ten different marches as equally cheerful, although each of the ten be perfectly aesthetically distinguishable from the rest. But in our opinion there is no such analogy between the human emotional character and the asthetic
;
individuality of a work of art. The character of cheerfulness or solemnity depends upon an emotion which, once set up by some main perceptive adjust-
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

is
227
ment, continues operative until some other emotion set up by another main perceptive adjustment, so that we may continue seeing quite different details of a work of art without the human emotional conBut the dition of our feelings in the least altering.
actual aesthetic quality, the essential individuality of a form, that which in common parlance we see, corresponds upon the subjective side to a totality
as
motor adjustments which is exactly as complex, co-ordinated, and as individual as that which we think of as the objective form outside us. In other words, the pattern of our senses of adjustment taUies most absolutely in every detail with the pattern of the particular object we are looking at ; for the simple reason that the subjective pattern of our perceptive feelings and the objective pattern of the form perceived are one and the same phenomenon differently thought of. Whatever the nature of the mysterious ego which is aware of the muscular adjustment and of the form, and whatever the explanation of the possibility of consideraing the phenomenon as a double one of subjective change in us and of objective quality outside us, there is not, in our opinion, any variation of visually perceived form which does not correspond to a variation distinguishable or indistinguishable [separately] of our perceptive motor adjustment ; and every individual difference perceived by us means an individual difference in our perceptive activity. Our formula that " the phenomena of inner motor adjustment must be, in each single case, exactly as complex, as co-ordinated, and as individual a totality as the artistic form perceived is complex, coordinated and individual ; that every particular pattern of form tallies with a particular pattern of
of
228
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

believe,
motor adjustment," can, we

strated despite the clumsiness
self-scrutiny
be demon-
and insufficiency of and self-expression, by comparing what
happens in us in the presence of a masterpiece with what we can detect in ourselves in the presence of an inferior work of the same school. And from this analysis it becomes possible, moreover, to apprehend clearly why certain works of art give us a
larger
amount
of pleasure, or a greater intensity of
pleasure, than
do
certain, others.
we have chosen a comparison of two Venetian pictures of the same period, the one an excellent work of an artist of the second rank, the other one of the most consummate masterpieces of one of the greatest of masters Catena's St. Jerome in his Study and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love. In order to bring home to the reader the principal elements of excellence contained in Catena's charming picture, we must point out two of the qualities without which no picture can affect us agreeably,
For
this analysis, the last in these notes,
:
and which
lines
are the practical result of the fact, so
often insisted
on in these notes, that we follow by muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye,* and that these muscular adjustments result in a sense of direction and velocity in ourselves and a consequent attribution of direction and velocity to the lines thus perceived.
C. A.-T. & V. L.
[C. A.-T.
Now,
in a picture, the actual outlines
of the various objects, or the ideal lines given
by the
* Cf. Msthetic Responsiveness, p. 336, where I have said: must, I now feel convinced, reinstate in all this Einfilhlung matter the old psychological items of ' thinking,' of ' idea,' of ' memory images," and above all of association." V, L. (191 1).
"We
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
229
movement of the eye from one represented object to another, can either be co-ordinated in such a way as to make of the various parts of a picture an agreeably focused whole, or they may be in vague, haphazard relations to one another in such a way that the picture reverts, more or less, from the condition of being a form to the condition of that which we have experimented upon under the name of If a picture possess this coconfusion or chaos. ordination of direction of lines, this element of composition, which we may be allowed to call tie, it is in so far agreeable ; if it do not possess it, the picture is, despite everything else, disagreeable. The case of the velocity of lines is very similar. The lines in a picture (both actual outlines and ideal lines along the eye's passage) can force us to quicker or slower inner adjustments, and by this means make us acquire what we feel as the objective quality of more or less rapidity of movement. And the various velocities of the lines of a picture can, like the directions of lines, be either co-ordinated
or haphazard, so that the slowness, for instance, of
one line and the pause made before starting upon another, may either be in ratios agreeably perceived and evidently related to one another, or they may be irreducible to any kind of order.* In so far as a picture possesses this quality, which we may call
That pictures possess the quality of being in or out of time, due to their provoking in us adjustments which are necessarily temporal, is proved by the curious fact that it is possible in the case of a good picture to mark its rhythm with the voice or hand, all the line movements seeming to take their place in the rhythm whereas with a bad picture such scansion leaves out, or is impeded by, some of the linear movement. ^V. L. (1897). Cf. Êsthetic Responsiveness. See also Index under Rhythmic
Obsession.
230
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
being in time, it will be agreeable ; without it, it is bound to be disagreeable.* For the quality of tie and the quality of time are so closely interdependent that we never find the one conspicuously present without the other, lie and time are the most rudimentary merits which a picture can have ; and although it is difficult to demonstrate, still more to describe their nature, their absence is instantly and automatically felt by any person of normal sensitiveness, and causes a picture to be dismissed as ugly. Having explained what we have ventured to call tie and time in pictures, we can begin our examination of Catena's St. Jerome by noting that all its
parts are perfectly tied together, and that all details are related to each other in perfect time.
a result of this co-ordination in
its
As the directions and
the velocities of the perceived lines, we see this picture at once and as a whole, as if all the parts of
it were connected by invisible ties and obeying an unheard musical beat. Thus, we see the crucifix, the bookshelf and St. Jerome not as separate items the lion, the but in connexion with each other quail, the marble steps and the broad-brimmed hat
:
we
all
equally see in connexion. And the existence of the details seems to be going the same pace and
to
be happening together. As a result of this double co-ordination, of spatial and temporal relations, we feel as if we were safely enclosed in a haven where the minutes do not seem to pass and the sense of hurry is removed from our lives. And, as long as we look at it, the picture keeps up steadily This this sense of leisure, of order and of serenity.
is
what
* Cf .
all
good
art gives us,
and what we obtain
Das Psychische Tempo,
in Stern's Psyehologie der individuellen
Differenzen, Leipzig, Barth, 1900.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

only accidentally and intermittently in
life.
231
ordinary
Meanwhile the colour of the picture, by stimulating certain of our nerves connected with breathing, gives to the air which we inhale a sort of exhilarating power ; and the special colour quality of coolness, as we very properly call it, awakens in us a feeling of temperature similar to that of a spring day. Quite independently of what it represents, the picture thus puts us into a delightful mood. But although it continues delightful as long as we look at it, we never seem to get into closer or more intimate relations with it. It defends us from the worry of the passing moment, it encloses us, but always as a something into whose innermost we cannot penetrate. Whereas, as we shall see when we compare Titian's masterpiece with it, a greater picture allows us, while encompassing us, to enter into it, and so to merge our existence in its nature. This difference is due to the fact that Catena's St. Jerome is without much realisation of the third dimension ; its parts connect among themselves, but do not connect with us ; and upon such connexion between the beholder and the various parts of the picture depend, as we have seen in treating of the third dimension, those feelings of vivid fellowship with the picture which help to make it important and absorbing to the beholder. Moreover, in this Catena we can note the absence of another great quality which we shall find in the Titian, and which also differentiates a great picture from a merely good one ^the quality which we usually call life-likeness, but which is really the quality of making the beholder feel more keenly alive. In this Catena everything seems to be
232
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
motionless, at a standstill, because, as we explained in connexion with the movement of architectural lines, we attribute movement to visual forms only when they are such that their perception entails
complex adjustments of equilibrium in ourselves interplay of balance which, instead of being recognised as part of our own being, is felt, except in
experiments
like ours, as existing objectively in
the
work
of art.
We
shall
be better able to understand
these qualities of realisation and vitality when we find them actually present, as in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, to which we now proceed. This very great picture has, of course, all the good qualities of the St. Jerome, conspicuously those exciting us through its colour, widening our breathing, of making us feel light-hearted, of making us feel enclosed, and of making us feel in perfect time. But it has many other quaUties besides. First, the quality of greater realisation : the third dimension is wonderfully rendered, the ground lies flat, and will bear our weight right through the picture into the distance. The objects have bulk, the sarcophagus stands squarely on the ground, and we feel Similarly, the the farther side of it as a reality. tree-tops have room all round them, and seem to wave freely in space. Secondly, the quality of greater intimacy, due, as we have seen, to a greater and more complex unity of the picture, whose parts connect, not merely sideways with one another, but backwards and forwards with the beholder, so that we enter into the picture with each of its details. There thus arises in us a heightened interest in this outer painted world, and towards its contents a warm feeling which is almost incipient affection. But, beyond all this, there is in the Titian picture
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
233
that vital quality which corresponds to its compelling us to balance all the time we look at it, and thereby setting up a sense of living over an unusually
wide area, of being
alive,
one might almost
both
sides, instead of
only in front
say,
on
in other words,
the quality of universal movement.
Let
us, after
summing up
some
these qualities, examine the picture in
of its details, for the better verification of these
general statements.
The two women on

little
either side of the sarcophagus
combine with the a whole of which they are the evident parts while they combine also with the landscape, in which a larger whole is made up of similarly balanced parts. The figures seem to be still moving,* the wind is still in their draperies ;
are not detached individuals, but
Cupid
in the middle to
;
form
the rush of movement of the woman in the white dress begins at the outside point of her drapery, runs to the right along her knee, and is joined by the rush of movement to the right of her right sleeve. The wave of movement does not run up her body to her head, but sweeps sideways to the right, across' her and across the tree against which she is seated, and finally swings itself across into the uplifted arm of the beautiful nude figure seated opposite at the other end of the sarcophagus. She seems to catch the movement in her extended hand, as one might catch a ball, and keeps it poised high for an instant before the return movement swings across the
*
My
own
impression after
much
familiarity with this picture
my Gallery Diaries) seems in the least moving, in the sense of doing a movement, is the dabbling Cupid. The two women I cannot conceive as ever " doing " anything else (cf. Grecian Urn). What does give me the sense of movement is the lines,
(seen several times every year in visits noted in
is
that the only foreground figure
who
V.L.
(1911).
234
picture
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

;
to the left. The eye is caught by the it leans a little over to church steeple behind her the left, and with this the return movement begins. The drapery round her arm tosses upwards and her
this stretch to the ; plant by her side, whose topmost branch swings over to the left. The movement to the left here meets the arm of the woman in the white dress ; it goes up her arm at diminished speed, and gradually ends when it reaches her head and the tree and castle behind her. Then our eye is caught by the two rabbits at the back, and after this pause we are swung again across The movement is, therefore, in the to the right. line of the landscape, of the figures, and of the The drapery especially does not hang draperies.
left is
body
stretches over to the left
taken
up by the
as real stuff
like a
would, but
lifts
up and moves
of itself,
bird on the wing, freely upwards and outwards All the time that we look at as well as downwards. the picture our balance is swung from left to right, and, after a pause, back from right to left. Our interest is not allowed to settle on to one of the figures and then on to the other ; but the two unite into a whole which is, so to speak, organically produced by the equilibrium of the beholder. This wonderful pattern reminding one of the comis carried on in the plexities of certain symphonies The Cupid dabbling lesser details of the picture. in the water and the carved figures on the sarco-
phagus below him make, by their movements, a second connexion between the two women ; and the movement of the bas-relief is balanced by the swing to the left of the plant growing alongside the sarcophagus. Again, the two little rabbits behind the woman in the white dress are a check on her
s >> H a
M H
b < O H Q H z <: < s
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
235
movement, and hold her in place in a wonderful way, and the church steeple on the other side of the picture leans in towards the uplifted arm of the woman with the red cloak, and balances it so that the poise of the lamp in her hand can go on for ever without giving us any feeling of effort. This balanced movement is, perhaps, the greatest quality a picture can have ; for, in looking at it, we unconsciously mime the subtly subordinated complexity of movement, and we obtain, in consequence, a sense of increased vitality and of marvellous harmony of existence. C. A.-T.] This comparison between Catena's St. Jerome and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love will have shown the reader in what consist some of the immense differences between a merely good picture and a great masterpiece, a difference not merely in degree, but in kind, for it consists in the presence or absence' of a quality of higher organism and vitality. This supreme quality, which has its analogous one in every department of art, constitutes the picture into such a whole that we, in beholding it, are not only made happy, but enclosed, forbidden to escape or lapse, and forced to move through every detail of a mood of happiness. Life outside seems obliterated, and the moment of consummate self-sufficing feeling to have come, and, as in the case of Faust, to have been fixed.
VII
Before concluding these notes, we desire to remind the reader that we are fuUy prepared to find that our observations have been extremely rudimentary, imperfect, and partial. Moreover, that personal
236
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

may have
passed in our eyes as uniand that our object in ; the present paper has been mainly not to establish facts, but to suggest a method. More serious opposition, and far wider spread, will meet us in the shape of absolute disbelief in the existence of such half-hidden motorf adjustments and the dependence thereon of a process so important, and hitherto so unexplained, as the Perception
idiosyncrasies*
versally obtaining processes
Form. There is undoubtedly, at first sight, something startling in the notion that it is we, the beholders, who, so to speak, make form exist in ourselves by alteration in our respiratory and equilibratory processes, and by initiated movements of various parts of the body. But there is nothing at variance with the trend of philosophy since Kant, in thus adding Form to the daily increasing list of
of
apparently objective recognise as modes of less at variance with recent psychology, in

tions of
existences
which we must
what we
function of our mind ; still the tendencies of the most adding another of the funccall mind to the processes of what
rather arbitrarily distinguish from it as body. must point out, also, that grotesque as may appear at first sight the notion of external form being in a way executed, or, to use a convenient word, mimed, by the beholder, we are daily postu-
we
We
lating,
though without perceiving
it,
some
similar
* To the extent of my having been convinced that introspective experiment (which I did not trust myself to make without autosuggestion) would reveal in myself the phenomena discovered by my collaborator. ^V. L. (191 1). t Recent psychology (Kiilpe, Outlines, and Semon, Mnemische Empfindungen) admits an " Unconscious " consisting of physiological processes abutting in, but not parallel with, ideas and feelings. -V. L. (1911).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

We
237
mimetic connexion between perception and motion. refer to the fact that we all of us reproduce through our gesture, not merely the gestures of other creatures, but the forms, the lines of directions, the pressures and uplif tings of inanimate objects ; that we can place the muscles of our face in the
same position as those of the person whom we choose to mimic ; and that we can nearly all of us, from our infancy and utterly untaught, reproduce more or less correctly on paper, or with movable objects, the shapes and positions of surrounding
objects. Nor is this capacity limited to visual phenomena the power of imitating sounds, the whole process by which, without any knowledge of
:
the parts employed,

all testify
to
we learn to speak and to sing,* some mechanism by which the percep-
tion of form, audible as well as visible, is intimately and automatically connected with movement, fullfledged or incipient, hidden or obvious, in ourselves.
The mention
of audible
phenomena brings with
it
a double confirmation of the facts
forward with regard to visible patent to all of us that the perception of various rhythmical relations in music is accompanied by very perceptible stimulation of movement, often externalised in movements of the head, the feet, and what is called beating time ; and it must be a matter of experience to many that the hearing of musical phrases, and still more, the repetition of them in memory, is accompanied by faint sensations in the chest and larynx, absolutely corresponding to the actual movements necessary for audible performIndeed, the fact that sequence of notes is so ance. thoroughly remembered, while simultaneity of notes
* Cf. Groos, JEsthetische Miterleben,
we have put form. For it is-
238
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
seems to escape actual vivid memory, seems to prove that while harmony is perceived only by the auditive apparatus, melody, which is essentially audible form* depends for perception on motor adjustments which are reproducible in the absence of an external stimulus. t All the various externalised mimetic proceedings are so familiar that we never even ask their reason ; yet, when considered in themselves, they are several degrees more unlikely than the internal and hidden mimetic processes by which, according to the present authors, they can alone be adequately explained. Why such mimetic processes should exist is indeed a difficult question, but one which physiology may some day answer. But, answered or unanswered, the difficulty of explaining the connexion between retinal and muscular sensations in the eye and muscular adjustments of the chest, back, nape of the neck, and so forth, this difficulty is not any greater than explaining the connexion between impressions on the ear and muscular adjustments of the throat, mouth, and limbs ; or, perhaps, of explaining any of the numerous inter workings of apparently dissimilar and
distant organs.
A more difficult question appears to be raised, yet one which psychology may perhaps some day solve, when we ask how it is possible that a combination of ocular sensations and sensations of motor adjustment should be transmuted, in our normal experience, into ideas of qualities of form in external
Cf. Gurney, The Power of Sound. t Here I must again apologise for my extraordinary ignorance of the auditive memory of other folk. In my own case the sensations (which on closer scrutiny are not laryngeal but connected with mouth and nostrils) accompany not the actual hearing, but the recollection, of music. V. L. (1911).
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
239
objects ; how the subjective inside us can turn into the objective outside ? Yet such a transformation is accepted without difficulty whenever we recognise the fact that alterations in the chemical and mechanical conditions of our eye are transmitted to consciousness in the utterly different state of
qualities of colour, light, and rudimentary line and curve of external objects. Indeed, it seems to the present writers that these mysteries at present besetting on all sides the most elementary facts of mental science are not so much hindrances to the acceptance of the aesthetical hypothesis herein put forward as indications that the further progress of psychology depends in great measure upon the employment of just such hypotheses. Psychology has problems more important and more mysterious than the problem of aesthetics memory, emotion, volition, logical connexion, intellectual construction. Before relegating any of these to the Hmbo of the uninteUigible, will it not be necessary to seek for whatever accompaniment of bodily sensations we may discover for them in the dim places of our consciousness ? * And, this being the case, the authors of the present notes desire to call the attention of psychologists to whatever facts and suggestions may be contained in this hypothesis of the aesthetic perception of visible form. Vernon Lee. C. Anstruther-Thomson.
This sentence
still
expresses
my
views as to the psycho-physical
phenomenon, although I consider that the " mental " phenomenon of Empathy is sufficient basis for aesthetics
basis of the aesthetic
as such.
Cf. Êsthetic Empathy^ Esthetic Responsiveness, and Conclusion.
V. L. (1911).
ESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS ITS VARIATIONS AND

ACCOMPANIMENTS
Extracts from Vernon Lee's Gallery Diaries,
1
901-4
following extracts from my Gallery Diaries the years 1901-4 contain the rough material of of personal experience whence have arisen the views which have confirmed, but likewise qualified, those expressed or expounded by me in that first attempt at psychological aesthetics entitled Beauty and UgliFor, while gratefully acknowledging (in three ness. of the foregoing essays) all that the study of Messrs. Lipps and Groos has done to enrich and clarify my ideas subsequent to my collaboration in Beauty and Ugliness, it is desirable to point out that these ideas have invariably arisen from, or been tested by, my own personal introspection. I point this out not to avoid any charge of plagiarism, which would
The
be as absurd as contemptible where community of views is the result of a convergence of studies and speculations ; but because an essential of my own view of these matters is precisely that aesthetic receptivity or (as the Einfithlung hypothesis suggests our calling it) aesthetic responsiveness is a most complex,
various,
and fluctuating
241
phenomenon,
Q
and
242
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
until
one upon which we must now cease to generalise we have analysed and classified its phases and factors and concomitants in the concrete individual But these extracts from my Gallery Diaries case.
contain also implicitly the method of my own contribution to such analysis and classification. This method has aimed above everything at keeping these deHcate processes of feeling and imagination as free as possible both from self-suggestion and from that artificial isolation of separate factors which is bound to falsify our knowledge of phenomena whose very nature is to be complex and unstable and as dependent upon inhibitions, abbreviations, substitutions, and summations as upon any more elementary psychological factors. Indeed the value of this method is largely due to its having arisen spontaneously and unintentionally. These extracts will show the reader (and herein lies one of their uses) that the examination of certain purely objective matters led to the question " How do I behave " How in the presence of a given work of art ? "
:
do
of
art
led, insensibly
become acquainted with it ? " and that this and at first unconsciously, to a series " How have I perceived and other questions
I
;
:
felt
with given works of have found myself with so many introspective data to verify and compare that there has ensued a deliberate system of noting down all the factors and concomitants of my aesthetic processes which cause them to vaf^ from day to day.*
to-day in
relations
little I
?
my
" until
little
by
* Cf Kiilpe, Der gegenwartige Stand der exferimentellen AsthetikSeparatabdruck aus dem. Bericht uber den II. Kongress fiir exferi" I am happy to find that mentelle Psychologie in fViirzburg, 1906
. :
so methodical an investigator as
Herr Segal
is
descriljed as
having
.ESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
forestalling
243
Vary from day to day. In saying this I am one of the most important generaHsations which have resulted from my own observations and those (which I shall now put before the reader) of two persons who have kindly assisted me. This generahsation is that our response to works of art in general and to any work of art in particular varies from day to day, and is connected with variations in our mental and also our
:
bodily condition ; or, to put it otherwise, that there exist in experience no such abstractions as cesthetic attention or asthetic enjoyment, but merely very various states of our whole being which express themselves, among other results, in various degrees and qualities of responsiveness to
as I am of the supreme importance for psychological aesthetics of direct and varied individual evidence, I shall postpone the extracts from my own Gallery Diaries until I have laid before the reader the papers of the two assistants above referred to, and this, first, because these two observers were unbiased by any theories (having been instructed merely to answer on certain points without knowing their theoretical bearing) ; and
works of art. Persuaded
from one day of experiment to another there was a of values.' The same (elementary linear) figure would one day be the most pleasing and next day the most disfound that
' *
revaluation
pleasing.
He
(Segal) rightly insists

all
an aesthetic attitude, which eliminates are foreign to aesthetic apperception."

I
memory
upon the importance of tendencies which

an " attitude "
as
would draw attention to the
fact that such
that imposed by Professor Kiilpe
on
his experimental subjects
must
not be sought for in
my own
observations,
whose
interest consists
precisely in their being, so far as possible, a faithful description not
of experiments but of spontaneous occurrences.
244
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
secondly, because their two papers, being less choked with detail and with technical considerations than
my own
of the
forth.
I will
diaries, will give a better general suggestion

I shall
main conclusions which
afterwards set
begin with a summary made by my pupil Maria Waser-Krebs from notes kept from December 1903 to the middle of April 1904, the notes themselves having been taken at my request
Dr.
during
art-historical
studies
in
the
Florence
Museums. Dr. Waser-Krebs is doctor of philosophy, and her education up to the age of twentyfour had been chiefly historical and literary. She had never regularly learned to paint, but drew with
amazing natural facility, amusing herself, for instance, by copying drawings of old masters and making diagrams of pictures. She belongs to what is, rightly or wrongly, called the motor type, but has personal experience of only a few of the localised sensations described by C. Anstruther-Thomson in Beauty and Ugliness. Her powers of visuaHsation while her observaare good but not exceptional " rhythmic obsession " lead me to mention tions on that she has a taste for music and sings from notes and from memory. To this description I must add what is an essential in all aesthetic introspection she is spontaneously aware of her psychological states and remembers and is interested in them
;
equally spontaneously.*
* Titchener, Feeling
psychological attitude,
" and Attention, p. 197 : . the the introspective habit, which so grows
. . .
on one with time and experience that at last everything, novels and games and children's sayings and the behaviour of an audience
becomes tributary to psychology, and one can no more help psychologising than one can help breathing."
in a lecture-room,
iESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
Here is her resume of observations made museums during the winter 1903-4.
(a)
245
in
Only
in a comparatively small
is
number
of cases
am
able to
feel
any
jesthetic emotion, that

it.
to say, really to enjoy a
work of
art, to
(b)
enter into
This sense of participating in the life of a work of art, of participating in a deep, joyous, thoroughly satisfying way I experience on the same occasion only for one given work of art, or at most for a given group of works. (c) It has never happened, for instance, that I have been thus moved (German, ge-packt, literally "laid hold of forcibly") by all the important works in a museum. I have no experience of an aesthetic condition corresponding to works of art in general, but only to one or a few given works. {d) I have noticed, however, occasions when there was greater facility in grasping works of art in general ; but on these occasions what I experienced was not so much enjoyment and exaltation as
intellectual satisfaction.
{/)
My
observations
stages in
allow
me
to
distinguish
three
different
varieties
and
my
receptivity for works of art.
(J) In three-tenths of the cases a work of art takes hold of me as a whole (chiefly as a unity of composition and coloured impression) quite suddenly as music takes hold of one the feeling is one of deep-seated excitement (sometimes with heart-beating) and at the same time of being satisfied. The passing of time is unnoticed, and the sense of surrounding things almost lost. There is a crescendo of joy, a feeling of agreement between the work of art and myself, an inner harmony, a concordance of rhythm. The surroundings are perceived only enough to produce thoughts and associations which in no way interfere with the work of art. I leave the work of art with reluctance. In all such cases I have made the following observations upon my
:
physical condition
impressions, and closed to the outer world.
open to aesthetic was quite indifferent to the visitors in the gallery. At the same time I was dominated by a strong rhythmical obsession, which continued while I looked at the especial work of art and which seemed to prevent the enjoyment
I
entered
the
museum
feeling a little tired,

I
of other works of art.
In six- tenths of the cases the work of art does not catch hold of have to make an effort to enter into it. I often succeed by and mechanical fixing of attention, or by some scientific interest
(g)
:
me
246
at last I
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

work of
art, until
so gradually reach the aesthetic contemplation of a
come
to possess
{i.e,
it.
In these cases
secret
of artificially induced attention) I
am
able to
assimilate different works of art successively, to enter into their
and enjoy their specific character. But this enjoyment lacks the inner excitement, the complete satisfaction, the exaltation In this second category {i.e. of the cases of spontaneous attention). of experiences my general state was as follows on entering the museum I felt in good physical spirits, very open to impressions
:
from the outer world. The rhythmic obsession due to my walking would diminish, disappear, or be replaced by a different one as soon In cases like as I had entered into contemplation of a work of art. this it has sometimes happened that as I passed from one work of
art to another the rhythmic obsession continued to
change before each,
had a rapid succession of new rhythms and new melodies which seemed to result from the work of art. These rhythms and melodies often came to me then for the first time. Whenever the rhythmic obsession was very strong I noticed that it was suspended during rigorous visual attention, to reappear as soon as the attention was relaxed or interrupted. In similar cases looking was a painful effort, a continual struggle against a force arising and preventing my entrance into the work of art, {h) At other times, also, I noticed that the melody which pursued me before different works of art underwent modifications of rhythm and measure, e.g. a trochee degenerating into an iambus, the tempo
so that I
increased or diminished.
(j)
In the remaining tenth of the cases there is absolute impossibility
of entering at all into connexion with the

Efforts
are
useless
:
work
of art.
the work remains external and foreign it seems in a way painful to me, almost hostile ; and I leave the In all such cases I have gallery under this disagreeable impression.
been previously suffering either from mental preoccupation or decided physical malaise. Or else I have had a musical obsession so strong as to worry me, a musical obsession to which nothing seemed
to answer.
have been able (continues Dr. Waser-Krebs) to make the (J) I following remarks upon the process of contemplating a work of art. First, the glance goes to the central point of the picture or statue (no matter how high or low the work of art may be placed), then
rapidly to the meeting-point of the principal lines ; there it rests an instant ; and then, following again the principal lines, it hastens
to the lower points, towards the bottom. From there the glance goes again to the highest points and then loses itself in the less
ESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
important
lines.
247
feeling of joy, strength,
the lower part

in breathing,
is
going up of the glance is accompanied by a and lightness ; while the glance towards accompanied by a feeling of weight, of difficulty
slackness.
The
and of
And with these sigaificant details Dr. WaserKrebs's very valuable memorandum unfortunately comes to an end.
There
are
several,
more
precisely
seven,
main
threads to be picked out of this piece of introspective evidence ; and these I should wish my reader to grasp as clues through the far more detailed and far less systematic information which I shall presently give from my own Gallery Diaries.
First.
^The difference between the act

a
of seeing
and understanding*
taking stock of
work
of art in the sense of
its peculiarities, and the act of enjoying it cssthetically. Second. ^The variations in the capacity for such aesthetic enjoyment, depending upon the psychical and also the physical condition of the individual beholder on the one hand and upon the choice of the work of art upon the other ; the existence of states of more or less spontaneous aesthetic interest and enjoyment, and of corresponding states of aesthetic inattention and insensibility culminating in what, by analogy with the non-receptive conditions of
religious mystics, I shall refer to as tssthetic aridity
not feel, how beautiful things are."t Third. ^The possibility, in some cases but not all, of overcoming such (esthetic aridity and inducing
I see,
"
aesthetic responsiveness
* Titchener, Feeling
:
and enjoyment by forcing

:
" Cognition is not and Attention, p. 238 an associative process of the assimilative kind." t Coleridge, Ode on Dejection. I have so frequently made use of this line as descriptive of (esthetic aridity (to borrow a word from
clearness
it is
248
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
or decoying the attention on to the work of art by such processes as historical or technical examination
or
by interest in whatever the work of art is intended to represent or to express. Fourth. ^The frequent inhibition of enjoyment of a given work of art by immediately previous
attention to dissimilar works of art, and also by attention to too many works of art possessing no
common
Fifth.
existence of (subjective) movement and rhythm attributed by us to the work of art, movement and rhythm found to be compatible or incompatible with that of any melodies or rhythms which may happen to be haunting the consciousness (" rhythmic obsessions ") to the extent of the one
inhibiting occasionally the perception of the other.
Sixth. ^The existence of definite processes of taking stock of given works of art ; or of paths along which the attention travels in the very complex process of aesthetic perception.
The
aesthetic characteristics.
The
occurs
seventh item deducible from Dr. Waserhad

a
the mystics) that I
better quote the passage in which it
" A grief without
pang, void, dark, and drear,"
etc.
" And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars ; Those stars, that glide behind them or between. Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen ; " Yon crescent moon,
In
its
as fixed as if it
grew
own
them
not
cloudless, starless lake of blue

all so excellently fair,
I see
/
"
see,
feel, hoio
beautiful they are !
I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are O Lady, we receive but what we give. And in our life alone does nature live.'*
within.
249
Krebs's memorandum seems almost too self-evident to be insisted on ; and yet there is scarcely a writer
on aesthetics, however illustrious, who has not overlooked its existence in a part (sometimes in the whole) of his writings.* This obvious and yet neglected psychological item may be summed up as follows The process of becoming aware of the subject represented (or the object imitated or the
:
emotion expressed) by a work of art, is essentially different from the process of becoming appreciatively aware of the work of art's visible form ; and this difference is so essential that one of the first tasks of empirical aesthetics must be the study of each of these two processes of awareness and of the intricate interaction alternately and sometimes contemporaneously inhibitory and co-operative, of the perception of the visible form and the recognition of the represented, imitated or expressed,
subject.
II
The reader will be able to verify several of the above points in the next piece of evidence I shall a detailed introspective account put before him of two visits to the Louvre, set down on return home by my friend Mile. C, who had been instructed what kind of phenomena to notice, but who was unacquainted with Dr. Waser-Krebs's or
:
my own
represented
diaries.
Cf. The Central Problem of Esthetics, p. 114 et seq., for examples of the confusion between such imaginative realisation of the subject
form by Mr. from my present inquiry into individual musical responsiveness, and mention that there seems to exist a tendency to polarity between sensitiveness to musical form and sensitiveness to musical expression.
with
I
cssthetic
perception of
the
visible
Berenson.
may
forestall a conclusion arising

2SO
First Visit.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS ^Weather damp, misty, sky grey but not dark.
I
Noises
aware of slight general weariness. I am not as much interested as usual in the faces and gestures of passers-by. On the whole a state of organic boredom. A melody is haunting me [" rhythmic obsession "], but I have no memory of the sound, it is a mere colourless schematic recollection, a succession. Pulse and breathing normal. I enter the museum by the Renaissance sculpture. At first a diflBculty in fixing my attention ; but it is not attracted by the surrounding visitors. Unable to fix itself, my glance goes by brusque transitions from one ornament and one bust to another, as if seeking something. Once or twice the attention is caught by the expression of a face (in one of the sculptures), but only in passing by. The rhythmic obsession had ceased with my irregular walk and with my transient stoppings before works of art. After a general extremely rapid survey I come to an abrupt stop
seem deadened.
am
before a statue.
At
first
a feeling of relief, of satisfaction, as
if
unconsciously pleased at having found the object on which one was going to fix the attention : a feeling of general satisfaction, an " at last.^' Then my body becomes motionless, there is a pause in
breathing, a sort of internal tension and stupor.
sort of tendency to imitate the gesture
After that comes a and expression of the face
of the statue looked at.

I
(In thinking over previous experiences
remember clearly that the imitation of the expression of the face and of the position of the head exists always in a greater or less
degree in
my
case.)
when
which is almost unconscious, there follows a period hold a sort of conversation with myself, when I reproduce in myself a psychological state parallel to that which the contemplated image tries to represent. I have even caught myself several times " Ah, yes," or " That is it." saying inwardly
all this,
On
In the above observation I was looking at one of the Slaves of Michelangelo, the one with his hand resting on his forehead. During the culminating moment of aesthetic impression I am no longer conYet I notice that scious of noises or of people coming and going. sometimes I perceive the presence of people, but as if so to speak the people were not really alive, and they arouse in me no thought, no observation in a word, no reaction me. I notice no further trace of the rhythmic obsession. At the end of a little time I feel I believe a certain g^ne a need to tear myself from a domination. the turning of the attention is nearly always due to the presence of some visitor in whom I am suddenly interested, or something happening around. When the impression has been very deep,
I
251
depression at the beginning

impression,
special."
have sometimes had palpitations. I was rather in a state of nervous but after this visit I notice excitement,
:
a keener power of reaction.

curiosity
was
alive
During this visit, after the first strong and there was " un enthousiasme
Second Visit.
light
Grey
weather.
Sudden changes, showers.
The
sometimes very white, sometimes suddenly clouded. Air light and exhilarating. My movements are quick, attention active but shifting it jumps from one object to another following a sort of general curiosity. Free and active state of mind a little ironical. One of those days when nothing irritates, when things seem detached from all influence on oneself, one considers them objectively. No rhythmic obsession. Heart and breathing normal. I go to see the Watteaus in the Lacaze Room. No notice, or barely, of the visitors in the gallery. In crossing the other rooms on my way I stop before certain pictures, but merely to revive ideas or judgments they have suggested on previous occasions ; no impressions as such,
;
:
it is
a purely intellectual affair.

:
Reach the Watteaus
there
is
no rhythmic
obsession,
is
and nothing
and
distracts the attention.
Nevertheless there
great difficulty in
aesthetic
entering into the picture.

impressions.
parisons,
I notice that a certain depression
slight fatigue are the conditions
most favourable to strong
In the state I am in I have critical observations, combut no real emotions, only purely intellectual experiences, aroused by a sustained attention. Never once do I lose the sense of discussing with myself, as if my personality were too distinctly defined and did not penetrate into the essence of the work, were not sufficiently supple to take its shape. This condition irritates me and I try to escape from it by emotional stimulation by adjectives and all the ready-made phrases which might perhaps produce emotion by a kind of trick. (All this is unconscious at the time I only notice it later in thinking about it.) Moreover all these efforts, almost mechanical, have no result. After several fruitless attempts I give up trying to concentrate for the day ; my power of attention is exhausted by these efforts, and Afterwards I have a sense of fatigue, of depresI am getting bored. sion, instead of the excitement which I felt on days when the impressions were keen and spontaneous.
:
These two memoranda made several days apart (and immediately on return from the Louvre) by Mile. C. will serve to foreshadow in my reader's mind the nature of such aesthetic introspection as I
252
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

among
psychological workers
;
desire to introduce
and of which my Gallery Diaries constitute a continuous and a gradually more and more deliberate
record.
gradually more deliberate record ; for the introspection begins in my case unintentionally in the process of other observations upon works of art, and
becomes an aim
tion,
in itself only with the gradual acquisition of introspective facts requiring verifica-
and the gradual arising of queries connected with such introspective facts. Thus the diaries from which I shall now proceed to quote begin, in April 1 90 1, with an attempt to settle to my own satisfaction a question which is not a directly psychological one. I took the opportunity of a stay in Rome to verify a theory of my friend Professor Emmanuel Lowy (in his aturwiedergabe in der alteren Griechischen Kunst*), according to which Greek statues were at first composed from three separate points of view (Dreiansichtigkeit), and did
not acquire absolute continuity of planes and consequent continuity of points of view {Vielansichtigkeit) until This the time of Lysippus.
apparently quite objective question led me to inquire how one goes about it to look at a statue, how one follows the lines and planes, where the glance and attention enters into the statue ? And this was an inquiry concerning no longer the statue
:
only, but myself, the beholder,

its
and
to
my
activities in
presence.
The attempt
verify
Professor
LOwy's theory, which, if true, involves the beholder standing still once he has found the desired and separate points of view of a pre-Lysippian statue,
* Translated into English, with many illustrations, Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, 1907 (Duckworth).
as
The
naturally led
253
me to inquire into the correctness of (and this time a psychological theory), brought forward by myself in Beauty and Ugliness (p. 220) and according to which the contemplation of a statue causes the spectator to mime internally the gesture of this statue* in such a way that a complete aesthetic response to the statue would be facilitated or impeded by the attitude and gesture of the spectator during contemplation ; a theory which, I may say at once, the studies of that very spring, 1901, caused me to limit to inferior or badly restored statues. This inquiry implied a study of what took 'place
another
in myself in the presence of various statues ^
what
associations of ideas^ what feelings were awakened, and how I reacted psychologically both towards the
visual
form of the
statue
and towards
it
the thing which
the statue represented or the emotion
expressed.
problems (whose only original connexion was that they might lead, and did so lead, to my abandoning two theories I had upheld in Beauty and Ugliness) became practically The connected in my Roman gallery observations study of each speedily reacted upon that of the The more I observed, both objectively other. and introspectively, the more queries and problems presented themselves. After the first day I found that I was examining not only the work of art, but
totally separate
These two
* At the time of my putting into literary shape the notes for Beauty and Ugliness furnished me by C. Anstruther-Thomson, I was under the impression that this view of " Inner Mimicry " was
shared by my collaborator. But she has since (in 1909) made it clear that she was not alluding to any miming of the re-presented action, but only of the gesture, so to speak, and the balance of the work
of art as such.
See her detailed statement in The Central Problem
oj Mstheticsy p. 119.
254
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
the consciousness in which this work of art was reconstituted. The beginning of such introspection is visible in a note of April 15, 1901, made (like nearly every one of these notes) in the presence of the work of art spoken of. The statue dealt with is the so-called Subiaco Niobid in the Ternie Museum. " In the case of this statue (certainly later than Lysippus) one really can go round and must. It affects me absolutely topographically^ and when the man turns the pivot I have a sense of the monstrous Sincerely there is as if a mountain were to rotate. no more miming on my part of its supposed human action than there is miming of Monte Rosa. Of course the mutilation of antiques immensely complicates matters. In this particular statue the mimetic balance happens to be magnificently kept, but the balance of lines and masses is irreparably lost. In fact I suspect that I feel in myself the pressure in a sort of attempt to restore of an imaginary head, just a ball to steady the slew of the figure ; even to some slight degree of an ." imaginary raised upper arm. On the same day as the preceding there is a note on the way we perceive the objective motion of a stream of water or fountain-spurt, after a conversa. .
tion about this with an engineer. The difference between the " movement of lines " {i.e. empathically attributed
movement) and the objective movement (which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing as " motion ") or locomotion of real objects and
persons had long interested me ; and this difference and its distinction will play a more and more prominent part in the following gallery notes. The attempt to test Lttwy's theory of Dreiansichtigkeit, entailing experiments of moving round and standing
ÊSTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
255
still in front of statues, immediately leads (as alreadyremarked) to the question of inner (or outer) mimicry which had been raised in Beauty and Ugliness. A note of April i6th suggests that " quite apart from the obvious subject {i.e. of the
work
human element
is in plastic art a dramatic, a quite analogous to the one in music and connected not with aesthetic Einjiihlung but with the act of recognition of the represented move-
of art) there
thick of the question not only of inner mimicry but of subject versus form, and dramatic, or, as I sometimes call it,^ human interest
leads us into the
ment mark
or intended emotional expression.
This re-
versus cesthetic {i.e. formal) interest.* April 17. Terme Museum. " I am beginning to suspect that we should give but little importance to the miming, where it really exists, of the gesture of a statue. I mean of its human, actual gesture as distinguished from the movement oflines. There seems no reason why perception of form, i.e. of
. .
.
dynamic lines, should be in any way connected with our own gesture. What probably is thus connected is the recognition of gesture i.e. the rapid completing of a very partial visual impression by remembered experiences of our own. To begin with I think statues are not often really doing the action we attribute to them. I am now looking at a Muse of Tragedy, one leg raised and the other bearing the weight of the figure. But in reality what the lines are doing is a combination between the outline of a mountain group and the mass of a fluted pilaster. I think we are cozened by the vivacity of lines into thinking they give what with reference to our other
:
. . . :
in
Cf discussion of this point and criticism of passages by Berenson The Central ProbUm of Esthetics, p. iia.
.
256
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
experiences we recognise as the gesture of the statue. In fact I think any miming on our own part will be in proportion, not so much to our present aesthetic perception as to our awakening of memory images a memory reviviscence which ought, on the whole, to disturb our present contemplation, i.e. if looking at a statue^s hand makes me think of my own hand, then I may have a sensation in it ; but not if I see that other hand only as form. This would explain why dramatic or pathetic expression is less realised by people who look at the form. Verify this notion
on Lao coon.
better
seems to me that I realise Gladiator (Roman bronze, in Terme Museum) when I too sit in that position or But what I realise is not the form but thereabouts. his gesture ; similarly his position makes me feel, even more powerfully, that looking at him is like looking at a real sitting man. And the peculiarity of this bronze is that it is singularly without cBsthetic weight values. The feet don't seem really to rest much more on the heels than my own feet do. The arms are very decidedly resting with their real anatomical weight, i.e. but little, on the thighs, and the thighs have very little spring. The conventional, i.e. aesthetic, part seems to begin with the head and shoulders. " Looking again at the Subiaco Niobid, I cannot And say I feel the smallest call to do his attitude. on reflection, I don't see how I could, for I doubt whether it is in the least a human one. To begin with, seen from one side the activity is much greater than that from the other, merely because the thrust
it
" Yes, decidedly

that
brutal
of the lines
is
more complex.
saying
that in thinking of
this
N.B. This is not Niobid I might
:
257
not inwardly or outwardly mime him but that would just be because I no longer saw him well, but substituted a composite experience-image of my
own."
Thus introspective observations become more discriminating. It is henceforth no longer a question of the statue in the abstract, but of individual
concrete statues and my response to them. I begin to observe spontaneously and then to study deliberately what takes place in me before good or bad
statues, before architecturally built
up or
realistically
and finally, what associations of ideas, what feelings awaken or lapse in me, how the subject represented by the work of art acts upon me, as well as the visible form, that visible form which conexpressive
;
stitutes its intrinsic existence.
April 17. Vatican Museum. Braccio Nuovo. am getting to believe that it is only the bad statues which tempt us to mime. I feel not the faintest tendency to mime, in the sense of imitating the action of, the Afoxyomenos. How could I feel this, since, on the contrary, I feel impelled to walk round him, looking up, while he, if doing anything, is standing still looking level. Exactly the same with the Polycletan Amazon, the Doryphoros, Faun; and that very charming little Apollo Musagetes (opposite the Nile and the Demosthenes), which are about the only good statues here. Whereas the other wretched herd do not tempt me to mime them. Why ? Simply because, I suspect the good ones are not really doing their supposed action, or indeed any. While the bad ones are doing their they positively gibber, action and nothing else: surprise, presenting arms, raising shrinking, showing cups, begging, and answering the bell, asserting
"
258
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
themselves with every form of impertinent emphasis. I verify that all restored arms and hands do their work with a vengeance, except the arm of the Apoxyomenos, restored, I believe, or mended, by Thorwaldsen. It is the being busy, the doing
And
something,
which makes bad
statues unrestful
and
spot the action and have done. The action also, when thus realised, unnaturally is disagreeable exactly because it is arrested ; we cannot continue to look probably because our miming instinct demands the next moment of the action and feels painfully its
prevents our looking at them.
reiteration.
We
(Verify this on instantaneous photo-
graphs.)
" I find myself in positive doubt whether the Doryfhoros and Afoxyomenos are standing still or walking. In fact they are not doing either any more than a mountain. They will never be otherwise than they are. The * movement we talk of is a
'
pure movement of lines, either of lines rising, expanding, carrying, etc., when we stand fixed before them, or of lines changing when we walk round (or in the frontal ones across) them."
'
'
Cafitoline Museum. Analyses of several statues with reference to the relation of movement oj
April
1 8,
lines
and gesture. " The Antinous
is,
of course, merely the Dory-
fhoros altered and, in so far as Doryphoros, has little action. It is the stoop of the head which gives the
raised foot
gesticulating,
I
of course it was the hands I felt inclined to mime when lately some one spoke of this Antinous.
its
movement, and
expressive
don't feel the least inclination to mime the Dying Gladiator, except perhaps a little the head.
.
The Venus
is
contradictory
in
some views she
is
259
doing her stooping only too well, from others much less. But, the outHne of her head, back, and shoulders remains architectural. Her head acts like the capital of a column. ... I think the vague immodesty is due more to this realisation of action than to the very lovely realism of the flesh." Notes on several statues, Vatican Museum. always from the point of view of gesture and of the
movement
of lines.
It
" Apollo Sauroktonos : not the faintest tendency

to realise his action.
will never stir.
is
eternal,
and the lizard
her pretentious modelling of the worst statues in existence a woman arrested in the act of falling off a sofa on which she is lying in a hideously uncomfortable position. The drapery, so far from keeping her in place, as lines, drags her down. She is derived from the recumbent goddesses of the Parthenon only here the legs, feet and drapery contradict that mountain quality of the great original. It is the inertness, the visible tumbling out of bed which makes the public think that she is * sleeping. One must be asleep in order to tumble out of bed like that ' we unconsciously say to
all
"
The
Ariadne, with
:
and drapery, seems to me one
ourselves.
" The
Belvedere
Hermes.
How
little
such
:
statue tempts one to mime is shown by the fact that his head constantly attracts one upwards now his
head is very much bowed. Moreover his planes tempt one to walk round. Now, if anything, he is
walking downhill. Evidently in looking at real people we are perpetually spotting and identify. .
ing action and expression. The really motor side of aesthetic-perception is quite distinct from this
26o
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
miming even contradictory to it. The fact of having * motor images ' of people does not in the least imply memory for the balance of a group or
its lines.
turally
the
Query : What is the glance of architeccomposed statues ? It must be a way into statue^ and must be one of the main lines of
along
its
movement
surface or profile.
think
have verified
this for the
Hermes ; the awful Canovas
are distinctly looking out of themselves. " The Apollo Belvedere already has (probably because a pastiche) a little too much of the kindle and snort which makes him restless. But even with him, his glance never makes us look at what he is looking at, as the glance of real people, I think, does. (Note the singularly aesthetic impression of the glance of very beautiful real people Princess V., Mrs. S., even Lady V., their glance making us look their glance drawing us inwards.) at them " Verified about glance in Demosthenes. From the position of his head he ought to be looking at me when I look at him ; but he never catches my glance. One reason for not marking the eyeballs is that doing so directs the glance outwards ; the statue focuses. Now a statue ought, so to speak, to focus inwards. "Women do better in a gallery, are more tolerable than men, because skirts and hats make them in a and because the action slight degree architectural A ' well-hung ' skirt of their gait is dissimulated. is one which substitutes a more agreeable movement
to the real one of their legs. " Verification of question of the glance on ten or twelve statues. Roman statues look out at one. " Braccio Nuovo. Verification of same question on my dear little Musagetes. Catching his glance
261
I go first to the sunflower arrangement of folds round his belt, then up his extended arm by the curls round his head and the laurel crown.
it
"The
is
glance seems to
me
to be initial, always
or nearly so.
there
;
Our human habit makes us (where no objective movement) go straight for

good
statues'
statues it directs our eyes highways. Probably on a mountain a well-placed church or tree fulfils this function." This inquiry is continued the following days. Terme Museum. The Apollo. " It seems to me or that here the point where we leave his glance think we leave it (for I seem to look at the eye itself, then to follow the glance down the nose and as far is at the as I can go, without moving my head) pectorals. My eye goes round them to the left (whether from habit of reading from left to right or because his head is turned to my right I can't tell), then round the shoulder and head and down the ." opposite side. " Terme Museum. Dionysos. Here it seems to me that his glance makes me catch the middle of his bent arm and travel up from that. " It struck me yesterday at the Cast Museum that it is the turned head which first invites one to take in rather more than the mere full-face view of a
in the
and
along
the
statue.
"The
statues,
result of this inquiry
about the glance of
and the way

(as
is
it
leads us in our perception of
distinguished from their anatoin two sentences of that diary, representing the objective and the subjective * side of the question The work of art is, so to
their aesthetic
mical) form,
summed up
:
speak,
its
own showman,' and The

*
total impression
262
of a
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

work
of art
is,
think, the
sum
of a series of
acts of attention.'
formula agrees, to a degree I was not with the trend of recent introspective psychology. But the psychological and introspective side of my inquiries was, almost unnoticed by myself, growing and ramifying. While noting down the relation between the glance (that is to say,
latter
of,
"This
then aware
the direction of the eye) of the Terme Dionysos and that statue's general lines of composition, I found myself adding, One ought to inquire into a specific pleasurableness, I don't know how to call it, of beautiful sculptural anatomical form as such. Is it the sense of planes in detail ? Or the feeling of youth and vigour, human comeliness ? " From April 22 to April 25 my observations, made in the Vatican and Capitoline Museums, and Professor LOwy's splendid Museum of Casts, are still ostensibly concerned with the question of Dreiansichtigkeit (frontality) versus Fielansichtigkeit (continuity of plastic planes) and that of the tendency to mimic internally the gesture and attitude of works of art. But the real subject of inquiry becomes more and more the relation of movement oj line to represented motion or locomotion, that is to say, the relation in the spectator's mind of the work of art's form and its subject. For instance April 22. Vatican Museum. Hall oj Muses. ". The forward movement so strongly marked in the Apollo Musagetes (I expect one would feel forward tension in thinking of him, and I find I instinctively hold my breath and dilate nostrils in looking at him) is not in the least given in his legs, which are little indicated and that little singularly inert (save the raised back foot) but in his drapery,
' ' :
.
263
which is rippling back in his robe and distinctlycoming forward in his mantle ; the going back of the one half and the coming forward of the other
half of the lines (in the drapery)
is
a first-rate illus-
tration of Lipps's favourite formula of the sense

of
movement produced by
It
lines
whose tendency
seems to clash.
ripples
spikes
seems to
me
of his hair
distinctly
if while the flow backward, the
also as
of
his
laurel
wreath
as
distinctly
press
forward.
"This statue (the original of which was probably by Scopas) is a wonder of movement of lines. If my ex'perience tells me that there is movement,
. .
it is not that of a sailing-ship (though we should describe both as sailing, advancing against the wind) but rather of a succession of waves, where the first falls back against the advance of the second. The statue of Lucius Verus has as much action as
. . .
two ugly English boys who come suddenly

.
in,
is
and
also
. He that apart from his restored arms. firmly and sheepishly looking at an object in the
.
room."
Several observations of the same kind follow : does the drapery of the Venus Anadyomene not seem to sHp off ? Walk round the Hermes " The Romans searching for the union of planes. discovered that the ear was not a rosette, but an organ capable of individual expression Whence the
Why
."
look of cocking
them
in their busts.
Comparison of the realism in movement between Roman art and the architectural quality of Greek art summed up, " Is not the Caryatid the " central symbol of great sculpture ? Notes upon the Conservatori Museum. April 25. movement of lines and the movement of gesture in
mediocre
264
statues
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

:
and the greater activity of gesture in ; antique statues which have been badly restored " I am distinctly annoyed by the eagerness, the forward action of the three very bad Tyrannicides. They keep catching my attention and not keeping it it is like having one's name called repeatedly. This action is an intrusion in my life ; what relief in the plash of the fountain going on steadily on its own account All the statues all or nearly all bad of the room (since rearranged) have the aggressive
!
photographed people. Even poor whose lines are not even is fixing a bust on the floor steadfastly. How the Baptism by Titian has the same permanence as in good statues self-continued,
self-assertion of
old crucified Marsyas, pulled by his position,
satisfying."
April 26.
tion in sculpture.
Museum of Casts. Notes on composiThe frivolous quality of statues
lacking architectural weight.
disagreeableness of real action in a statue is of the violent and instantaneous character of the action.
The
"
independent
I do not think even the most four-square statues intended us to take root before them. The very fact of their having subsidiary sides makes us move round, though it prevents our moving round without stopping. And the head always invites inspection from every side. There is therefore a sort of reinforcement of the emotion produced by the
chief view, a consciousness of subsidiary beauty, of
cubic thoroughness which makes them quite different from a relief. This is quite different' from the sense of roundness, or real existence in space. It is a concession to our habit of penetrating in and behind, to our sense of abstract bulk rather than
to any knowledge existence."
I
265
cubic
that
real
people
have
would beg the reader to remark these questions and of cubic existence, which he will meet with further on, and in constantly greater development. I have kept for the end of this
of summation
instalment of my Gallery Diaries a note written in the Museo delle Terme and in the midst of my observations on our alleged tendency to mimic internally {Innere Nachahmun^ the represented action or gesture of works of art. My reason for thus keeping back and isolating this particular entry in my diary is that it happens to
a generalisation which has grown more and certain with every day of my introspective observations and of my study of individual
forestall
explicit
response not only to visual art but also to music. It is the second most important generalisation of the aesthetics in which I believe, their first general principle and basis being the dynamic empathy (mechanical EinjUhlung) of Lipps's Raumcesthetik and of C. Anstruther-Thomson's and my own Beauty and Ugliness. But although less basal than the hypothesis of Einfilhlung, the generalisation contained in the following passage is perhaps of more primary need to the student of aesthetics, because it puts order into the confusion of Form and Subject. And for this reason I commend it to my readers Of course all form which we recognise as human awakens or can awaken the various orders of feehng which are awakened by human beings sympathetic, voluptuous, painful, etc., because the act of such recognition means a reference of them to memory impressions which must be more or less saturated with the human feelings elicited in contemplating
:
:
266
the
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

human
realities
of which those impressions the residue. But this emotion is evoked just in proportion as we refer the artistic form to the human reality, i.e. in proportion as we dwell little on the work of art and much on the memory impression. Literature, appealing entirely to such memory impression, has therefore a " moral power " quite different from that of art. The more a statue makes us look at it, the more it holds us by its reality, the less moral (or immoral) feelings we shall have. These are got largely by substituting the word for the form. If men have been in love with statues, it is because they have substituted for them the flesh and blood images of their memory. It is in this way that art, by reversing the process and furnishing us with artistic images and emotions to be revived by real things by accustoming us to translate reality into form (instead of form into reality) can purify and elevate the contents of our consciousness. The same with music* These observations made in museums were
(images)
are
* Cf. an article of mine, The Riddle of Music, in Quarterly Review, January 1906, p. 227. " In this fusion, or rather this oscillation between the emotional suggestion and the jesthetic contemplation For, of music lies, perhaps, the moral and social function of art. whether a composition affect us as a beautiful and noble experience, faintly tinged, vividly tipped, with some human emotion, or whether it affect us as an emotional experience kept within the bounds of aesthetic order, shaped in aesthetic beauty, by the presence of musical form ^whichever of the two possibilities we consider, there remains an action of the aesthetic element upon the emotional ; and the emotional is probably purified by the aesthetic, as the aesthetic is unquestionably brought deeper into our life by the emotional. . Our emotions, our moods, our habits of feeling, are schooled into the ways of lucidity and order, of braced and balanced intensity ... of contemplative happiness, which are the ways of aesthetic form."
resumed
267
in Florence in the winter of 190 1-2, and this time especially in relation to pictures. They begin December 3, by notes on the movement of lines, the greater or less tension and cohesion in the composition of FiHppino, Mariotto Albertinelli, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo. This is the note made on the Allegory of Bellini " After looking a little I seem to flatten down* the water, which at first looked rather a vertical wall, and in doing so I feel as if I were reUeved and breathed more freely. Perhaps the flattening is a subjective effect, perhaps the slow perception of reflections, etc., on water. When a picture pleases we probably do a deal of
:
subjective correction to it."
"I begin dehberately to ask myself, does this picture please me ? ' ' Why does this other displease me ? making at the same time an analysis and an inventory in both cases. As a general result the simplest attraction to distinguish is that of colour, t and that of certain tangible quahties, such as softness, and warmth of the flesh, etc. Why I give here the analysis headed I donH Hke Lorenzo Monaco (large Madonna and
*
December 6.
Why
'
'
Saints).'
Waldemar Conrad, Der
asthetische Gegenstand, in Zeitschrifi
fiir
/Esthetik, iv. 3, 1909, says, p, 408, of the aesthetic line : " Sie muss, eberi tvie eine wirkliche Linie, in einem einfachen Bewegungsakt veran-
und nicht erst durch die eigenartige kombination von akten werden durch die tvir uns zxoeidimensionak Ausbreitung zur Auschaung bringen." Also p. 422. own experience is that of a sensation of leaving off and beginning again, a sensation of distinct change of motion, in the eye, accompanying the recognition that certain portions of a painted surface are to be interpreted as verticals as distinguished from perspectived
schaulicht
erfafst
My
horizontals, or vice versa.

f
Cf Beauty and
.
Ugliness^ p. 206.
268
"
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
colour acid, shrill, crude, opaque (i) The (probably repainted). " (2) The swarthy, sooty faces. " (3) Their being set like ill-mended crocks on
shoulders.
^'(4)
The The
idiotic glowering
which makes me
feel
queer.
vague, delusive, changing relations of head in space, like masks and bats, waving in space, but waving at wrong discordant intervals, so that I find a protuberance where I expect an "(5)
body
afid
emptiness.
"
(6)
The
larly contrasted
limpness of arms and hands, particuwith truculent pose of head and
glance.
" (7) The total scatteredness, idiocy, fussiness. " N.B. On the whole one of the ugliest pictures
know."
Same inquiry. Domenico Veneziano. " At first don't care much, and have a slight difficulty in attending. Perhaps the acid magenta-ish rose and acid pistachio green chill me. Or rather the sourThen I am a little ness of the blue against it. put off by the extreme lightness of colour. At first the saints have no body, having so little shadow. Only little by little I perceive the body due to matchless poise and pressure and directness of But something in the relation with the thrust. background puts me off there doesn't seem room for more than half of them against those pillars they are like wafers. Is it the bad perspective worrying me ? But I get charmed by the lovely (unrestored) colouring, cold rose, warm grey, vivid geranium ; by the exquisite light colours of the floor. The spring of the little Gothic arches
f
.
.
delights me.
269
splendid line (mountain line) of the ship-like, swan-like poise of her head (utterly unhuman). The rock-boulder quality of Saint Francis ; his stooping head not taking off from his soaring erectness. The fine form, decided gesture of Saint John. The flattening of all the faces delights me. I enjoy the pane of glass, so to speak,
The
female saint
between us. " N.B. Of course this very fine picture is without imaginative or emotional quality, the are like chairs and tables simply."
totally
figures
Giorgione, Moses.
Why
I like this
picture
" The landscape makes me a little breathless by its brown colour, but I enjoy going into it with the eye I am not sure whether it suggests real
:
landscape.
sages,
contrasts,
The other colouring, local pasenchants me the shot quality,

: . .
.
laced with white and rose. " Then the deft, fat painting, e.g. in chains, fringes, folds of linen. This indicative slightness
gives
"
ful
me high pleasure. Then the roominess, crowd. (I am
none
of
that
of
fright-
thinking
Lorenzo
Monaco.)
" Then the
figures' relation of
bulk and pressure.

of standing.
Then
a certain limp, posing
way
The
about the head and neck. The extreme unconcernedness, yet thorough being there ; in this very scattered group and vague action, a
plant-quality
mysterious unity. " A sense of leisure,
seriousness,
effortlessness.
Life easy, but very grave. " This picture is not exhilarating, but very reposeful. Except in the two lovely youths, no expression and no discoverable literary suggestion or
270
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
reminiscence. The poetry is visual ; you could not make a sonnet about it. " I think the easiest thing to find out whether one likes is the colour. Certain blues and lilacs catch me at once with a sense of slight bodily rapture, unlocalised but akin to that of tastes and smells. Also certain qualities of flesh, its firmness, warmth
{realism undoubtedly), as with Titian's Flora. This picture gives a sense of this flood of life : heightening one's own (this seems very unaesthetic, perhaps it is). I confess to a wish to kissnot to touch with fingers the Flora's throat. The dreadful repainted flesh of the Duchess of Urbino gives me a horrid sense of
touching cardboard."
December 9. " A very vague Uffizi Gallery. notion which came to me in the gallery, and which I note down in its vagueness, trusting that circumstances may make it clearer. After all, may not the perception of form be, normally, a subconscious process accompanying the conscious process of recognition of the subject of the work of art, the utility or name of the thing represented ? And would this not explain our inability to say why we like a form, as opposed to our manifest facility in saying what that form symbolises or suggests P In other words, are we not pursuing a necessarily unclutchable phenomenon in our pursuit of perceptions of beauty
and ugliness
?
First, consider that if
what we
call
beauty represents a desirable complex of organic modes, and ugliness the reverse thereof ; would not the stability, the constancy of repetition of the act of preference tend to make it very automatic, and of a degree of * Fusion ' which defied analysis ?
Whereas the
'
spotting
'
of qualities, the inference
of qualities, the reading of the symbol, the calling
things
271
by name and evoking
their associations
;
would
it
necessarily be exceedingly varied
varied because
depended upon the synthesis of desire, need, attention, which in all cases would differ.
. .
habit,
.
The
real
world phenomenon
it is
is
so individual, so different
from the phenomenon

that
of yesterday or a
minute ago,
bound
to be conscious and distinct.
" Secondly, for practical purposes there is no need that we do otherwise than react correctly to aesthetic stimulations, and the more automatically the more safely and correctly. Whereas for practical reasons the mere ' spotting,' naming, recognising, is most advantageous when very conscious ; if for no other reason because such * spotting ' often tends to concerted action between various individuals, and therefore requires to be communicable. The habit of recognising what a picture refresents is intimately connected with the ability to tell some one else, or store it definitely in one's memory in the same way that one notes for oneself and others, * in such a place I noticed such and such an object, useful or dangerous in such or such cases.' Hence the recognising process would have a rich analytic vocabulary, while the aesthetic process of attraction or repulsion would, as indeed we find, have no
vocabulary at
all
;
for our
names
tell
of visible qualities
:
none
long,
of
them denote
eesthetic ones
red, blue,
of
tall,
triangular,
square,
pleasant,
us
no
cesthetic
peculiarities.
For those we must go to the names

:
of our moods
unpleasant, harmonious,
all this is
jarring, unified, etc.*
" The long and short of
when we
ment
:
look at a picture or statue,

:
that normally, we think the
I ought to have added
and to the names of our modes of move-
strong, slack, free, light, rapid, harmonious, etc.
272
subject,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

and feel the form, and express the first in and varied language intelligible to every one,
rich
we only indicate the effect of the other on us in vague terms not much more than translations of gestures and cries, I love I'd rather never see " it again,' etc.
while
* '
!
'
Note on the " It is on such misty days, and towards dusk, that churches reveal their qualities of spatial arrangement. The people become mere faceless gliding ghosts one is alone with the building. I note the emotion of heightened being, of vitality as it were from one's head, which is carried higher than usual. I feel lifted with a lighter tread, at the same time there is absolute restful satisfactoriness not rest in the sense of selfabandonment but not any of the excitement of French Gothic* How any one can feel religious awe in such a church, I cannot conceive one becomes a kind of god, and the place is a god. " The next day under crude light, the people, the ugly arches become visible too much. " Next morning. Yesterday, being tired and harassed, I walked to the Opera del Duomo. As usual the people in the streets on a winter day they seemed a variety depressed and grieved me mud one picked one's way only of that foul town in. On the staircase of the Opera del Duomo my eye met a fragment of freize, carved and set with Cosmati work. I had a very vivid sense of liberation, of having slipped into another world, in which mud, bodily and mental, does not enter a feeling of being where / ought to he.^^ While staying in Rome during February and
Florence,
January
19-20,
1902.
interior of the Cathedral at nightfall.
* Cf.
Beauty and Ugliness, p. 201,
273
March 1902, I resumed my notes about the Movement of Lines and Real Movement.
" Marcus February 17. Capitoline Museum. Aurelius seen from the window. Evidently if the horse had anything like real movement, we should be distressed by the pedestal over whose brink the next step must take him. The movement is mainly due to the resistant Hne of the quarters, hind legs and tail, the forward thrust of Marcus Aurelius' arm. Curious that the raised front leg in which the real action of a real horse mainly resides, carries the eye back, and with its hoop-like line is what prevents the horse going over the pedestal. The mane, waving backwards, does much the same, and probably the bridle did it also. . The real horses to be sure only Roman cab-horses move only because they change place across my eye and across the square. But they have no line
.
.
.
of movement
" N.B.
Examine to what extent the knowledge

:
grow or He affects our sense of knowledge, e.g. that the mane grows backwards from the head. " Roughly speaking, even the very worst busts have forms of neck, ear, and jaw, mode of carriage of head, wholly unlike those of real people. " A statue like the Capitoline Venus is not one work of art, but several, of which some bad. Seen from in front the only agreeable impression is due to our knowledge that she is well grown [for the limbs as such have no beauty of line], physically pure, and to the sense of pleasant resistance and
things in reaUty
how
movement
warmth
of
flesh
(like
Titian's
Flora)
in
fact a
realistic pleasure.
" Seen from the side and back she becomes a
'
'
274
angelo.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

like
mountain composition, interesting

. .
Michel-
" The work of art is the joint product, the point of intersection of the process of the attention of the
artist
who makes
and
it.
etc.),*
it (hence Lowy's memory images^ of the process of attention of those who
look at
" Let us try to reconstruct both these.

ourselves about,
e.g.
Ask
antique statues. What were people doing, thinking, attending to, when statues offered themselves most habitually ? Certainly not going round en touriste^ nor like me at present, half killing themselves in trying to fix, possess, understand. The first way in which a human being meets any statue is when he asks, * What does it represent ? and (as most tourists show) such meeting rarely goes any further, until we get to the artist's or archaeologist's attitude,
it
'
How
'
'
By whom
'
'
Why was
made
" But we must try to understand what kept the ordinary beholder before the statue, or brought him back to it. First, I think, the statue, commemorative or votive, being there as a natural object, part of scenery or piece of furniture from which the attention could not escape.
* êe Lowy's Naturwiedergabe. Professor Lowy explains the combination in the same figure of profile face and full-face eye, of profile legs and full-face chest, etc., observable not only in all primitive art but in the drawings of children and savages, by such figures reproducing the memory images of what is easiest to understand and see and most interesting, which persist and impede the " seeing " of the model, the memory image being due to successive impressions, and preventing the immediate artistic In this connexion cf. Mr. perception of simultaneous aspects. Henry Balfour's extremely interesting anthropological study, The
Evolution of Decorative Art, 1893 (Percival).

" Secondly (this tion), its being an
is
275
at least the Christian condi-
an aid to devotion, something on which the eye is fixed in prayer or in the desire to reahse divinity. *' Hence we are quite wrong, we critics, in coming and staring at a statue as such. It is nearer the normal to sfot a given figure and feel attracted by what it re-presents as I am attracted here by the thought and attributes of Apollo. The natural ' process for going into art is either, * So this is Apollo * or else O Apollo,' etc. But it is not, What the deuce is the value or importance of this statue ? ' or * How does it answer to such and such a demand or
idol^
'
definition
shall see.
'
"
This consideration will be resumed
later, as
we
The notes go back to other questions. 7he Amazon, Braccio Nuovo, " I am not sure, but it seems as if the quality of flesh, possible softness and warmth, certainly helped us to look at her, perhaps by a kind of physiological Einfiihlung, It may
perhaps be merely a question of planes, as in a mountain. But I suspect something more than form interests, the suggestion of a beyond, a life more than the skin, like the possibiHty of a forest, etc., on the distant mountain. Also, two Diana torsos, Chiaramonti, of which the drapery charms me. But I am attracted by the idea of the goddess vaguely the woods, etc. " When I said that we first make for the eyes of a statue and follow them I was mistaken. This happens only in bad statues, and the following of the glance has the destructive effect of carrying us What we do is, I think, to follow the out of them. line of the brows, or more properly the brow opposite
276
our
left
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

(owing no doubt to our reading from left to circumference and thence upwards.
this reason a slight tilt of the
right), to the
think,
head is a help, I by taking the frontal line of the right angle. I wish I could make out on what depends the looking out of Roman and realistic statues and the reverse therefore of good Greek work. It has nothing to do with the pupil being marked. The Terme Dionysos has the pupil clearly engraved, but
;
For
is
not looking, at least not looking at; whereas a very bad Roman Peter Lely-ish Juno (?) there has an amazing looking out. Probably it would be found to depend upon the presence (or absence) of some arrangement of lines, differing in each individual case very likely, which counteracts the outwardness of the glance. It is quite certain that one of the chief charms of, say, the Ludovisi^r<?j is exactly this
thorough self-concentration of glance. It makes one think of certain words by Dante about the selfcontainedness of the Divinity. And it makes one feel similarly to certain old landscapes, i.e. Perugino's and similarly to how one feels inside a building. One of the greatest delights of a work of art is when it encloses our attention, and that is why architecture is the most easily efficacious art, and
' sculpture, as a rule, the least so. Und Marmorbilder stehen und sehen mich an' (Goethe's Afzgwow).
The good
It
ones do the first, the bad the second." was following out such thoughts, which came to me, as we have seen, in the course of my objective study of works of art, that there shaped itself a
distinct intention of studying the response of the
Immediately spectator in artistic contemplation. after the note I have just quoted comes the following :
February
"
21.
277
Stanze di Rafaello.
Heliodorus.
The
chief fresco gives

I find in
*
me immediate and thorough

a
phrase of Pergolese's ' it goes filii Evce with it. Goes also with the Liberation of Saint Peter and the Miracle of Bolsena, and portions of Attila. Impossibility of taking in Attila as a whole. I will try another tune. I try themes of Choral Sympleasure.
my mind
Salve Regina,
Exules
Exules
:
some Mozart some Bach nothing goes. I try and imagine the Parnassus Apollo playing Minuet of Don Giovanni : then Bist du bei mir : the Ninth Symphony chorus then Che faro, chi mai deW Erebo I find he does play that Exules, though slowly, but Virgil in the corner and Sappho
phony
distinctly
mime
it.
" Looking at the architecture only of the School of Athens, I try again. The Exules enables me to see the arrangement of cupolas and arches, to take in very well the depth of the great waggon vault. The Ninth Symphony makes it all joggle. The Don Giovanni Minuet makes it (or my attention) sway and shake from side to side, with a result of carrying my eye out of the building. " If I can trust myself the same applies to ceiling of the Sala della Segnatura.^' February 23, Capitoline Museum. " I find that the Lo Spagna Muses, etc., give me a pleasure greater than Raphael's. It is a question of " (i) The Umbrian spatial quaHty the form of
:
valleys
and
hills,
still
relation of sky-line.
*
reticence.
angularity of line and But also, " (3) Very much of this peculiar pale colour, extremely simple and cool, faded green, pale blue and abundant white, all very diaphanous.
(2)
"
The
Primitive
'
278
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

call
*
" This Professor Groos would
sensuous,' but
the attractiveness is wholly different from that of qualities of food or touch or smell it is an emotional effect, an effect of moods. " Ideas rather upset. It seemed as if that * Exules Exules ' tune helped me to see or at least did not interfere with most of the pictures, though it didn't seem absolutely to fit the Titian (Baptism). I didn't bring it to the Capitol, nor did it come spontaneously. As I was walking up a tune was knocking about in my head spontaneously, the Fidelio quartet theme. It distinctly did not go with any picture, nor did any other theme I tried, except that blessed Exules. I ought to say I was
:
tired
possible that Exules
and had palpitations and didn't see well. Is it went not with the pictures, but
with
my
palpitations
But,
as I said,
before going
up the
staircase
my mind
theme. Of course it goes with our momentary state helps us." February 28, Sistine Chapel. " are forced to strain neck and attention, and to bring mirrors. But in the periods of artistic progress, the work of art really does answer to the natural way in which The Campo Santo of it was, on the average, seen. Pisa, the typical Salle des pas perdus, the Chapel or Hall, where you waited for hours, is decorated Even the Loggie of Raphael become accordingly. different if we imagine ourselves on business here, waiting our turn of audience or taking the air in bad weather. The eye and interest go spontaneously, and return spontaneously, as we walk and talk, to It is reversing the these histories and arabesques. whole process to go and look fixedly at a work of art, and then never see it again."
was full of the Fidelio may be that a tune which
We
ESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS March i. Sistine Chapel. "How little the

problems of
art are appreciated
is
279
real
shown by the
fact
that no writer I know expresses any astonishment at the figures of the ceiling staying in their place. Yet this is a far greater feat than the mere mechanical holding together of the vaultings of Gothic buildings ; and some of these figures, and of the most colossal, like Jeremiah and Daniel, actually lean
The far as attitude is concerned. that not one of these figures has any weight as human figures, but acquires weight, shifts it, or transmits it to another, exactly according as our eyes require to be pinned down, or forced up by the first satisfactory imturns. ... I owe this pression I have ever had of the Sistine Chapel (though I had been there two or three times every year since 1888, not to say that I knew it very well when I was eighteen) to my refusing this time to walk about, strain my neck or try to see like all the other poor wretches. I simply sat on a bench near the door, allowing myself to look now at the vault, now at the Last Judgment, now at the people, now
forward so
fact
is
.
my writing in fact tried to exist as one would if one were in this place for some purpose (if no other than waiting) quite separate from seeing. I should like one day to be here at a Papal Chapel. I seem to remember, in 1888, that the Palestrina Mass, etc., did enable me to get an impression. But I was ill and have forgotten. " Very interesting to find that from the Tribune, even sitting, this marvellous composition is very much spoilt. The things telescope, and the moveat
ment
fact.
.
of
figures begin to gesticulate.
the lines being interrupted, the single This is a most important
28o
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

It
is
"
does, to stand
worth while, in order to reahse what art on the altar steps and look from here
It is not merely that the subjects of at the ceiling. the composition become unintelligible and people stand on their heads : the whole composition is chaos, and the prophets, sibyls, and slaves who remain quite intelligible, make one vaguely seasick. Of course, in this losing of the composition, everything drops on one's head." March I. Resuming the observations on the melodic obsession. Raphael Loggie. " Exules do only in part {e.g. " Creation ") perhaps because of the various executions, or because my step in walking up and down is naturally not in that measure ? " I found I had in my head, walking up and down, But it a slow waltz, a fragment of Chopin, I think. didn't help me to see, on the contrary. Whether Exules is the rhythm of my attention when intense ? I notice that while looking carefully at these frescoes (even Constantine) and even when writing at this minute, I am keeping my mouth tight shut and breathe hard through the nostrils, with accent on
expiration.
" Whether it has to do with going up all those I was not out of breath at all but excited ? in breath and heart. " Exules again all right for Heliodorus. All palpistairs
tation gone.
through
nostrils
mouth
all this
is
seem to see better breathing than through mouth. The open inattention. More and more I suspect
I certainly
is
breathing business
is
question of atten-
tion.
"
I can't say a picture
of a given breathing
simply
more agreeable on account I see it better, and if

pleasure
is
seeing
it is
agreeable^
why then
increased.
^S'THETIC RESPONSIVENESS
Try same thing on bad
pictures.
281
Besides, isn't
attention often fleasant as such P March 1902. Uffizi Gallery , Florence. (Question of Inner Mimicry.) " The arrow through the throat of Sodoma's Sebastian ought to give me a slight sense of discomfort in my throat. The fact that it doesn't points to something else diverting my attention. What is that something ? When I say to myself, * The arrow cut into the flesh, crashed through the bone, and cut through the arteries,' I feel a vague sickness. When I cover the angel the arrow business becomes more painful ; that cheerful, busy, very alive angel sets up, I think, a feeling which destroys the arrow feeling. " Coming upstairs and after, I had a certain Neapolitan popular song in my head. It fitted on As long as those to the beating of my heart. palpitations went on, and that song, I couldn't see the Saint Sebastian properly. " Curious how far easier to see the unfinished Leonardo is than the Saint Sebastian, though everything is intelligible in the latter, little in the former. "Andrea del Sarto's Virgin delle Arfie. I experience the same initial, bored, slight repulsion of over-facile form, of over ... I don't know what sense of emptiness, in short, as I did with Raphael
"
and Michelangelo. Only little by little I am caught by the splendour of Saint John's arm, his head, the Virgin's clutch of the book and the
colour.
" Evidently one

another.
artistic
period indisposes us for
palpitation tune I came with quite interferes with this. So does Exules,
That
" After a minute or two, with intensification of effect, with fuU vision, specially of Saint John, Exules

282
goes
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

all right.
child,
It doesn't do with the leap up of the but doesn't that come in as a sort of rubato in the whole rhythm ? " How little anatomical form makes artistic
;
pleasantness
witness Bronzino's Limbo."

Uffizi
" Things which are disagreeable. In Rubens's big battle the fact that Henri IV.'s arm grasping a thunderbolt comes out at a wrong angle. Every time I look at it it gives me a peculiar shock. The sixth or seventh or eighth time, this can no longer be surprise, for I know it is there. The painful effect is partly that his arm, thinly and badly sketched in, is also out of plane (too far in the canvas for its sharp outline) ; but mainly that it stops the movement of the man and the horse. Now it does not stop it from realistic reasons. One can imagine the man riding forwards with his arm stretched out laterally, and the out of drawing ' is no worse than other out of drawing in the picture. " But that arm stretched laterally prevents the eye and something more (though I can't tell what what I should call me) from pushing forward into the picture, as the tail of the horse, the gripping leg bent back, prow-like beard, nose and helmet all make me push. It is of the nature of a wrong note, or rather of a trap, stopping me.
April
2.
Gallery.
'
" The pleasure I take in this picture (when I cease to see that arm) or at least in its central figure, shows that it takes a minute to learn the rhythm of a master or a school, for it seemed gibberish at first, after coming from the Primitives. A distinct
feature in this pleasure
is
a sense of intensity of
pushing forward and of concentration, far greater than a real horse or real man would have a dynamic
:
unity of strenuousness."
AESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
" The agreeableness,
a
283
of
certain vague
sense
peace and harmony, on entering the sculptureroom seems connected with the steadiness, the monumental quality, the absolute cubic size of the marbles, also, I think, with the fact that the values of their hair, flesh, etc., as substance and solidity are the same, and their drapery of course
also."
From a long note on a repainted Van der Goes. " The hatefulness of everything being out of plane as well as out of perspective. I think the view is conceivable (?) but the ground is nowhere under the people. The Virgin and Angels are kneeling on a and it gives one a kind of almost vertical plane
;
. sense of discomfort, very strong in the chest. . are being precipiOf course also the Shepherds
.
. .
a diagonal across this same not a question of anatomical attitude. Apart from all this there is the fact that the eye (and I) are forced into an intolerable game of hide-and-seek, absolutely without rhythm, backwards and forwards in the picture. There are no roads into it or in it, nothing to keep one in place, and the constant discovery of new items more angels kneeling or flying, more shepherds to dispose
tated, catapulted at
It
is
vertical plane.
.
of in this chaos,
is
a positive distress.
"
De
Bles' (formerly
called
Madonna
her feet
is
in brown landscape.
distressingly
Van der Weyden) The ground under
saints are so solidly, squarely kneeling
wrong, but the two female and sitting on
themselves that one feels pretty reassured. The landscape also slopes upwards badly. I notice that to rectify this fact I naturally lean my eye on the parapet, correct it by flattening it (such corrections being automatic is a curious fact in art), and having

284
flattened
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

it
in
my
sensations, that landscape thereby

.
becomes walkable.
."
A visit to Paris, in April 1902, gave me several observations on the movement ref resented in a 'picture. " In looking Louvre. Frud'hon^s Cain and Abel. at this picture (full of good-looking people) I notice that I never succeed in constructing anything in it, not even the dead body. I try to go into it, but doing so I am arrested by the fact that the people, although not projecting from the picture although
well behind the frame are still in front of what my And I cannot get round eye claims as the picture. them into the landscape from which they are separated by a very real space filled with the visible air of moonlight, and every time I look there they are doing it. Cain always in the act of running actively in the act the avenging ladies always in the No amount act of outstretching, flying, doing it I always of looking makes me a bit more familiar. find a little shock of surprise at finding them at it
again.
little Prud'hon singer is always tilting up his head, always blowing out his nostrils, squeezing his eyes always catching my eye with his rather hypnotising little presence ; and I get vexed.
:
" Similarly the
"
Is it a
mood
of
mine
But
fiad
Madame
Beauharnais also oddly doing her movement and the slipping, propping every time I look ; branches of the trees also do their thrusts." Resuming my observations on rhythmic obsession, the rhythm and movement in the lines of a picture ; with indication of my perceptive and aesthetic
condition.
December
"
I
7,
1902.
Uffizi
Gallery,
Florence.
walk along and having got to the top of the
stairs
285
palpitations,
and into the gallery find myself with slight some sense of hurry and a tune the
Allegro of Beethoven's Symphony in major. Accidentally I alight before Piero di Cosimo's Andromeda, and find it utterly impossible to look at while that tune (come spontaneously) and sense of hurry, last. I remember some one saying it is an early Leonardo, and I cling to it by this question. Gradually examining, from this point of view, I get en rapfortf though rather with fragments than with the whole. (N.B. While I am writing this and not looking, that tune has come back but no sense of haste.) I certainly see much better if I get rid of that tune. It slackens all the movement of the picture, which, when the tune isn't there (back while writing again) is astonishingly rapid. " By rapid movement I mean that, e.g. Perseus is advancing through the air, wheeling round on himself when on the monster, back with great
though perfectly deliberate swiftness. The little crowd of rather ridiculous people is also gathering very swiftly round Perseus, and is moving with
swiftness
almost suddenness. The people doing nothing with musical instruments, and those weeping on the ground are also very swift. I suppose I
their movement looks as if it were and new ? Of course all these people are making gestures which are transitory, even poor tied-up Andromeda is bending quickly away from the snorting monster, and the two naked deplorables, weeping in each other's arms, could not remain long. The tiny figures in the extreme background (and
mean
that
transient
these are probably crucial) are all hurrying. " It makes the picture interesting but fatiguing.
There
is
mountain, by the way, rearing very
286
literally,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

. .
with its top going to overbalance it the The picture, which I have next minute. always shied off, is rather crazy, quite independent of the monster. " Unfinished Leonardo. Totally different impression (the tune distinctly irrelevant and out of measure). This is swift ; in fact some things the raised hand, the gesture of the king screening his eyes wonderfully so, and the reaching-out arm of the child. But there is absolutely nothing transient. These people balance each other like the lines of a Gothic window. In fact the total effect is very Gothic exciting, lucid, interesting and yet holding
.
one.
the thing is a most complex whole. balanced movements will go on till Doomsday, and have always been there. It is the music of the spheres, the movement of the sun in the song of the Archangels in Faust. " Certainly I feel no tendency to mime any of them in fact the more I look the less I can separate
all
" Above
And
these
them. "Returning to the ridiculous people in Piero di Cosimo, I certainly feel a very faint miming of his I can fancy the next separate, very separate figures. twist of Perseus's waist and legs, and Andromeda, with her gesture of nausea, is rather disgusting. ^^TutoiidLidoQ), Annunciation. Certainly the tune I feel that the angel has a. has nothing to do here. tune, but I can't find it. The staccato talking of the people all round is distinctly out of time (musical tempo) to the angel. The movement is swift, but marvellously steady in that kneeling angel, one of It is the loveliest of figures it now seems to me. the actual time (musical tempo) of his profile, of the
wave
swift
287
is
of his hair, of the knots of his dress

;
which
something swift happens where the line of his eye meets that of his profile and his very faint eyebrow. " The thing is in a way wonderfully passionate, in the sense of full of more than human life ; but nothing could be quieter, humanly, thaji his greeting. Here, again, I feel that Gothic quality, but with
" Coming up the Uffizi Gallery. (no palpitations) I discover a tune in my head and which I am actually singing or whistling. I think I discover it on saying * I must look up the tune question.' It is Allegro of a Mozart Sonata. It goes on, and I suppose keeps pace with my a little accelerated heartbeat. I walk quickly and stop at the Baldovinetti Madonna and Saints. I know I like the picture and immediately get into a superficial examination. Pleasure comes suddenly with perception of bearded saint's white gloves. I then begin to see the relief, go into the picture. Light bad ; I can't see whole well. Left-hand corner ; I take pleasure in bearded man and much bulk pleasure in Saint Lawrence and his very beautiful
stairs
more passion." December 12.
dress, and in his flat but solid existence. a little worried by his wrong spatial relation to bearded Saint Anthony (though I spotted him at man. once, saying how like Baron A. F.) is difficult to look at, all because he is without solidity. " In looking I have lost the tune, and I can't remember it. Another has arisen something rudimentary I must have heard whistled in the street like a starling's song. I can't get it out of my mind while looking. A sort of raising of my hat and scalp and eyebrows seems necessary to see this picture;
.
Am
288
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
otherwise it is swimmy. By the way, the lilac and crimson give me a vivid cool pleasure, like taste. " Cosimo Rosselli, Magi. The colour attracts me. I see it also less well when I don't raise hat and scalp. I can't just lay my eye on it. (Like Baldovinetti above eye-level.) That street-bird tune goes I substitute a Chopin Mazurka. on. I think that makes it much worse. ... I don't hate the picture, but merely because of its warm colour. The people are all stupid and vulgar. Flat as a wafer, and no going in, even in landscape. Why don't I hate it more ? " I simply can't and won't look at the * Virtues ' of the school of PoUaiuolo. I am stopped by an
unknown Tuscan Madonna and Child. The resemblance of the Madonna to somebody at first repels,
I am surprised to find this picture so good. Though I am a little worried by the child doing the cuddling up, and the liking it, too much and always over again {a la Prud^hon) and slowly ; and I hate catchiag his eye. But the air and space please me. The tune has subsided. . It doesn't go with the picture, nor the Chopin either. I know I shan't remember liking this. "I am tired, can't go on, am bored with the succeeding pictures, as when one doesn't want to speak to people or be spoken to. In looking out of the window there is the relief of not focusing. How out of time to the buildings, etc., to nature, all idea of time is given the people are walking. by the delightful movement of ripple on the water,
then attracts, me.
My
of fascinating colour.
The
people's talking also
is
out of time. " The Venetian Room. I am tired, bored, disinclined to look at anything. The various paces,
glances,
affects
289
utter irrelevance of these wallfulls crowd. I think a piece of pure colour would revive me (all this is dark and smoky). " Yes, I can look with pleasure at Veronese's Sophonisba even much pleasure, of which much I somehow know to be physical, located almost in my
the
me
like a
picture so much, although symmetrical repeated movement make me laugh and bore me. But the very idiocy, the about nothing at ally the indifference of executioner and executed, is pleasant. I make no scalp movement. I have a tune, a phrase of Mozart or Beethoven. It goes well they seem to say it. " Have I always tunes knocking about unbe-
mouth.
do
like this
the two
men with
knownst ? " Titian's Flora takes me.
Her
glance, gesture,
drapery, all drags one in. I have no desire to stroke, touch, or kiss, but there is a delight of life, of clean, warm life, such as one wishes for oneself in her flesh. Somehow she is physically attractive no, if her head were tilted she wouldn't be. The previous Beethoven or Mozart phrase interrupts her. Why have I the same pleasure, as just now looking into the river ? She attracts me like that water." December 18. Uffizi Gallery. " Already in the loggia below, a tune, I think a bit of a Beethoven Symphony. Arrive upstairs quickly a little palpitation, but tune still there. (N.B. It is not produced by the coming up, nor by the palpitations.) Absence of light in the Tribuna bores me, and I am unwilling to look at anything. I find that habit makes me attempt Titian's Venus (with room and Tune going on hard, and figures in background). distinct palpitations. The first thing I can look at without effort (initial effort excepted) is background.
290
I
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
go to the window ; the pillar, pots, tree outside I do not care about the women, me. though the red one is pleasant. Perhaps I am trying through that window to escape out of the picture ? I cannot go back without effort to Venus herself, and give it up. No For wide-opening of the eyes and lifting of the scalp or hat (I have glasses, not spectacles) and breathing hard through my nose and mouth, enable me to see her at last. But the
attract
!
effort
is
too great.
del Cardellino.
Madonna
"
It
is
nearer the eye
and more visible, but tune which I provoke
lack of light worries.*

is
The
evidently wrong. Closing nostrils, breathing hard, my eye is first attracted by background. Then by Virgin's head, the child, below my eye, is disagreeable to see. Once seen is platonically recognised as delightful. I give it up. '^ Large Tuscan Room. The light makes a great
difference.
Saint Sebastian. The opening of mouth It is only after a seems to prevent focusing. minute of having got into the picture that I can do equally without breathing tight. I think this means that an effort is needed, nothing more. So far from going into landscape, it is with great
difficulty that I look at
it
at
all.
make
is
straight
for Saint Sebastian's
head and stop
a little
below the
arrow.
its
The
;
lower part of the body
intolerable,
sudden immobility after that writhing torso annoys me and the feet are out of plane. The arm also is * dead the tree branches on the other hand have a lot of movement, more than the head. As to the angel descending, its speed is tremendous, and
'
is
Gallery Diaries since 1904 contain evidence that bad lighting often a cause of aesthetic irresponsiveness, particularly combined with the general depression of dark weather.
My

291
utterly out of connexion with the Saint's. Whether it is this disharmony of pace (query in Prud'hon also ?) which gives me the intolerable sense of constantly repeated action ? Very likely ^for one
discontinues the angel's pace to verify Sebastian's and vice versa. He also, in his slow way, is intermittent. Whereas in the Leonardo Cartoon everything goes the same pace, and one has no sense of momentariness. This observation is important if
correct.
" Quite
Filippino
automatically
stop
before
large
Madonna and
Saints I think I have never
Difficulty extreme, because the architecture and people are all hanging towards one, intelligently seconded by the authorities, who have tilted the picture forward. But once I can get over this impediment, I find considerable satisfaction a sort of soothingness due partly to no one catching one's eye ; not even Saint John looking markedly out, but mainly to its evident unity of pace, very slow, languid, but harmonised. Even the angels, though the action of the feet and legs is most instantaneous, are poised and scattering flowers, oh, so slowly Tune gone I look for it and find is it the same ? Yes and it is much, much too quick. " I go to the Leonardo (?) Annunciation, with a
really looked at.
distinct
emotion
of
expectant
liking.
And
as
pleased at once. (I have liked associatively the cypresses and landscape for years.) I go into the background, then cypresses, and return at once to the angel. " That tune is now far too slow. I can look and enjoy breathing naturally, without effort, walking about in the picture in a leisurely spirit. I shy off the Madonna because (i) it is impossible, except
result, perhaps,
am
292
at a
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
great distance, to see both her and angel because of wall which I hate ; (3) raw colour. I (2) retreat to middle of the room see the whole Wonder, miracle The Madonna becomes the magnificent other half of the phrase, and angel and
Madonna after all go at harmonious pace. Or paces ? or perhaps the cypresses hold one ? But the tempo is very rapid, even in cypress tops. " This is by a great, great man, but a very longsighted one, for the wall gets into perspective only when I am half-way through room. This matter of long-sightedness might be a crass mechanical test of authorship. This picture, even from where the detail (dark day helping) is lost, is enchanting. " The Annunciation opposite is certainly by Botticelli (it has been attributed to Raffaellino del Garbo, I believe). Here there is, beside rapidity, suddenness ; and of course anatomically, the gestures are most unstable and momentary. But none of the Prud'hon feeling {i.e. of sudden repeated motions). The angel may dump on to his knees, and the Madonna may wheel round, like the people on Keats's Grecian urn,* for ever, for they are doing it at the same pace. And the tree gives the needed
sense of vertical.
Raphael's Cardellino. " This picture is more compact than the Leonardo, square instead of oblong, and can therefore be seen much nearer, though everything is larger.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy
song, nor ever can those trees be bare Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss Though winning near the goal ^yet do not grieve She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy dUss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair
293
" Of course in a gallery, pictures are simplybutchered by reckless hanging above and below the
eye-level.
I
The Madonna del Cardellino is hung as shouldn't dare to hang a sketch by an amateur.
"
No wonder
all art
criticism
is
wrong, when
!
we
stand against a rail and look down into our pockets Of course a or up under the brim of our hats great picture, like that Leonardo, is made to be seen You possess the whole ; but you at several goes. also possess these exquisite details. These things are made for leisurely living with, not to make one bang impression with a visual image banged into your brain like a seal on wax. This question of bang impression comes in, I fancy, with things like the Sistine Chapel, where, obviously, you cannot get How utterly have we separated art from nearer.
!
living life
"
Renaissance Sculpture in the Bar24. have come to verify a theory that the heads by Donatello seem to have more the feeling of breath in the nostrils than those attributed to Desiderio da Settignano.) I find I carry a tune phrase of Cimarosa's, which certainly does not go with the Gattamelata or Donatello's Saint John. The latter I find gets living, all except his leg. There seems an extraordinary rapid life, a deal of pressure." January 19. Uffizi Gallery. " Arrive with hurry
gello.
December
"
(I
tune, scarcely more think a Symphony of 2, 3, Haydn) already in arcade. It continues upstairs, and I enter with considerable palpitations. attracted by splendid gold dress in small Ignoto Toscano (Sienese). Look at it easily all except very opaque repainted robe of Madonna and draperies. " The rhythm is here, but diminished. I get
and
fluster of great cold.

I,
than a
4 rhythm
(I
Am
294
bored.
parts,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

On
and
the whole I care to look only at the gold am much attracted by that same garment. ... I feel the attraction of fretted, patterned gold and dark colour. Tune has suddenly
changed
still
4 time
bit
of
symphonic
cadence. It is so far from produced by a very poor blue Lorenzetti that I have to suspend its internal performance to see that picture. I try various other tunes, all make looking more difficult. The picture is singularly out of time, the eyes violently squinting in various directions. " The splendour of the Simone Martini, seen (for the first time) from the opposite side (as probably intended), so that the eye, instead of focusing faces, goes into that golden sky, makes me literally gasp.
" Without
my
glasses,
from some distance,
this
glory is still greater ; to me enthralling. It is a question not merely of gold but of the aliveness of the sharp, acute, narrow, arrow-shaped silhouettes, of the flaming, sharp cusps and finials of frame (the sharp, sharp glory of angels swallow-tails extended, the spiny, rapid lines of the vase). " It seems to me I have rarely had such a feeling of rapid flame-like movement. It seems to me that the feeling is as if that glory of angels, that frame, really had motion as flame has.* " What I can't understand is that a tune which seems a little dull (but perhaps leads to something whirly, I think) goes on every time I lift my eyes off that picture. Slight palpitations, at least rapid breathing with shut mouth. I am bound to say I have such a feeling of excitement that the arabesques
of the ceiling,
when
take
my
seem
in
movement.
A man
eyes off the picture, walks by very fast with
Cf. p. 319.

295
creaking boots ^his movement is slow comparatively ; other people pass quickly, but slow compared to that picture. The exhilarating rapidity is, I think, the same as inside a good French Cathedral, Gothic. " I look at Athlete with a pot, a fine antique decidedly, he is slower than the Martini and its frame, but much quicker than the people going quickly by. I walk twenty yards at a medium steady pace and stop before Doryphoros. I am astonished to find that he is not markedly much slower than the Martini. I keep the same tune. " A bad Roman bust next to him jerks up, and I feel is much, much quicker out of step to everything, including the tune. But he is out of step in a series of jerks. A man walks quickly past. But nevertheless he is slower than Doryphoros, perhaps because he walks across my eye ; I don't follow him. Whereas in fact compared with Doryphoros I have no feeling I note the very of activity connected with him. immediate and great pleasure of those two antiques. Has the Martini helped me into them ? Very bright day." January 19. âme day. " Looking at the people in the Piazza del Duomo while waiting in the rubber shop, it struck me that the movement we perceive in
them (and
in horses, etc.)
is
of a totally different
category from that we

tional
;
feel in
works of
art.
All our
ideas of swiftness are relative

a
and
in a
way conven-
man
or horse
is
going quickly jor a
man
or
horse.
But there is no feeling of swiftness. It is This man or horse must be rather like a judgment moving quickly to have passed across our eye (or a given space) in so much time.' There is no sense of
^
motion.
The
only thing that gave
it
me
was the
296
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
vibrating movement of the pigeons rising and the " rotating of wheels. Why ? January 26. UJizi Gallery. " Walking along, a bit of a Haydn Minuet goes on although different with quick stairs ascent. Good light but general disinclination. I walk rapidly down corridor, worried by stiff legs of statues and goggle eyes of tapestry. Stop at Bellini's Allegory. This picture hangs too low. Consequently the floor always
remains under my eye, and feels as if under my chest. " It seems odd that a painted floor being lower gives less the sense of being under the feet, showing that we locate our feet in our eye. I sit down so as to be a little lower. Even now, however, I do not use the floor patterns to go in by. I go in about middle, just above people's heads. I follow the water (which as yet dês not affect me as water) in the background and there look about me, houses,
rocks, skies.
Then
come
back, so to speak, to
myself,
and look
at middle distance, cavern.

It
is
Centaur
on the other
side of the water.
only after this
that I can look at foreground and figures and find it totally impossible to consider that foreground as a whole. Nor can I satisfactorily look at any figures or group long, although each is distinctly outlined and pleasant. I am worried as in watching aimless
billiard balls.
"
if
The
floor isn't quite right
under the people's
feet.
Those who are not leaning on the rail look as they must be pinned on to keep straight. The
me as fastened in grooves ; they could assume no other position on that floor. It feels easier for one to walk on that water than on that floor. I take it that we go to the floor or ground only after exploring background, because we
children affect
habitually explore the back
297
and middle distance, not the ground under us. " When I stand quite close to the picture it becomes wonderfully agreeable. I utterly neglect that floor or rather, in some funny way, it gets into position and I only vaguely feel it. The foreground figures, seen from above, balloon fashion, become all right. The sensation is that of looking from a balcony. The water reflections, village behind, sky, become the essential. The floor under the children
is
now
quite flat.
" Veronese's Esther hangs high and right. I go straight up the train of Esther's lady, catching Ahasuerus in red stooping alongside, and am attracted into the open sky above parapet. The two men leaning down seem to give one leave to go to that sky, while with their leaning prevent one's neglecting Esther, etc. The exact hanging of the -pictures evidently affects enormously our manner, quite apart from degree, of seeing them. " The Mantegna Triptych is hung too low. It
must have been on an altar. It is annoying to have Magi coming down hill into the region of the pit of one's stomach. If one stoops and thus raises
the
the picture, the procession carries the eye up^ instead of down. ... It is clearly the artist's treatment ." which makes us consider part as below us. February 3. Ufjizi Gallery. " Showed the * Immature ' Giorgione to-day to Professor He agreed about the difficulty caused by the people not standing properly, or rather the ground not sloping properly under their feet ; also about the hat of But what seemed to put up his back that figure. most was the way the young executioner is holding (The picture represents the judgment of the child.
. .
298
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Solomon.) He could not away with, or rather from it. " This shows one of the important inner interactions of form as such and form as symbol. I mean one which goes on perhaps automatically, almost unconsciously, bringing only a vague accompanying sense ; and on a totally different plane from the action of the ' subject.' This thing worried Professor me, not because the executioner , and worries and child make a disagreeable, an arresting, checking, or otherwise disagreeable counteraction of lines and masses, but simply because their meaning, realised and drawn into our consciousness, produces there a If we could imagine sense of doubt and discomfort. the child to be a feather-brush, a bunch of flowers, a fan, we should not thus be checked, checkmated. But we cannot attend to the form as such because of the discomfort, the doubt awakened by the notion of a large naked baby, struggling with all its might, being held in that particular way by a * light-weight ' young gentleman, not very secure on his feet ; and held, moreover, without his arm being stretched ; held with the wrist and forearm, as we could not even hold a kitten. " I believe there is no reflection in this, merely we feel uncomfortable as soon as we spot that item. And it is my belief that we spot the symbol before we realise the form, else why should this symbol stop us ? I fancy it is the same with the question if the people were of the ground under the feet realised as bunches of ribbon, they would not worry us and prevent our going into the picture. " A 'priori it seems likely that we recognise subject before we realise form ; and all our mistakes, erroneous judgments, show this ; we jump to con-
elusions.
299
It would be worth while to examine the opposite case: whether, where the form is veryagreeable as such, we make light of such matters, allow our experience of standing, lifting, etc., to be Probably some persons, like set at defiance. my father, are so hypersensitive that a horse having only three visible legs upsets them and inhibits all aesthetic pleasure." The subjective, introspective character of my Gallery Notes increases more and more. aesthetic observations, interrupted in February 1903, by the sudden death of a very dear friend, were resumed in
.
. .
My
was in a state of nervous collapse, and subject to very strong alternations of feeling. This circumstance led to my giving a maximum of attention to the variations in my own
in April,
I
Rome
when
aesthetic receptivity.
Terme Museum. " Effect April 7, 1903. Rome. of emotional tone on aesthetic perception. The other day, the first time here (but it was pouring, the light extremely bad, and the rooms were most inconveniently crowded), feeling fearfully depressed, the lid down on life, hut not in the least freoccwpied ; on the contrary, listless. I not only did not feel^ but Nothing I didn't see * how beautiful they are.'*
caught my eye. " To-day, rather tired in body and
spirit,
but
extraordinarily shaken up, (very literally) warmed, vibrating through and through (most literally almost quaking) with yesterday's very strange experience ;
moreover in the complete grip, obsession thereof (thinking it perpetually backwards and forwards), but also immensely heightened in self-confidence; I find I see very easily, even quite slight things, and
Cf. p. 248.

300
feel
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

and vibrate to the movement
etc.
of
them
^the
but perceptible state of palpitation, rapid breathing through the nostrils, no sort of distraction or worry from without (perfect sense of freedom from others) a. The day perfectly bit of Bach humming in me. fine, cold, tramontana, light excellent." " The rest of that day I suffered from a reaction, from physical lassitude and mental depression." " A tune, mainly April 10. Capitoline Museum. accompaniment, of Phyllis (old French song), on
slight
swing round of the Niobid,
entering, and keeps on. First room I enter (Hall of Nero Antico Centaurs) quite intolerable impresThe statues seem infinitely more sion of gibbering. intrusive than the moving crowd of tourists all
;
;
agog, gesticulating idiotically, a bedlam. Is it that I have become abnormally sensitive to movement ? Out of the window Marcus Aurelius even seems to be going unpleasantly fast, distinctly out of time to the architecture. (Slight palpitations, a slight but rather pleasant excitement all morning, perfect
lucidity.)
" In the room of Gladiator I am arrested, and have a moment of vivid pleasure before the griffin tripod near the window. Griffins have the intense,
rhythm of flame. After a little their horrid bodies and legs begin to bother me. And I begin to catch the eye of one rather too much. There is too much emphasis, decidedly. " By this time, and thanks to the griffins, I am Gladiator, for instance. en rapport with things. But oddly enough I experience him as a little too quick, a little too exciting in time : the knots of his hair jump out a little too much. " I have very marked palpitations, and I suspect
vivid
stiff

tion.
301
that the over-perception of movement is a summaOddly the vague, shifting, gravityless move:
ments (if such they can be called) of the crowd do not woTiy me they are like ghosts compared with the statues and me. " Window. Even the opposite architecture
heaven help
it
îs
a little bit exciting,

is
and Marcus
Aurelius, seen a little back, little more than is pleasant.

in the square,
for the
it
thrusting that arm a The people, cabs, etc.,
on the other hand, though hurrying most part, have no movement I can find. " All this seems to shed a light on Einfuhlung, does not ? The work of art made exciting to me by
excitement, the reality remaining utterly
my own
unreal, passive.
Again of course it is the beastly which make these statues gibber. Also, their being quite remarkably bad. . In my present state of excitement (palpitations continuing) it seems to be the gesture of the bad statues which hustles and worries me, and the time of the good ones. Yet even the bad ones, dead as door-nails in line and mass, how infinitely more living and moving than the real people. To add a gesture to a statue is like adding squibs and
restorations
largely
. .
" Big Hall.
If real people they would have nothing, be nothing, save to very careful and loving eyes."
crackers to already existing music. gesture,
had no
April 15. Subiaco Niobid. Terme Museum. " (Fine day, soon after lunch, very good spirits,
state of happy, not at all impatient expectancy.
Very
from walking rapidly and only running as a faint rapidity of life, unlocalised, breathing through nose, mouth shut.) I see very well, easily, have no sense of seeing^ but a
slight palpitations
stairs,
302
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
strong, full sense of it (the Niobid). It is the only nominative. Despite the bad architectural building-up the figure is delightful. It seems to be swinging about, thrusting forward, pressing down, hurling up, with a total delightful spiral movement. Oddly this impression is irrespective of the point of view, and exists equally in that total impression. I take it the total impression is one of pushes and pulls and of this unstable equilibrium, which has the same exciting intellectual quality as good Gothic. I am perfectly aware of the remarkable ugliness of the line
in
many
positions.
" The pleasure seems to be in the impetuosity of that spiral cast forward of the body. Still, I do not think there is a vestige of pleasure in anything human lam familiar with such impressions about landscape. The surface modelling and patina give me another kind of pleasure, like that of the chest of Titian's Flora. I find nothing human in this
:
either, for I
am
conscious of a negative satisfaction
in this surface having
no tactile softness and no temperature ; the fact of the bystanders having both is on the whole repulsive to me. " Looking at them I realise how utterly the movgment of this is different it is not so much an
:
infinitely greater life, spring, thrust, weight (weight
particularly),
but
different
one.
One wonders
how
the real people do anything : they seem to stand on the principle of inflated paper bags or eggshells on end. " A-pollo (Pheidian). How he erects himself. But without excitement it is like the interior of, say, Cappella Pazzi And he, poor dear, with half a skin too little,* is yet absolutely satisfactory. It One side of thorax abraded by water.
or
; !
why
is
303
question of pressure, of splendid cupola-like
lifting.
him
" Leaning on balustrade of terrace outside I get at a better angle and distance. I get him par-
ticularly in the midst of
my
impressions of
air,
of
stirring leaves, flying, chirping birds, children play-
ing outside.
He
is
in
my
life.
tune from the one the ritournelle of the end of I Divinites du Styx of Gluck. Is it a subconscious
I find I have
"
came with
now
is
a different
it
association of ideas
I
? For some time could not identify that tune. Also, though those bars seem to concentrate my seeing of him, the opening bars distinctly improve it. " Even that brute of a sitting Athlete has an attractiveness in his mountain quality, when one gets ^the rise of the head and fall of his head in profile the shoulders. " Cast of Ara Pads. There is a great deal too much looking out and about, and this group of toga'd magnificoes is distinctly going at various paces and not in the same direction ; their arms grab and hang loose with wonderful motion and irrele-
Âpollo, etc.
vance.
."
introspection henceforth becomes habitual and is extended to one detail after another. " Cool Venice, October 9, 1903. Academy. north-west wind after rain ; feel much better, almost braced and relieved, pleased at having come to a difficult resolution. Very pleased also at finding below, and relieved about her ill friend, and idea that I may be useful. Rubbed the wrong way in gondola by some mannerless tourists.
The
and
deliberate,
Attempt at showing them anything frustrated. Find

304
cat's fur
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
myself with strong palpitations, a general sense of brushed the wrong way. And a tune apparently bit of symphony, I don't know what beating itself out inside me. " Great difficulty, as usual in this gallery, in seeing anything. So far I have seen nothing not a scrap better than my companions. " I have vainly attempted to see the Dives and Lazarus (by Bonifazio). After three or four minutes I begin to see it, attracted principally by the colour. Another vague look at the people in it. The mental irritation diminishes (have got rid of tourists), but the palpitations continue and the tiresome, tiresome emphatic tune. Get up and look into picture nearer. Palpitations still very disagreeable. Great desire to see the picture, and utter impossibility to do so. Distracted and bothered by sense After some of futility of this whole morning. minutes still much the same. I cannot comfortably see the foreground. I feel sure some perspective arrangement makes it difficult to see these very attractive people. I find I am beginning to care âll beyond the empty middle of for background picture. The little altar (which I had never noticed) or Three Graces fountain, and man with bow and spear (?) and dog begins to attract my curiosity and to charm me. " The dog is greedily thrusting his head into the fountain, climbing energetically on his hind legs, the boy has a sort of lyric, passionate flutter, as A thought if adoring the fountain or the figures. of Hippolytus, scraps of the invocation to Artemis,
or at least a feel of it, arise in me. It is significant that I am caught by the literary sentimental sight. I like it, enjoy it, go with eye into the charmille of
305
garden, and begin to feel considerable reluctance at leaving the picture and looking for my companions, which I suppose I must. By this time I can look at foreground, feel the charming people. Palpitations still. But that beastly tune gone and instead, oh joy a bit of an stccompaniment of Brahms Wie ist doch die Welt so schcn.''^ October 11. " Cloudy but cold morning, bracing. Walk quickly to Saint Mark's, feeling tall and light,
and quietly happy.
Had
suffered lately
from
traction, aridity, impossibility of seeing art
seeing
dis-
the people too much. Surprise at walking into comparative dark, / go into it, and into the organ music during the Elevation. During that music I see and feel. The central cupola is, indeed, revealed to me the first time. Slight palpitation I had no The organ's tune became mine, and the tune. church lived to it. Ten minutes of very concen:
trated feeling, perfect. " Same day. Ducal Palace.
on to Bacchus that deep, deep blue ; I linger, pleased, unwilling to leave. (I was unwilling to leave Saint Mark's also.) I was aware of
I clap
;
and Ariadne, see
it
immediately
no tune
before, but as soon as I see this
strongly of a
theme I think out of Beethoven, the Seventh Symphony, with which I see this a sort
lam
aware
of waltz tune.
" Same for Three Graces, but this picture takes me a little less. I do not notice the tourists, but when they thrust into my attention, I feel violent annoyance at voice or gesture, as at a fly when
playing or reading. " ^harf pleasure at the little poppy-pod lanterns on Saint Mark's cupolas, and at downward line of cupolas. The pleasure seems to have the sharp,
3o6
crisp,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
puckered quality of those lanterns. All these cupolas, at least the three I see from the window, are unlike in the clustering of those lanterns and
rosettes.
of opal white grey of lead and stone moonstone colour against white, luminous, delicately cloudy {not scirocco) sky. " As usual, in the inferior pictures of the Ducal Palace I am bothered by the sense of the people, their expression, gesture, personality ; they are all doing things and in an absurd way poking out their hands, flying. ... I said a true thing at the Academy, when we all fell to finding likeness to When acquaintances in (of all painters) Rosalba strong resemblance in a 'picture it is that the we find only the picture doesn't exists or our attention doesn't make an exception in acquaintances exist. I case of loving people. often find in some very work of art a resemblance to some beloved one ; fine but it is rather a state of our feeling, a going-out of it, and the masterpiece remains, never overlaid by the reality, but rather magnifying it, as sudden music magnifies our emotional state.'* October ii. Ducal Palace. " In the pleasure at the really scarcely visible Giottesque frescoes discovered where the Paradise of Tintoret used to hang, there is distinctly that of the great Simone Martini
" Loveliness
Istrian
We
at Siena, in a
somewhat
similar hall
and scheme
of
colour and fadedness." At Florence in the winter of 1903-4, I resumed my observations in the museums with especial reference to rhythmic obsessions, palpitations and
aesthetic responsiveness.
December
feeling well.
30.
" Cold, wet day, Uffizi Gallery. Drive ; and have a tune coming along.
Can*t identify
glasses
it.
307
Palpitations
from staircase. Weak
The tune doesn't answer. The gold attracts me, but I have difficulty in being interested. Shy off Virgin. (Tune continues while writing.) Angel's wing attracts me, and olive branch. Get a little interested in wings. They come into singular relief. The tune while looking at them diminishes, but regains while Try quick Bach. writing. Still palpitations. No. The forward head of angel interferes somehow with my tunes. See Athlete with vase
and bad
light.
Martini.
at once
and well." December 30. Uffizi
Gallery.
,
" Botticelli,
as I
said to-day to
has an odd intermittence in his his energy. You expect a given sort of line say the other side of an ogive, which he prepares you for by small indications. But he suspends the fulfilment by a brusque line say a vertical. You have a feeling of heart syncope, hope deferred, something not merely poignant, but letting you down from your excitement, as in a rhythm lapsing or a refused dissonance resolution. " With Leonardo the intricacy is always a mere unexpected more, an increase of complexity in
young D pattern and in
harmony.
The one
sort
of
temperament might
lead to religious mania, the other be associated very naturally with the passion for nature and generalisation."
Ufizi Gallery. " Fine, dry, 1904. Drive. Slight mental irritation and dissatisfaction in portico ; march time, no palpitaUnwillingness to tions, but slight feeling of chill. Venetian Room. I single out, attracted by look. light colour (lilac, stone-colour, scarlet) among all these sunk in blackness, Veronese's Esther.
January
7,
sunny day.

3o8
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
" The top attracts me, sky, architecture, with its good climate and reminiscence of Venice z little personally pathetic. The tune goes on and prevents my seeing the body of picture. I fix the charming scarlet robe ; the tune vanishes or recedes. Picture, except as colour, difficult to see there is no restingplace one tends to climb on to that staircase merely, I think, to find space and quiet air. " Bassano. Burning Bush. Attracted by landCannot get scape, and most by crimson draperies. over ridiculous notion of the light being projected by magic-lantern or policeman's bull's-eye, or having some curative power on Moses. The same tune I am seeing the picture by an there but subsided.
effort of will.
First lively
movement
of surprise,
whether Moses' shoes, which I discover for the first time, are on his feet or alongside. The goat nibbling on hind legs attracts me, partly from opening of landscape. " Titian. Duchess ofUrbino. Bored and repelled, yet a little hypnotised by her stupid eyes. I should like to see the blue landscape out of window but somehow can't, all the planes of this scrubbed
curiosity
picture
" Duke of Urbino.
somehow make me slide off. Taken by crimson
velvet,
by
splendid slick painting, silveriness of armour, and the man's disagreeable face. I stick in the picture, The tune (which I nearest approach to pleasure. revive, for it subsides when I look) does not suit. " I think I am preoccupied by dissatisfaction with my morning's work. Another rather similar trivial tune, but different rhythm. It seems to help me to see the small Bordone head. I realise skin, hair, eyebrows and the Miss C physique of the
creature.
309
" Moroni's Student, interested in it and physicallyattracted by paint. Can't get rid of the second tune, but there seems a contrast, intermittence between it and picture. (Feet painfully cold.) " Titian's Flora. I try to go in by pleasure tactile, thermic ât her flesh and skin, and the vague I get to like likeness to a friend I am very fond of. her the silky fur quality of her hair, and her brows. I wish her eyes were deeper and am annoyed by lack
The insufficiency of her humanity seems to bore me. It isn't enough to be such an animal or fruit. But there is an interesting synthesis of form and subject ; specially of the sense of bodily cleanness, soundness, and healthy fresh warmth. Yet I do not feel any particular desire to touch or squeeze her ; she is still a picture, a goddess, not a cat or baby. " The trivial tune has subsided. If I keep it up, I have to slacken it greatly. This is the day of trivial tunes â Spanish one comes up. She looks calmly,
of modelling of her cheeks.
.
decidedly away from it. " The lullaby of the Christmas Oratorio which I, casting about, revive, seems to help me, to make me see her more as a whole, circularly, to get depth of glance, not to think about softness or warmth, etc. She seems to get a soul. Though wretchedly cold, I am beginning to be interested and pleased. " That Christmas tune has no effect on the Bassano Burning Bush. I am too cold, shivery, and
must leave this room. " Coming out of Venetian room, vaguely attracted by spatial quality, though false, of Castagno's
Crucifixion.^^
January 28.
spirits.
Cappella Pazzi. " Fine day, good But the falseness of our modern art habits

310
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Having nothing to do but to look at this place (and to look without any definite object) I find myself in
continual state of distraction, thinking of, attending to, everything else, painfully trying to steady my thoughts. Whereas it is the Chapel which should he acting as interlude to whatever I am doing. Oddly confirming this as soon as I begin writing this note ; my attention steadied, I feel the attraction of the place, begin to be in it and unwilling to go out." Same day. Ujffizi Gallery. " Pleased to get out after a boring lunch and blood to head. Light step ; under arcade a tune Ich will dich mein "Jesus, by Bach. No palpitations ; go into painters' portraits room to see whether Sargent's is there. Look about interested in purely personal way ; tune continues strong. Not tempted to look at anything much. Attracted by Benjamin Constant, but tune prevents my seeing it. But I can see Ingres very well. What a deep, deep magnificent picture. The tune, if anything, helps certainly ; and this picture of a quiet man is, like my tune, decidedly exciting (slight palpitations beginning, and breathing with closed mouth). The picture is so interesting I do not even care to spell out inscription in corner ; am riveted by the eyes and mouth. " Cahanel goes to bits dissolves to soapsuds to that tune.
" Leighton, I cannot see as a picture. Keep spotting likenesses, my father, etc. The tune prevents and makes the frieze cavalcade in Leigh ton's background go out of time. (The tune seems not to go with the palpitations, which increase, and I have to keep it up artificially.) " Millais fairly well. Watts fairly well, with some effort to keep up the tune.

311
" Morelli, Ussi, Zorn, Boldini, etc., utterly incompatible with the tune.
" Herkomer, already grotesque, becomes under that tune a sort of pulling-out doll, a goggle joke. " Zorn keeps walking out of the canvas under that tune. Most of these portraits are oddly staring. Tadema is the real winking human being ; he gets mitigated by the tune, but also disappears under it. " Villegas, easy and agreeable to see (not gibbering and well under his frame), is better without the tune. These portraits are most horribly speaking. " Return to Ingres. He has a little lost his hold over me, I suppose by the confusion. But regains it with tune slower. Palpitations distinct. Upstairs. Tune continued, partly voluntarily. I can't see with it the Simone Martini at all. But the gold blinds me in this very strong light. I try five or six other tunes, no good. slight improvement on Stabat fugue, but still little. Perhaps it is mere prolonged attention. What I do see best is the angel's wing. I go nearer it to see. I fix angel's wonderful crown and olive branch. None of that fugue nor Bach. It seems to overpower I cieli immensi * For unto us ' â near approach at last
G minor Mozart Symphony it makes the thing go tearing pace, and the thing makes it go quicker. " Surprise at seeing Leonardo Cartoon in light. Bach does not fit." February 6. Ujizi Gallery. " (I have been a little unwell lately with dyspepsia and insomnia ; and besides, mentally worried.) " Rainy, warm ; but good spirits and amused. Arrive with theme immediately preceding the
First
movement
of
Minuet
of
Don Giovanni.
No
palpitations.
312
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

At
;
first difficult it soon seems to go crown) quicker than my tune. But (now I perceive it well) slower than the tune. Excitement and faint palpitations after looking at How the flames of the frame scramble rushing it.
" Martini,
(leaves of angel's
uphill,
and the little obelisk " Athlete with vase. See him well with
!
either,
but
in
a
I think (I
am
surprised) better with the
theme
G minor. How that G

Christ
!
This statue is very sympathetic to me. minor makes the gaping gesture of and Saint Thomas more gaping and
foolish
" Sort of Apoxyomenos. How the restorations make it all go at different paces. The preoccupation (now spontaneous) of that minor motive makes Baldovinetti's Annunciation fall to pieces and the angel and cypresses go various paces. Extremely distracted, noticing (without annoyance) steps and talking, and struck by likenesses. Shall be glad to go and was unwilling to come. Have just met twice a person with whom I had quarrelled. Am feeling very personal, and what I should like would be a good solitary country walk. " Eye and curiosity caught by absurd gesticulations of little stories of Esther. I am attracted by the story, the people. The minor theme goes on irrelevantly and excitedly. ** Am caught by rug, hot School ofCosimo Roselli. colour, and vehemently craning Jewish angels. .
am
tired, distraite,
and impatiently waiting
for
cart."
February 27. Vatican Museum. " depressed, distinctly sore about the breast-bone with the bodily
sense of misunderstanding. I find in these statues (which I see at once and quite well) an extraordinary
Am
313
calm, charm, some sort of deep kinship and confidence, which comes out to meet my perfect goodwill, my determination not to let the passing hours be wasted, the beautiful present of life soiled by personal sadness. " This time, being with friends, neither in the faintest degree inclined to look at anything, I strolled about wholly unprofessionally and thinking about other things. Oddly (and yet my theories might have led me to expect this) I was able to see very well in the intervals of our desultory talk ; they seemed to catch my eye, in a way to beckon to me. The interest was a very full and composite one, in which while thinking of the statues as people (nay This is friends) I felt them very deeply as form. evidently the normal process." I here insert a note of March 8, on Titian's (?) Baptism in the Conservatori Palace, because it shows my mind entirely focused on the poetic quality of
a picture.
turns it (Christ's Baptism) into some Keatsian rite ; the initiation, let us say, of a mere mortal, a poet, his flesh still white and unaccustomed to exposure, into the life of the woods, by a ruddy Saint John, who is, in reality, a Pan that has only just
it
"
How
laid aside his syrinx."
the normal case the recognition of the subject distinctly corroborating the desired effect of the form. " Sistine Chapel, ceiling. Daniel, by his oblique position, not only carries the eye violently upwards, but frees a triangular space on one side of him. And here comes the action and reaction of the aesthetic and poetic : that swaggering, braving of heaven
interplay
of
subject
A note of a few days earlier exemplifies

and form,
in
this
314
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

of Daniel also reassures us
a titan
:
vault
about the playing with it." The following corroborates passages in Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 192-3 March 8. Interior of Saint Peter^s, Rome. " In Saint Peter's (towards dusk) if I feel tall and lightly balanced it is because I actually am so the muscular objective fact precedes the feeling and is due, obviously, to the way the eye is attracted to a high or very distant part, and the step and balance, the whole tensions, are determined by this necessity. Coming out on to the steps, I feel an immediate possibility of walking more or less hunched up. The greatness of the place had taken me and quite unexpectedly at once: the pale shimmer of the marble and the gold, the little encampment of yellow lights ever so far off, close to the ground at the Confession ; and above all the spaciousness, vast airiness and emptiness, which seem in a way to be rather a mode of myself than a quality of the place." March 9. Vatican Rooms. " Fine windy day, painful circumstances but deadened ; slight bronArrive in Stanze after easy strong ascent of chitis. stairs, palpitations from it. I find I have, very discontinuously, the final cadence of Caccini's Amarilli, heard yesterday. " Parnassus, I don't go in very easily ; the voices and shuffling disturb me. The Amarilli continues and I am bored and distracted. The heat and The people attract my attencloseness worry me. tion. I yield to this state, and go on and observe people. I go into Sala di Constantino and return to Heliodorus. When I think of it, Amarilli cadences. Distraction continues. I am struck by defects of Heliodorus. The out of plane of angels'
movement
he
is
315
corner proved too much, and so the grotesque and disgusting, grimacing people near Heliodorus. I have extreme difficulty in going in to where the high priest kneels, and yet it attracts me, or at least I wish it. Cross light intrudes. The gestures of the people affect me as over-real and sudden. The fact is that my wandering attention assimilates all it catches with reality. " Ceiling everything strikes me as over-quick, almost spasmodic the flames of the bush as much as God the Father. " Liberation ofSaint Peter. A bothering amount of emphasis, gesticulation, realism, something stereo-
scopic.
" Having met a friend, I proceed upstairs in hopes Melozzo da Forli.* The tune has changed to minor third downwards. a mere see-saw *' I am surprised by the beauty of Melozzo's But the figures even here seem disagreeably colour. projecting flattened, yes, but still projecting. I long to push them back and deepen the background. The steps and voices, creaking boots affect me' painfully. Evidently I am in an aggressible humour. The custodian pulls out Melozzo and with the right all goes into its place, and / into light, a miracle it. I see it then quietly, though not intensely, till it is turned away. " I find a certain relief, pleasure, in a very deep sea-green Perugino background (picture in a good light). I seem to free myself from these visitors. But I don't care for the figures, which again strike
of
too salient. The darkness of the great blackened Titian attracts me, but merely as a dark
as
I.e.
It
me
Melozzo da Forli's fresco of was at that time still upstairs.
Sijrtus
IV. and his nephews.
3i6
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

figures
room might, the

tesque. ...
slight
easily.
I
bore me, and seem gro-
believe the bad air is acting on a bronchitis oppression. I do not breathe
" Other Perugino, Four Saints. The temple perspective and green background please me, but the people seem real, stereoscopic and posing. I take pleasure in the few inches of free foreground in front
of their feet.
I
am
not exactly bored or in a hurry
to get away.
" Transfiguration.
hands
The
catch sight of nothing but hands
and
feet
than
I hot, emphatic colour there seem more ; people, and such vulgar
!
curiosity, pointing, craning, staring
faugh
am
attracted by three small Saints by Perugino, and with upturned eyes am looking down blank, dark background. It gives me a sense of rest and silence. Decent people, allowing me to live. " I can do with Crivelli, even like it ; the grimacing is so purely wooden, the composition so splendidly built up ; and that blessed stone rail, breast high, separating me from them (they are represented one-fourth up the picture, as in a balcony). This gives me pleasure : the very agony, monumental or picture, doll-like, attracts me : a magnificent am unwillmountainlike group. I really enjoy this, ing to go, wish to remember it. " I am much attracted by Leonardo's Saint
Jerome. The way it all goes inward. The relief, almost pleasure of fresh air, of long vista in going down Scala Regia and the corridor ; pleasure of streets in cab." " Fine March 14. San Pietro in Vincoli.
life.
tramcmtana day. a little better pleased with After ascending the steep steps I go into the
Am
317
church, very decidedly thinking of other things. Over the back of a Cook's touring party I catch sight of Moses (by Michelangelo), head and shoulders, and am immediately impressed by his grandeur. The Cook party having gone, I sit down quietly before Moses, by no means determined to see him. (What I wanted was the walk and the sense of having been I see him well at once, quite unimpeded by there.) the incongruous monument, and not at all worried by the people. I did not even see the Cook's party as they stood close. " attention goes slowly, regularly and easily from this book to the Moses. I take my chair to the other side, and see his full face equally well. But I return to my it is an intermittent attention. thoughts, go to him, etc. This is much the way in which to-day, with great enjoyment, I heard play some Chopin." Miss C March 15. Palazzo Doria. Copy of the Concert by Titian. " A great part of the badness is due to its having been given real human expressiveness. The fat man is digging his hand violently into the thin monk's shoulder, most anxiously interrogating. The thin monk is turning round and staring at him. It may be in the repainting that this * expresI am struck at the siveness ' has been added. awful outward stare ^the real stare of the sitter, in a Paris Bordone (?) portrait, vilely repainted. " Either I am in the aggressed mood, or all these pictures have been restored by the same expressive person. No, it isn't subjective. The double portrait by Raphael, hatefully greasy and viscous as it
My
strikes
me, by no means catches my eye. people are well inside and monumental. .
.
These
.
"
am in rather happier, less
tense
mood, weather

3i8
fine.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
And I do not notice the people walking about. An old English tune haunts me ; it does not go with that double portrait. " Herodias. Visibly a copy or pastiche. . The English tune recedes as I look. I see the picture easily and without effort. (As a fact I have these last days become indifferent to my work, and go into
. .
galleries
listlessly,
indifferent
whether
see
or
not.)
agreeable copy of the Leonardesque Joan of Naples ; monumentally built, no catching of the eye here. I like this picture dress, scheme of reds
"
An
and very deep background with view across a pillared yard with blue sky beyond double row of columns and over garden. " The room in which she is sitting is itself long, with a vaulted corridor before you get to the yard. Altogether a maximum of depth of background against this the girl in her ample red draperies is seated with infinite contemplative leisureliness, and This is one of the most eyes looking nowhere. engaging pictures I know, especially seen from a
little distance.
How Velasquez has taken trouble, by slightly placing the chair and sitter askew, that we should feel, as he doeSy the other unseen side, the fact that the man and chair have
" Portrait of Innocent X.
bulk.
I believe to result psychologically from the intensity, vividness and completeness of the great 3Litist's feeling oi what he sees (i.e. richness of accompanying memory images giving explanation of non-optical detail). But the pleasurableness to us depends, I think, mainly on this four-square quality making the eye go on, and preventing all
" This,
319
sense of aggression by this humanly threatening individuality. " If the chair were straight (no * round-thecorner ' indicated) and the man perfectly straight in it, we should feel that this Pope (who has only a curtain, though skilfully folded tent-like, behind
him) was infringing on our life, instead of adding a region for exploration and contemplation to it. It is odd how piercing the glance of this Pope is, and yet I have no sense of aggression or of indiscreet
. . .
personality.
collar, the circular cape and cap, somehow turn him into something vitally unhuman, a great magnificent peony, with those odd eyes looking out
" The
of
its
depths.
" Claude's Mill. It is that deep, deep distance of landscape, river, and sky which makes us endure, even like, Claude's Mill, and turn it from a cro^te
into a masterpiece." Same day. " I go into the church of the Minerva by the apse, and realise how much of my pleasure is due to the chapels, embrasures, into which, just like
those picture distances, my mind can go." The following entry gives a singularly typical example of dynamic Einjilhlung, and as such I have used it and referred to it elsewhere. April 29. Florence. " Yesterday I went into the to the station. Baptistery after taking Mile. Good spirits, but unwilling, and from mere sense of duty went into Baptistery. The place interested me so little, I felt so completely the hopelessness of such attempt to be interested, that I even began to read the newspaper as a sort of excuse for resting on a bench ; the unsuccess of my aesthetic attempts Walking (at enjoyment) being positively degrading.
320
about,
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
my eye caught that swirl pattern.* I was immensely surprised that from a distance it took the appearance of a double trefoil. I approached while approaching and while I stood quite still the pattern seemed to move very positively and violently ; to dap up and down, swirl round and round, as I remember water does. I say / remember^ because it is possible that by comparison with real water this would have been motionless or the contrary ? But the movement seemed to stay objective ; I could trace no movement of my eye No work of art has ever given me or attention. such a positive sense of movement. I was not inclined to be interested, quite the reverse, and everything else seemed as dead as a door-nail. " I had been waiting at the station nearly an hour, noticing, undergoing the faces and manner and move-
ment of the people with disagreeable vivacity. I did not notice about a tune. At Duomo after ; not very receptive." May lo. Church of Santa Croce. " Came in idly, while awaiting the hour to lunch with a friend. Find a tune in me while walking along here, the answer of Zerlina, Mi fa pietd Masetto, where it is repeated quickly, only / have made it into a slow 1-2-3-4. T*^ ^7 surprise I continue to have it
This pattern is on the Baptistery floor, near the N. somewhat analogous, but quite dynamically inferior one existed
gate.
exists (or
An eighteenth!) in the old floor of Saint Mark's, Venice. century engraving shows an exact but (at least in the reproduction)
friend,
Roman duplicate, existing, I think, at Nimes. M. Emanuel Pontremoli, who has done architectural archaeology and excavation in Asia Minor, tells me that the pattern is Graeco-Asiatic and possibly very old. The Baptistery
utterly spiritless
And my
floor
is,
I take it, of
the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.
Cf. also p. 294.
321
before Desiderio's honeysuckle and palm pattern {Tomb of Marsuppint) ; only I take it quickly and with its natural flutter. Have had rheumatism,
much nervous irritation, and feel bored though not depressed after bicycling against high wind and walking. I felt no ' immersion ' on entering church, and was interrupted by fumbling at entrance for penny for beggar. No sense of being enclosed. Little desire to see anything. The footsteps irritate me much. Have been worried by thought of people coming and interrupting me this afternoon. The beggar woman alongside of Desiderio tomb strikes me now much more than the tomb. The little boys on it seem pert. The tourists and guide worry me. . The tourists keep catching my eye, and seem moving very quickly. I sit down tired. tendency is not to get absorbed in the place, but rather stupidly distracted, staring without seeing, or at least feeling, minimising sensation, as happens when I have to wait at a station. I tvanty however, to have a look at Donatello's Annunciation, Impossible. Different tune ; some Beethoven, Impossibility of seeing Donatello, First Symphony. though I want to. Both those tunes impossible. I will make an effort. There seems an actual ocular difficulty, want of light. I like staying simply from Still I am not dispirited, only worried by laziness. constant cramp in hand ; I have worked well and
. .
My
easily."
May
much
14.
Academy.
;
"
Come on
jolted
veil has
blinded me.
bicycle in heat, Vague sense of
pleasure at being among these pictures after a year Impossibility of seeing big Angelica the or so. figures come out and there is no air behind them. I
should
like to
go into background but
can't.
It
is
322
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

show coming forward
I
that puppet
pitations.
of figures.
Pal-
catch eye of figures disagreeably and they gesticulate so. The catching of eye is not due merely to lack of composition, they all actually roll their eyeballs and grimace. " I was platonically attracted from first by little Botticellis and resisted. I see little Salome at once most vividly, but the tune remaining (has it to do with palpitations ?) intermittent with it. The other three little panels also seen at once and well (the comfort of a thing small enough to cover, isolate with one's eye !). " That tune and the palpitations (the tune has a see-saw) seem to make a sort of pattern of excitement at certain beats of which I catch Botticelli well. " The Resurrection (by Botticelli) seems less harrowing, tragic than 1 remembered it. I go in and feel so comfortable in it. " But I do not feel inclination to linger, am
restless.
...
"
Tune and
palpitations continue.
.
.
Can't see big
Gentile da Fabriano. " Botticelli's Spring.
In an excellent light but
with
my
palpitations full-cock, I see the Primavera
very vividly, almost* hyperaesthetically, but piecemeal. The upward and circular movements become yet not actual almost, a sense df lifting and turning is so fearfully acute as gibbering, though the thing
action.
vitality. / see-saw bell tune goes That see less well ocularly. on. I do not see the picture on it, but between, in
" Curtain closed and diminishing of
frame of it. " I am tired and lean lazily against wall when I like being catch Primavera it delights me. I rather
a
;
in the
323
same room and don't want to go away. Not the faintest inclination to look at other things. " I seem to see it less well sitting, although glad to sit. " Extraordinary look of irrelevance in other This Primavera is really a pictures, such posing. enchantment, and I fancy one remains in it world of even when not looking. One might experiment with some reading in its presence. Have read my note on a certain fountain with a most vivid feeling of being in the country. I come back quite easily and am at once taken by this picture made to tread these mazes. "Palpitations much fainter, but quiet heartbeating and always to that tune. I find myself able to see the small Nativity of Lippi, but not as a whole. " That tune seems to give most absurd movement to Perugino's Gethsemane : the people seem to sway or roll like a ship." Florence. May 24. " Hot evening after stormy day. I have come to town to meet a friend at station. But no excitement. Have been ill and very tired two days. State of vague day-dreams.
Have walked from tram and shopped.
No impression of enclosure in church, only of rather sweet fresh incense. People are like ghosts. But I can make no effort to look. Verrochio's fountain pleases me by the vivacity of Nothing in it gibbers. I have very little lines. sense of sacristy. I am not distracted by outer life, indeed scarcely perceive even Cicerone, but perceive nothing except splash of fountain, echo of evening service and that sweetness of incense and coolness. Everything is dreamlike. If it were the first time I might have an impression, but I am too sleepy. I
" San Lorenzo.
324
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
not thinking, I have bad headache on the way, and kept on smelling smells. " One of the bronze doors in a ray of low light suddenly catches me, and some fig-leaves outside window. Making an effort to see merely makes me hear the talking priests and get bored. I begin to notice conversations a little. It is all very agreeable, but I am too sleepy. A curtain suddenly drawn
sleepiness,
am
(always in sacristy)
and
awake
a little.
The
frieze
making battements. But that bronze It neither vexes nor pleases me. door in the light pleases me. So agreeable not to wonder who and what the people are mere shiny and shadowy surfaces. Pleasure at this as in moonlit garden when tired. " Having tipped sacristan I linger. It is all so
of terra-cotta cherubs seems to be
fountain plashing, incense, echoing sounds, beams of light high up, coolness, and I like the marble table very much, with vestments and hats and Donatello tomb mysteriously tucked under it. I catch that glistening bronze gate again and a great stack of wax candles. " This is really an enchanting form of sleepy impression if one could lie down instead of sitting on a hard bench, and if one hadn't the idea one ought to (but wonH) look up into the cupola. " Total indifference to tourists. It has cost me
vaguely pleasant
an effort to get out this book and write, but far less than to look at anything. How little trouble observing oneself and writing is. It seems part of
the drowsiness."*
" ^^^ experience * Titchener, F^(?/wg and Attention, P- ^79 ^ that I want to bring to your mind is this : that, as one is reading, one is able to take mental note of passages to be remembered and employed, without appreciable pause in the process of reading itself,
approwith this one, which shows how easily, without being in the least disturbed by it, I could note down my aesthetic conditions. For years all my psychic life has been thus accompanied by consciousness of itself : only logical thought, work, interested conversation and states of extreme emotion suppress the spectator, whom I carry within myself. The greatest aesthetic enjoyment, always very calm in my case, is accompanied, as has been seen, by a constant consciousness of my condition.
priately
.ESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS The extracts from my notebooks finish
325
Having ended
this
series
of observations
taken
down
rapidly, I will ask leave of the psychologist to
place before
logical order.
him
I
notebooks which
certain other extracts from my have taken out of their chrono-
For these notes which follow contain, by pure chance, some of the main conclusions, some of the most striking hypotheses which have come to me in the course of these two years of intimate
study of my own relations with works of art, over^ throwing or strengthening the aesthetic theories I held before. They were made either in presence of the work of art, or always under the impression of it (within twenty-four hours). They are, to tell the truth, merely the omitted synthesis which the reader has been able to gather from the preceding notes, a synthesis come spontaneously and without intention of examining the
state of
my
.
theories.
loss of
and without even momentary

ment.
.
.
the thread of the writer's argu-
When we
close the covers of a
book we have marked

critical
down
half a dozen passages for further use without interrupting of
attitude,
the main current of consciousness. That is the technical, and the introspective attitude is akin to it."
326
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
These notes will, I believe, exempt me from making an examination of the results to be drawn from these studies, by indicating them in a spontaneous and natural way, corresponding to the
direct character of
my
observations.
The
first
of these notes
(December
17, 1901) will
perhaps serve to make plain a point frequently alluded to in my notes : " the deciphering of the symbol or the subject," as opposed to the perception of the form ; and to unite this artistic phenomenon with the daily act of recognising surrounding objects ; an act of which, to tell the truth, psychology has, until now, not taken sufficient notice. This note deals with the phenomenon which despite the explanations of Wundt and more recently of Lipps, writers continue to call " optical illusions." " Looking down at the little farm just rebuilt in the valley below I saw, most distinctly, that the new shed, open towards us, on the bend of the stream, was filled with the splash of a mill-wheel and the water ran round quite rhythmically in great heavy white bubblings, filling the dark shed with its flash. I pointed it out to a friend, a painter, who saw it also. But, she said, almost immediately, * I think it is the smoke out of the chimney in front.' (The chimney was half-way down the hill.) * Nonsense,' I said, and continued to see the mill-race in that shed for certainly three minutes ; and shifting my place a little until I moved sufficiently for the curls of smoke to be visible against the side of the hill, when the shed became empty. But what made me finally believe that it was smoke was my friend pointing out that the movement of the water was towards the hill, i.e. backwards. "The place is called Mulinaccio Horrid old
327
mill. I said to myself, * They have turned it back And I had been looking the moment into a mill.' before at one of the tributaries of the stream Mensola rushing downhill opposite with most
my supposed mill-race moreover, that wet day my mind was much impressed and delighted by the bubbling and seething of water everywhere." This recalling of previous visual images by means of which we interpret forms seen by the eye, is shown in a second note made on May 3, 1904 " High above Igno, I look down on a very tall white tower outside Pistoia. It turns out to be a But every now and then I see it as straight road. a tower again, and then distinctly feel a third dimension behind it." I would beg the psychologist to consider this second " optical illusion " together with my observations on the way in which we sometimes correct involuntarily the defective perspective of a picture, and, when we have once grasped the idea the artist wished to represent, we flatten, for example, vertical lines into what we judge to be a sheet of water because of reflections owing to its colour. To this question of the part played by memory and judgment in the act of recognising real objects, or the artistic representations of real objects, there should be added my various observations on the subject of " real motion " (actual changing of place) and of the " movement " we attribute to lines. The following note adds a more theoretic developvisible boilings like those of
:
ment
April 1904. " I find an old note of my own^ April 21, 1 90 1, saying of antiques * They are not doing it, because great art does not give movement
:
328
of people,
I
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
but movement of lines and surfaces,' etc. would now add that what in art is movement of feofle probably varies from artistic generation to
generation, because movement of 'people
is
an inference
we make, and because we make

different degrees of suggestion.
this inference
on
What may
suggest
movement {i.e. locomotion) to a Byzantine will suggest nothing but immobility to a Renaissance man ; the Greeks probably felt attendant movement of people in the Discobolus as much as we do in Sargent, because they were equally looking for it. The more complex the formula of realism becomes, the less satisfied we are. peasant thinks an oleograph very like, because he is not accustomed to
something more like he spots and infers more willingly than we. Reality, real movement, are in fact equations between our powers of recognition and a symbol, and they are therefore shifting, for the symbol alters. But the equation between our aesthetic faculty and * form does not alter, because there is here no symbol." The above thought came to me after the following
: '
observation April 22. Opera del Duomo. " To-day I showed my young friend the difference between the relation between the real people and the real surroundings (or, more strictly, the lack of relation), and that existing between the people, architecture, etc.,inPollaiuolo's embroideries (first noticed during the study of various works of art, by my collaborator C. Anstruther-Thomson). In the reality the relation) as said, is zero. connect these items by experience, by causal relation, but by no kind of necessity, or affinity or interchange existing between them as visible things. The chairs don't press into
We
the
329
people
ground,
but
stand
detached,
the
ditto.
" There is no reason why the most mediocre painter, having learnt * drawing ' and perspective in the schools, should not give us a faithful portrait of In fact he will give this floor, room, chairs, people. a more faithful one, for this very mediocrity will consist in his freedom from that aesthetic inspiration which forces, however unintentionally, the real artist to alter all these represented things until he has brought them into relations of equivalence and
hierarchy and interaction." The same thought, due originally to the studies of my collaborator, C. Anstruther-Thomson, for Beauty and Ugliness, is very clearly formulated in the two following notes January 13, 1903. "Yesterday, looking at some second-rate water-colours, a thought recurred to me which I had had once before about Pennell, namely, that the artist translates what he sees into his own particular kind of form. This is obvious in such large matters as compositions, as anatomy in the latter we have all the Furtwanglerian and Morellian observations, hands and ears, etc. etc. It is admitted also that an artist has a * line ' ât least we hear of Leonardo's, Botticelli's, nay even Pope had heard of ' Thy loved Guido's line.' *
:
My former pupil, Dr. Waser-Krebs, has broached a most sugges-
tive theory connecting the line of individual painters, or, rather,
the smallest graphic elements composing it, with the same individual's handwriting, and considering both as the expression, the graphic
gesture, of his particular
temperament.
The
artist's
peculiarities
composition, departures from or detail of traditional arrangements would, according to Dr. Waser-Krebs, repeat the gesture scheme already existing in the elementary forms [Kunstlerische Handof
schrift,
von Maria Waser, Raschers Jahrbuch,
i.,
Zurich, 1910),
Dr.

330 " But
this
I
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

think
fact
we do not
acts
sufficiently recognise
how
is
latter
upon the
spectator.
He
shown, by Botticelli, not merely ladies swaying about (let us say) in oddly tied up draperies among trees or fountains, but an assemblage of very particular (as Berenson pointed out) smoke-like Beardsley also shows not only highly sexualspirals. looking people with diseased nostrils and leering eyes, but a system of vermicular lines quite as disagreeable and diseased as they. And so on. Now these constituent lines act upon the beholder quite as powerfully as the represented subject, or as the convergences, etc., of composition, indeed far more
than they do. But inferior artists have no line^ or no organically recurrent and intelligible one. They
feebly try
far
to
reproduce the lines in nature.

style.
.
And
in so
they have no
"
The boringness
of
much of
is
Blank's water-colours
is
of the Alps, despite other excellence,

I think, to this.
due mainly,
about
There
a helpless vagueness
the modelling although he has the keenest sense for the lie of the land, a passionate rendering of mountain form. But the precipices and projections, ledges and crevasses are all rendered in tentative lines and blotches. Very like the real thing, but without definite quality, without category as form. " Hence one comes away feeling that nothing has been said or done to one. I feel the same thing in the Watts drawing of Lady de V. He has got the spiritual value, the bodily presence, of the woman very nobly ; but he has rendered it in a confusion of
tentative lines.
One says The essential is lacking

'
'
Waser-Krebs has developed the same most valuable hypothesis in Zeitschrift fUr ^sthetik, vi. I, 1911, but in my opinion deformed by building into an aesthetic system of doubtful value.
Not the
but the
essential of
essential
331
there,
Lady de
V., for that
is
the essentials building up, happens to be there). " That explains the fact why, once I have taken in the fact of Lady de V., I never care to look at the drawing again ; instead of which Sargent's drawings keep calling and alluring the * Eye.' " The fact is that an inferior work of art causes us at once to reconstruct it in the sense of reference to reality ; we think of the Alps (in the water-colours), we think of Lady de V., and ^we cease to look at the picture. Instead of which we are allowed by Ruskin to think of the Alps only in a constant circular activity within his drawing to think of the lady singing only in a labyrinth, so to speak, of
of a work of art, or at least one of (the other one, the monumental
Sargent.
" The great artist captures us by filling us with a given movement, exclusive of all others, his, to which we willingly yield. In so far there is a certain truth in Souriau's notion of a quasi-hypnotic condition. But the suggestion is not merely of the object represented, it is, on the contrary, of the
mode
of representation."
of a Lady Singing, by Sargent. " picture gives not the value of the seen person or thing, but the summation of the person or thing seen, heard, felt, heard about. In this case this assemblage of lines (what would be the value of the mere assemblage of lines, could we separate it, of the real lady ?) gives the value also of the lady's
Portrait
singing.
"
The golden rule of art is
not, as Lessing thought,

of
to avoid representations of sudden, rapid, fleeting
movements, but to make the representation
what

332
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
we tolerated or were agitated by when thus sudden and fleeting, satisfying and interesting when permanent." Development of the idea of movement and rhythm
in art.
April 26, 1904. Bargello Museum. Tuscan Sculp" Fairly well, arrive on foot, a tune, loud (martellato of fugue of Zauherfidte overture). Tends to fade on entering large hall, evidently far too quick for one's step there. It prevents my seeing Donatello's Saint George ; seems to make the mosaic tesserae twinkle and take precedence of statue. The tune seems more alive to me than the statue : I hear it more easily than I see the statue. " I am taken at once by the bas-relief (under Saint George), though the fading away of upper part of horse worries me. . The tune of a Schubert Moment Musical seems to suit fairly. ... I have forgotten what the fugue theme of Mozart was like Let me recall it ^here (with a little difficulty) no, no, how utterly out of time the waving of drapery, the step of the Princess. Let me try and modify it I can make it suit by slackening it and altering it to a sort of waltz time, or rather mazurka. " Extreme rapidity and sense of the striding of Saint John, but no tune. The rapidity is in the locks of fleece, the bend of both wrists and fingers more than in walk, for looking high up I don't see his legs, and there is no walking indication in the torso. I feel rapidity in the muscles strapped over chest as form, also in the relation of mouth, nostril, and eyes. This rapidity is evidently that of my perception. I am really forced along very quickly ; a little palpitation (had none coming up the stairs slowly) and breathing hard. . .
ture.
. .
"
333
I go out to the Bronzes. The difficulty of getting an impression of any work of art in a galleryis clearly initially the difficulty of isolating it (or oneself) from the vague total chaotic impression of all the surrounding objects, all of which, being works of art, have both a far more definite and stronger * accent * natural objects ; ' and also catch ' than any an attention already set on works of art. " Moreover they project out of their surroundings, they do not fuse, and we cannot dismiss them in a lump as we dismiss * natural objects.' " This smaller bronze room is really a Babel of people talking different tongues, vociferating. While for the most part, the details of a landscape, of a street, assume the vague character of natural noises which we scarcely perceive." Definite conclusions from my numerous observations about the movement of lines and rhythmic It obsession begin to be drawn in the next extract. contains the experiential formula of that attribution of our conditions to visible forms, which constitutes, in my opinion, the solid, irrefutable and distinctive part of the theory of Einfiihlung set forth by Lipps in his Raumcesthetik and his Grundlegung. These notes, although the result of personal experience like all the others given in this work, were written while reading a new volume by Lipps, Grundlegung einer j^sthetik ; and they constitute an attempt to clear up my ideas about the theory of I consider them, as usual, incomplete, Einfiihlung. the reader to look upon them as a very and I beg provisional synthesis, which I set before him only to make him familiar with the actual state of an aesthetic theory which I desire to see empirically
demonstrated.
what we project is that initial to set going a whole automatic train, which, in the case of all habitual movements, is the only part of them existing in consciousness
I believe
334 " (A)
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
act,
sufficient
the
mount,' of the ready bicyclist

:
the word of
command
which,
if
I
is
rise,
I sit
down,
lie
down,
etc.,
absolutely successful, precludes all knowledge of muscular conditions. " That this is so is clear when we consider that the movements thus projected into inanimate or motionless forms are necessarily movements so familiar that they are part of our conception of all existence they are the most automatic thing we have any consciousness of at all. If they were more recent, less perfectly organised, if any portion of the automatic chain could suddenly start into conit
sciousness, they
would be such
as
we could never
project outside ourselves. " Hence, there can, as Lipps rightly judges (though he seems to give no reason), be no localisation in Einfiihlung ; not because we could not localise in ourselves what we project outside, but because we could not project as explanatory mode, as necessary way of being, an activity liable to localisation, i.e. to imperfect automatism. " (B) What localised feelings may be called forth are therefore evidently of secondary nature, responses, on our part, to the action we have attributed, in fact imitation consequent on Einfiihlung : we draw ourselves up because we have perceived the column as doing it, and we perceive the column as drawing itself up because certain relations of lines translate themselves into automatic relations of which we only know the initial fact * drawing up.' * I may add (1910) to this that it has occurred to me that such
"
335
localised signs
attribution of this idea thus stripped of would be Einfuhlung, putting us into relations of vital similarity with the visible object. The muscular tensions perceived in certain cases (cases as I believe of least asthetic attention, of attention divided between the thing seen and our own -person) would be a phenomenon of inner imitation aroused by the attribution of our movement
to something else ; in a word, a result (not necessarily occurring) of Einfuhlung. " CC) In fact the image of a thing completed by memory image tends, when no evident signs of a passiveness are present, to be an image also of a movement or gesture. Now, the image, let us say the thought, of a movement or gesture, tends, as we all know, to produce an actual outer miming of that movement or gesture ; if that outer miming be
The
may possibly be a means of helping out a naturally insufficient attention, in the same way that silent muscular performance of a melody may be, I believe, a lielp to
secondary muscular processes
memory, or perhaps a means of diminishing on the motor centres. " Meaning is originally Titchener, Thought Processes, p. 176 kinaesthesis the organism faces the situation by some bodily attitude. And words themselves, let us remember, were at first motor
deficient
auditive
inattention by calling
attitudes, gestures, kinaesthetic contexts,
complicated, of course,
by sound, and, therefore, fitted to assist the other types of attention. But I go further. I doubt if meaning need necesP. 178 sarily be conscious at all, if it may not be * carried ' in purely physiological terms. In rapid reading, in skimming of pages in quick
:
succession, in the rendering of a musical composition in a particular
key
in shifting
from one language to another

;
as
right- or left-hand neighbour at a dinner-table

cases
I
in these
you turn to your and similar
doubt
if
meaning
necessarily has
any kind of conscious
representations."
How much more so, I may add, in cases of aesthetic contemplation where the focus of the mind may be upon the representation or use !V. L.
'
336
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
checked by our own real movement or gesture, it produces merely a sense of the movement.* (And being made to realise it in ourselves, we project it a strengthening of into the seen thing once more that original attribution of movement.) Anyhow, having attributed movement we feel that movement in ourselves by the fact of partial imitation, and instantly awaken thereby the sense of pleasure or displeasure associated with such movement. And I may add, if that awakening of the initial thought ' of the movement and its accompanying pleasure or displeasure be very lively, a real bodily disturbance, sometimes mimetically muscular,' but more often influencing the great emotional organs, heart, respiration, etc. We must, I now feel convinced, reinstate in all this Einfiihlung matter the old psychological items of * thinking,' of * idea,* of ' memory images,' and above all of association. And to these we must add as most powerful factors of variation, * checking and neutralising ' (Hemmung) and emotional synthesis, i.e. the domination of a affective tone ' on the whole associated given images, simply because such * affective tone answers to what is after all the most vivid datum of consciousness, our own condition." February 20, 1904. " I should like to add a few words about Hemmung (check, partial inhibition). " This constitutes one of the main factors of the aesthetic phenomenon. Einfiihlung, i.e. the act of interpreting new visible facts in terms of our previous experience, of seeing a new shape in the light of a familiar one, of attributing movement to form, life to movement, and of miming initially the movement
:
. . .
'
'
thus attributed
this process
would doubtless take

p. 145.
Cf. Extracts
from Miinsterberg,
place constantly
to
if,
337
so to speak,
fry. exploitation force us to shorten ever more and more the act of visual perception, and to substitute for its suppressed portions other acts : the thought of the
The
necessities
we had not other fish both of self-defence and of
connected with that form, the connected therewith, and of our thought answer thereunto. own acts in " This is a checking of the sesthetical possibility, not merely because we are hurried from contemplation into action (Groos has seen this clearly), but, even more (which neither Groos nor Lipps sees), because this checking is in the first instance a thinking For, before about something which is not the form. we are hurried away out of contemplation in general, we are already hurried, in the very act of attribution^ out of the contemplation of the form
other
qualities
of the acts
into that of the subject. The child, for instance, recognises in a curtain tassel a shape similar to that
of a
woman (I speak from personal recollection). But, instead of attributing to this shape merely the act of erecting body and head and spreading out skirts, and then passing on to the aesthetic empathy (Einfiihlung), or more properly the aesthetic sympathetic feeling of that act of erecting and spreading, the child at once flies to the other acts of which that shape is susceptible actively and passively : dancing, walking, being nursed, dressed, etc., in fact the child thinks of that object as a doll. " I have used the words * that object,' and this is significant of the whole process of checking aesthetic perception or rather of deviating its initial elements into other processes. Deviating to the extent, perhaps, of preventing the further aesthetic experience going on simply because there is no basis for
Y
338
it.
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

When one puts
(save music
together the absence of aesthetic in children with their extraordinary activity of, so to speak, turning every shape into a doll or a story, an activity which is probably the preparation in play (overlooked by Groos) for the paramount human instinct of ' interpretation ' {i.e, connecting sights with qualities, actions, reactions and furthest consequences, practical imagination) ; when we note this coincidence we may suspect that the very generalised, typical, strictly * initial,' attribution of movement to seen shapes whereof aesthetic Einjiihlung is a residue, an alluvium of infinitely repeated experiences ; an alluvium which can exist only after years of habit, and which, even when ready, complete, is probably diminished by the necessary continuance of that activity of * playing with things ' which characterises childhood. " But my belief is that the starting-point of all habits of aesthetic Einjiihlung, such as I conceive them, is always interest in things the question ' What is this ? ' * What is it like ? ' In other words, the
life
and colour)
aesthetic interest
least in
I
the
may
a complex, late and residual, at the individual." add (191 1) that as regards paragraphs (B)
is
life of
and (C)
of these notes, I
put them forward as
mere
suggestion, the correctness of which may be proved, but quite as probably, I think, disproved, by such further psychological and psycho-physiological investigations as I refer to at the
Having given thus
provisorily
end of this article. and for the better
understanding of the subject these still very undeveloped discussions of the question of Einjiihlung, I
want to express my conviction that all this question would gain by being reduced to a termin-

ology agreeing
aesthetics
339
less than does that of German with metaphysical and almost mystical terminology. I venture to hope that there will be eliminated from this discussion that very gratuitous and ambiguous notion of the ego of philosophers an entity mysterious, indivisible and eluding study to substitute for it, perhaps, conceptions acquired during the analysis of states of consciousness, and due to the very modest studies of the inner life of an individual a sample of which studies I hope to have given in this work. After thus renouncing the habit of a 'priori discussions in aesthetics, I will return to the ideas which have been suggested to me by my individual
;
experience.
May 14, 1904. At the end of a note on the very intense enjoyment given by Botticelli's Spring, I find the following observation, which raises the question of activities other than aesthetic, implied in the appreciation of form. The note deals with the very unexpected pleasure received from a picture by Angelico, which I did not know, and this, scarcely half an hour after receiving an unpleasant impression from another picture, which I knew very well, by the same master. " It struck me at the Academy that the action of novelty on aesthetic impression is to set going the inquiring, discovering, prowling, whafs-what activities on which aesthetic appreciation is carried. Novelty makes us look because we don't know what This explains why novelty of place or there is. represented objects acts favourably to aesthetic appreciation, while novelty of style often kills it off. The maximum appreciation is given, perhaps, by
unexpected recognition of the familiar.
We
have to
340
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Now in the case of the unfamiliar we can explore but not synthesise. In new friendships we are often conscious of attraction by real or fancied likeness to people for whom we have no lively feeling. On the other hand, the dead-level of old friendships is due to our having ceased to explore, and going perpetually over an old synthesis. This explains why showing a place or piece of music to another person often renovates it. We are obliged to synthesise afresh. All this proves that aesthetic pleasure has to be carried on some one of the great utilitarian processes of life. I
explore, but also to synthesise.
find in a
book of an American psychologist, Mark

:
Baldwin, this phrase, which gives a phylogenetic form to this notion of mine * The time when the only function of art was that of attracting attention.'
I
*
is
would add that attracting attention
now
art's
first necessity.
the action of novelty in heightening our next extract from my the normal diaries passes on to a cognate question alternation in aesthetic attention, and the alliance of
aesthetic responsiveness, the
:
From
various competing kinds of interest to which art has recourse (interest in subject, e.g. with interest in form) in order to prevent our attention divagating by enclosing it in a rhythmical alternation.t
Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development (1899),
p. 151.
t Titchener, Psych, of Feeling and Attention (1908), p. 263 : " According to Wundt, attention is discontinuous from force of circumstances and intermittent from its very nature. It is discontinuous because ideas come and go in consciousness, and attention " Ein grasps but one idea at a time." Titchener quotes Wundt
:
dauernder Eindruck kann nur Jest gehalten zoerden, indent Momente der Spannung und der Abspannung derselben mil einander Wechseln.
"
Palm Sunday.
rence.
341
High Mass, Santa Trinitd, Flo" The great function at Santa Trinita, very
by
beautiful to look at, with three-part music, I believe Lotti. hopeless state of distrazione : I feel that I cannot in the least keep my attention on these
My
sights
and sounds, because they are only
sights
and
sounds. Surely this is legitimate, natural. are not, save byexception, capable of orfit ioimono-ideismy and what we take for it ^for instance, in writing, talking, etc. îs in reality complete synthesis, absolute summation. Where such summation cannot, from disparity of subject, take place, there will be unsteadiness and wandering of attention ; and this is our habitual condition when not engaged in doing or pursuing something continuously.* " The distraction in the presence of, say, a work of art, is merely the surging up of the other interests of our life ; it is due to the work of art not appealing sufficiently to various of our faculties while not making a sufficiently intense demand on one special group. (If, for instance, one is trying to make out a new piece of music, at the piano, with difficulty, one is usually not distracted.) There is no distraction, or much less, when the work of art has a subject, because that subject uses up our powers
We
and forms a summation. If, had had the words of the Mass, and particularly if those words had possessed real
of associative thinking
for instance, I
Auf
diere
Weise
ist
die Aufmerksamkeit
^^
ihren
Wesen naci
eine
intertnittirende function.
Titchener, p. 265, quotes Ebbinghaus " Dauernde Aufmerksamkeit gibt es nur bei einem stetigen Wechsel der Inhalte, in deren Hervortreten das aufmerksamsein besteht.^* * Titchener, Feeling and Attention, p. 302 : " I doubt whether
inattention, in the waking
else.'
life, is
not always
'
attention to something
342
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

meaning
distraction,
for me, there would simply because there would have been no have been a blending or a synthetic rhythm, backwards and forwards, between various items ; there would have been a total, a harmonious state of mind. " What I want to point out is that division and oscillation of attention is normal in aesthetic conditions (and in most habitual ones), only that the complexity and the synthetic and regular quality of our activity makes us overlook it. At the bottom of this is of course the perpetual movement, shifting and competing in our attention, without which no consciousness would exist. It is very probable (as M. Krebs at once suggests) that we cannot think of only one thing at a time ; we are so constituted that we must, save in most exceptional states, perpetually weave patterns between many items, come and go, fetch and carry. If the work of sort of item, then the other items art gives only one habitual in our life, worries, trifles, will compete with it. Hence the superior average power of composite art, opera, religious art, etc. etc. " What it all comes to is that art must occupy
practical emotional
our
life,
or be a
mere
trifle
from which our
life is
perpetually flowing away. Again, of course much art is made for intermittent attention in the intervals of living: furniture, dress, etc.: it is, so to speak, the garment of life." I should like my psychological reader to think over the note I have just put before him. To me it seems to represent the unexpected conclusion of many of the observations and hypotheses given above. The notes immediately subsequent put the same question with more clearness and detail. March 27. Florence. " With this hangs together
AESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS
the question of what
I
343
call the various dimenexperience is that however attentive we are to a work of art there is always, on another plane of attention, an associated something ; nay, I cannot even be in a much enjoyed landscape without distinct associations of other landscapes, not preventing my seeing that one, but in a manner continuing it in other planes of consciousness. I see this even in trifles. On a farm-house near my home, there is a stain of sulphate of copper under the spalliered vine. I have rarely remarked it of late without a thought, sometimes a distinct vision, of Tintoret's Bacchus and Ariadne, the peculiar blue of the stain being connected with the sea and sky in that picture, while the vine (even when leafless)
must
sions
of association.
My
suggests both visually and poetically Bacchus
and
the garland on his head and round his loins. The impression is not a fusion, still less a confusion ; it is an oscillation between that wall (with escutcheons, stain, and vine) and that picture. " And here I may add that a great picture fulfils its purpose quite as much when thus returning to enrich an accidental impression, even if only of a stain on a wall, as when looked at in reality and for
its
own
"
I
sake.
noticed this morning in Santa Trinita that whereas I could not possibly keep my attention from straying whilst sittmg staring and listening to a performance which had no intellectual or emotional sense for me, I could be absorbed therein for a few seconds of stopping on the way out.
" Our
either act
we
see
cannot be isolated, we must and feel in complete concert with what and hear (probably a need for synthetic
activities
action developed in self-defence, as seeing, hearing,
344
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

away
art.
adjusting, or escaping) or else life claims us
from
"
must not be misled (and we are) by the fact that the artist can give all his attention to the picture he is painting or the piece he is enjoying ; nay the student can do so to the picture or music he is merely examining. For the artist is doing a dozen things besides merely contemplating his work ; and the critic is examining, comparing, measuring, judging. Both are living a very complex life in reference to the work of art. This is the reverse of what the enjoying person is supposed to do, expecting to empty out his consciousness of everything save that seen or heard thing, and then perhaps a little bitterly surprised, almost humiliated, at not being let alone by his habitual thoughts and observations.
is not hypnotic, not monosynthetic ; it excludes, but by making a little walled garden of the soul of all manner of cognate things, a maze, in which the attention runs to and fro, goes round and round, something
We
" ^he action of art

it is
ideistic :
extremely complex and complete, taking all our This is the basis of a theory of art (this and not a theory of EinfUhlung or anything else), this the observed phenomenon of aesthetic attenfaculties.
:
tion."
Easter Sunday, 1904. " I have for years felt that the artistic phenomenon was circular. It seems to me now that it is perhaps our need for such circular conditions of consciousness, for such unity,
attention, summation, as opposed to conflict and interruption, which accounts, quite as much as our two arms, legs, and pair of eyes, for the need of
symmetry.
An
unsymmetrical object
is
one which

345
cannot be felt in the same manner ; instead of one mood, made of coherent and interdependent impressions, we have the abortive beginnings of two moods, each struggling against the other. " But whence this need of unity, co-ordination of mood ? Surely it may be a necessity of the human
and to subdue purposes. The soul, consciousness, character, is for ever threatened with disintegration by the various forces of nature ; our surroundings tend to break us to bits, to wash us away. The human personality has purpose, direction, unity, co-ordination as a law of its persistence. And we persist by adapting our surroundings to ourselves quite as much as ourselves to our surroundings ; indeed the latter would be on the road to disintegration, to extinction, it would mean the person, the soul, the type, swallowed up in what compared with it is the endlessly fluctuating chaos. " Human life is a certain cycle of activities, strictly interdependent ; and character is the expression, the sine qua non of such a cycle. Hence, in the perpetual going on, in the countless alteration to suit altering surroundings, the necessity, for mere human self-defence, of moments of complete harmony, co-ordination, summation, and the perpetual struggle to attain it more or less partially. The satisfaction of our bodily needs ^sleep, food, generation, are not related with the persistence of the personality ; they are responses of the individual to the general need. But given that the individual what we call the soul ^has come to exist as a part of the universe, this microcosm must, under penalty of destruction, perpetually seek to put its stamp upon the macrocosm, or at least affirm its existence as
soul in
its
effort to affirm itself to itself

its
the outer world to
346
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
opposed to the macrocosm. Now the macrocosm, except as thought by us, is the external, in a manner the foreign and irrelevant, perpetually threatening us ; and against it the microcosm asserts itself with
its
insistence
on plan, unity, harmony.
" Looking at the matter from a different standpoint we might say that the line of least resistance for consciousness is the establishment of one mood
Consciousness is for ever trying to arrange the more or less fluctuating and incoherent items it receives into such unity, and trying to carve such unity what we call either purpose or plan out of the surrounding chaos. " Art would therefore be, from the utilitarian, evolutional point of view, a school for this unity of mood, purpose, and plan, without which consciousat a time.
ness
would disintegrate and human

I
life
disappear.
" As
it
pointed out before (though I did not see so clearly)* this is the junction between ethical
and aesthetic life. Both are purposeful, co-ordinate, both represent the higher law of consciousness, The unethical, the i.e. synthetic unity of mood. unintellectual man, like the unaesthetic, is the one who is in conflict with himself, or who is the mere
passive toy of circumstances.
my Laurus Nobilis, Art and Life. In her admirable analysis and summing up of the Wiirzburg aesthetical experiments, Fraulein von Ritook writes (Zeitschrift fur Aisthetik, V. Band, p. 539) "One fact can certainly be formulated, viz., the indispensableness of unity in the aesthetic experience. In no other category of psychic activity does lack of unity act so destructively as in the aesthetic one. It is not a case merely of diminution of intensity, but of actual transforming satisfaction into " Harmony is the empathic unity dissatisfaction." And (p. 541) of the psychical experience." Cf. Lipps's saying that " ugliness is dynamic incoherence."
* In
: :
" The world
his
as Vorstellung
is
347
of
Man's assertion
the world of Wille of which he is a dependent, but a separate and self-consistent part. In this Schopenhauer saw correctly." Assisi. March 22. " Lower church. Yesterday at sunset and this morning at the Mass of the monks. (I have been recently worried and somewhat unwell.) One of the ways of coming in contact with art is, evidently, to bring one's troubles, doubts, one's
as against
own nature
fluctuating sea or ruffled puddle of distress,

this life
is,
and
live
subdued and chastened by that
of art.
This
of course, the function especially of music
and
architecture.
Music, seeming to voice our feelings,

to harmony, beauty,
brings
them
and an intensity
of a higher kind."
April 23, 1904. " It is natural that a work of art should be a Hortus inclusus, since, when we do not mime the represented action and then depart, our activity of perception consists in looking round and round, in and out and back again and looking over and over again. Hence the sense of eternity." My Gallery Diaries, continued since the above entries, have covered a greater number of problems, have suggested a new crop of detail hypotheses, have become in fact fuller and fuller, but also proportionately more difficult to deal with ; and I have therefore decided not to include any of them in a
volume intended,
after
all,
to familiarise students
with the chief problems of psychological aesthetics, and even to introduce such aesthetics, its problems and hypotheses, to those who have approached art from other sides. I will, however, forestall on some
future publication of this kind by saying that my diaries since 1904 have not invalidated, but only confirmed and enriched, the chief generalisations
348
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
drawn from their predecessors. Further observations, more systematic and detailed, have shown me
that, as regards myself at least, aesthetic responsiveness is an essentially active phenomenon, and one
subject to every conceivable cause of fluctuation in our energy and variation in our moods, to the extent that (as a well-known art critic has confirmed to me in conversation) the judgment of pleasurable and displeasurable passed upon the same work of art may be altered and even reversed within a few days. I find, for instance, that the same pictures by Lotto, a very peculiar artistic personality, are described, in successive entries in my diaries, as having given me the greatest pleasure and as having utterly repelled me according to the bodily and mental condition in which I happened to come into the presence of the work of art ; a fact which, explaining why certain categories of art and certain artistic personalities may be more or less suited to individual beholders as well as to the same beholder in different moods, may show that, although artistic excellence is always due to qualities of harmonious tradition and of individual energy and equilibrium, there is within the limits of such excellence wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the various types of normal mankind. Briefly my notes subsequent to 1904 have added more detail while further confirming what is implicit in the Esthetics of Empathy namely, that the work of art requires for its enjoyment to be met half-way by the active collaboration of the beholder, or, I may add, the listener and the reader. One last remark: these unpublished diaries subsequent to 1904 bear out on every point the contention of modern introspective psychology, namely, that a trained (if also a born) psychological
:
observer
is
349
not only able, but inclined, to notice

his
own psychical conditions and their concomitants, without any appreciable diminution in their spontaneity and genuineness, at least in the case of phenomena so normal, so constant and, I may add, so rarely attaining emotional violence and mono-ideism, as the aesthetic affections show themselves in my own case.
and record
Ugliness, to the effect that
Professor Lipps's testy criticism on Beauty and it is impossible to be aware
of bodily sensations while absorbed (Fersunken) in the joyful contemplation of a Doric column, there-
fore shrinks into mere evidence to an individual incapacity either for self-observation or for such complex impressions as associate in other folk's
minds the visual image of the Parthenon columns with the smell of sunburnt herbs on the Acropolis and the tinkle and bleating of sheep that rise from the valley below. It is quite possible that Professor Lipps's individual aesthetic contemplation at least of Doric columns may be of that absolutely unfluctuating and unmixed type which, in the case of very acute and massive emotion and of intensive intellectual preoccupation, defies all knowledge of its own concomitants, nay characteristics. But such impassioned or Archimedianly concentrated contemplation is, I will venture to say, by no means inevitable in our daily and loving commerce with beautiful things. And I can assure those of my
as
who hesitate before aesthetic introspection before some sacrilegious or abnormal practice, that if they are capable of the attention and selfdiscipline which such introspection involves, they need not be afraid of diminishing their aesthetic
friends
sensitiveness
and
pleasure, nor of approaching the
350
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
great things of art with less of that active participation on which we are taught by empirical esthetics that our genuine happiness in beauty essentially ^ depends.*
March
191
CONCLUSION
after all these years and all this discussion, to sum up my present attitude towards the essay called Beauty and Ugliness, I find it necessary to do so from more than one point of view. In the first place, I feel certain that but for my collaborator's experiments and the suggestion they afforded of a Lange-James or Sergian explanation
Trying,
of formal-aesthetic satisfaction
and
dissatisfaction, I
should have had to wait for Lipps's Empathy and Groos's Inner Mimicry before getting any inkling of a possible wherefore of such satisfaction and dissatisfaction ; indeed it is possible that unless I had previously collaborated in Beauty and Ugliness I should have failed to recognise the bearing of either Lipps's or of Groos's hypothesis. The experiments described and the theory put forward in Beauty and Ugliness had accustomed me to seek the explanation of form-preference in active participation, and in our own movements, their modes and concomitants ; in fact I based such preference upon Einfuhlung long before having heard the word.
personally
But these movements were movements which

actually took place, or which were felt as taking place, in the person of my fellow-worker, and
aesthetic preference
was explained by
life
a direct or
indirect participation of the organic

351
due to those movements being actually taking place or seeming
352
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
For at the time of collaborating in to take place. Beauty and Ugliness I had no standard of what
constitutes psychological experimentation, neither did I discriminate sufficiently between fact and
inference, or
between testimony and proof.
More-
over, the study of individual variations of psychological experience was barely begun in 1897, and it
me until I read Galton, Binet and Stern, Strieker and Ballet after collaborating in Beauty and Ugliness ; so that, although modesty made me throw in a saving clause about " Individual Idiosyncrasy," the astounding application of the plural pronoun to experiments which only one of two collaborators had attempted answered to my firm conviction that what was true of my collaborator must hold good of every other human being capable of aesthetic form-preference. Indeed my own unawareness of most of the mimetic movements and organic sensations which I described at second-hand only persuaded me that they took place normally in some " sub-consciousness " whose darkness was a guarantee of its " intuitive " or " biological " all-importance ; for, perhaps because I was still unacquainted with M. Bergson's philosophy, I was fully imbued with that quasi-religious respect for the " obscure," the " profound," and the " semi- " or " sub- " or " un- " conscious kinds of consciousness which that philosophy has systemaIn short, the plural pronoun employed by me tised. in Beauty and Ugliness meant not we two collaborators, but we, all mankind, or at all events all mankind capable of formal aesthetic preference. It corresponded to the Wir Motoriker for whom, a few years later, my friend Professor Groos claimed a superior intensity of aesthetic perception and emotion.
was utterly unknown to
CONCLUSION
Only
355
I had not reached Professor Groos's stage of dividing the world into Motoriker and not-Motoriker. I really thought that everybody was " we." It was only when, reading Lipps, I found that exactly the same (as I now call it) dynamic-empathic interpretation of form took place in a writer who absolutely scouted all Lange-James or Sergian explanations thereof, that I gave up the belief that the phenomena described by my collaborator must necessarily be taking place in some subconscious region of my own
self.
ness to the experiments
my, so to speak, historical indebtedand the theory contained in Beauty and Ugliness, and the indebtedness therefore of whosoever may have received suggestions from
for
So much
present estimation of the validity and of that theory is, as already suggested by the above fragments of autobiography, a very different matter. And now I am coming to a point on which it is very difficult to make myself clear to others, as it has been difficult for me to attain clearness for myself. The point has been put to me by others in the form of a question Why, since I now consider formaldynamic empathy as due, not to actually present movements and muscular-organic sensations, but to the extremely abstract ideas of movement and its modes residual from countless individual and possibly racial experiences, why should I still give importance to present movement sensations, and connected organic sensations also present, which I am scarcely ever aware of in my own case, and which are not necessary to explain the purely " mental " phenomenon of interpretation of visible form in terms of movement and energy that I constantly find z
that Essay.
My
and value
of those experiments
354
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

My
taking place as an essential part of my own formalreason for taking in aesthetic perception ? these imitative consideration movements and mimetic-organic sensations is not merely because I
find a considerable
number
of observers,
headed by
Professor Groos
and
my
collaborator, clinging to
the belief in their importance. For they can be explained away as resulting from the mental process of dynamic-empathy, reinforcing its effects according to Professor Kiilpe's simile (which I willingly accept) as with the cymbals and kettledrums reinforcing the effect of music without producing it. No ; it seems to me that we must take into consideration such mimetic-organic sensations because they may possibly afford us a clue to the origin of the odd fact of our associating movement and energy with objects and patterns, with mere shapes, of which we know that they cannot move, and know also that, nine times out of ten, the real movements originally producing them (growth of plants and animals, geological upheaval and erosion as well as artistic manipulation) are either unthought of by us or of a kind exactly contrary {e.g. down instead of uf) to that of the movements attributed to the forms by aesthetic empathy. For granted that this empathically attributed movement and energy are, as Lipps long since pointed out, abstract, or, as I
have called
it,
residual of countless past experiences,
there remains
the question
Why
should these
from innumerable memory-images of movement, be awakened in connexion with motionless shapes, and, what is more, awakened in a higher degree and in a very varied manner by some shapes rather than others ? Jn fact, must there not be in us some present moveideas oj movement, these abstractions
CONCLUSION
355
ment however slight, to set going this (to use oldfashioned language) chain of associations of movement, indeed to defend such abstract motor imagination from the competition of the less abstract, richer, newer chains of more or less individual associations which cause us to recognise those shapes as " representing " objects of our concrete experience ? For let it be remembeTed that formal- dynamic empathy is entirely independent of all suggestion of what a shape " represents,"*^ indeed it is inhibited oftener than excited, by the thought of a represented object. Granted therefore that formalaesthetic empathy is of the nature of memory, of thought, why should we remember, think of,
its modes unless some movement on suggests those abstract ideas of movement ? That this actually existing and suggestive movement is largely that of the eyes and of
movement and
actually going
all
sight or affected
the bodily parts instrumental in adjusting our by such bodilyadjustments, I feel more and more inclined to think. I am aware that experiments have shown that the movements of the eyes in following a given shape answer only very imperfectly to that shape ; moreover, that it has been repeated over and over again that eye-movements, when not physically unpleasant, are indifferent, and cannot therefore be alleged as a cause of aesthetic pleasure. But my use for eye movements, and all movements connected therewith, is not to explain the aesthetic pleasantness or unpleasantness of shapes. That I believe to be explicable by the mental process of formal-dynamic empathy, by the interplay of forces suggested by those shapes, and by the pleasantness or unpleasantness of such inner dramas of abstract movemcnt-and-energy-associa-
356
tions.
for any movement, is to explain why motionless shapes should awaken pleasant or unpleasant dynamic dramas in our mind, and awaken them, very often, far more vividly than the sight of bodies which we know to be really moving through real
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS My use for eye movements, or
present, actual
space, as
my
gallery observations testify to the real
movements of people and carriages seeming dull and dead compared with the intensity of movement
attributed to painted or carved shapes. Now, in the first place, the movements of our eyes normally involved in visual perception imply in the actual f resent a far greater number of other adjustments (head, neck, back, etc.) than we are apt to think of ; and secondly, ocular movements replace or symbolise an enormous number of fast locomotor and tactile experiences, as is universally admitted with regard to the visual interpretation of cubic existence and third-dimensional depth. Thirdly, ocular, or more properly visual^ attention, produces, if I may trust my own experience, kinaesthetic processes (so-called muscular, and also cardiac and respiratory) analogous to those attendant on other kinds of voluntary attention. Fourthly, ocular movements and their accompanying kin-
changes awaken verbal images which may themselves radiate (and with certain individuals
eesthetic
undoubtedly do so radiate) into mimetic

in other connexions.
acts
kinaesthetic disturbances, exactly as verbal images

It
and do
as thus explaining the starting and keeping dynamic empathy that I now think that not only ocular movements, but all directly or indirectly connected bodily processes, should be taken into account. Recent psychological thought as cxemis
up
of
CONCLUSION
plified
357
by Wundt, Binet,
Kiilpe,
and Titchener, and
as boldly
summed up
in the hypotheses of Semon's
Mneme, tend to the recognition that the phenomena of consciousness are not the parallels of
physiological processes, but rather their signs
vestiges in every degree of complication
or
degree of impoverishment. We the superposition and interchange of various mental processes, and their combinations and vicarious relationships the tactile-locomotor images replaced, symbolised, by the visual ones ; the visual images short-handed, their values extracted, by the verbal ones. And we should therefore be prepared to find very little likeness between the facts of consciousness and the bodily changes which underlie them, or the symbolical representatives of bodily movements which may have accompanied or perhaps do still accompany, unnoticed, all visual perception, and which account for that otherwise unaccountable stimulation of abstract motor memory by the sight of motionless shapes. And it seems to me possible that the secondary production of kinaesthetic processes by the already existing phenomenon of formal- dynamic empathy may be connected, in the persons who are subject to it, with a survival of such underlying kinaesthetic consciousness superseded in other subjects by a more completey abstract and, so to speak, disembodied kind of dynamic empathy. And in such so-called " motor subjects" it is quite probable that, as Professor Groos believes, the bodily participation of " Inner Mimicry " produces a deeper emotional resonance (Professor Kiilpe's cymbals and kettledrumf ) which may surpass or merely equal the excitemer of more purely mental empathy.
and every have been shown
3S8
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS
Having made this proviso concerning the possible underlying suggestive functions of the kinaesthetic accompaniments of aesthetic perception, and left the door open to the recognition of Inner Mimicry and Organic Participation as a multiplying factor of aesthetic emotion, I wish to repeat my present belief that aesthetic preference cannot be explained by Lange- James or Sergian hypotheses, whereas it can be explained by dynamic -formal empathy on a ground prepared by such economy and replenishment of attention as is necessary for any kind of
pleasant intellectual activity.
Indeed I should be glad if this volume, in which have thus tried to do justice to both the kinaesthetic explanation which I once put forward, and to the more psychological hypothesis of dynamic empathy which I now hold by I should be glad if this volume might result in recommending the study of such formal-dynamic empathy to persons capable of aesthetic analysis, and of relegating the question of the kinaesthetic basis or accompaniment For the to experimental psychology as such.
I
existence of bodily sensations (and still more of objective bodily changes) in connexion with our attribution of our own modes of movement and connation to lines and shapes is only a detail of the question whether such bodily sensations can be detected in any of our other mental activities ; and this is a matter for experimental psychologists, and On the not, primarily at least, for aestheticians. contrary, the question whether aesthetic empathy really exists and what are its characteristics is one which can be adequately dealt with only by aestheticians, meaning thereby individuals with
natural and trained sensitiveness to the qualities of
< s
< ^ o c
^
in a-
<
Q
/^
),
"S
CONCLUSION
visible
(or,
359
the case of music and literature, audible and verbal) form the finest training in introspection cannot give much result where, if I may frankly criticise some of the scientific or philosophical investigators into the reasons for aesthetic preference say Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen there are no aesthetical phenomena to introspect. The explanation of aesthetic empathy must therefore be left to general experimental psychology. What
in
:
we
is
psychologically minded aestheticians have to do to collect and classify all possible data bearing
aesthetic empathy, and decide whether those data are sufficient to establish the existence of such a mental process and mental habit, and whether, supposing Empathy to exist, those data correspond with the observed facts of aesthetic preference and aversion. A number of experiments should thus be instituted, after experimentally selecting distinctly aesthetic individuals ; experiments beginning with preference of the smallest aesthetic units, what might be called " empathic elements," which aesthetic elements or units would, I need hardly say, not be those often aesthetically indifferent geometrical forms experimented upon by Fechner, but elementary schemata of interplay of empathic, has i.e. imaginary, forces, such as Professor Lipps collected in the Raumasthetik and even more in the ^sthetische Betrachtung. After such experiments on mere preference as such (the experimental subjects being asked to place the specimen forms in the order of their liking and disliking) there might be experiments on the reasons of such preference, and others intended merely to elicit verbal description {e.g. " This shape is lumbering, that line is swift, jerky, smooth," etc., "That arrangement lifts up or
upon
36o
presses
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

down,"
etc.
etc.)
containing references to attributed to visible shapes.* These experiments on the subj ective side might be, should be, tested by objective examination and classification of the types of visual shape recurring and dominating in all times and countries in ornaments, pottery, textile fabrics, and every possible object susceptible of undergoing alteration of its merely practically required shape to suit individual or traditional liking. From such simpler subjective and objective study, the psychological sesthetician would go on to the examination both of the beholder's consciousness which is exemplified in the Wiirzburg experiments, let alone in C. Anstruther-Thomson's and my own and to such objective (if one may speak of objective in regard to Empathy !) analysis of works of art as my collaborator taught me to make, and I hope will teach others also, in her masterly descriptive
movement and energy and affective modes
passages in Beauty and Ugliness.

still
But we
are
far
from that, or rather,
alas
we
are nearer that
Psychological experimentation upon preference for simple shapes has already been carried on, I find, in Professor Miinsterberg's laboratory, and by other American experimentalists ; also by Segal
(JVohlgefMigkeit einfacher rSumlicher Formen, in Archiv fur He gesammte Psychologie, VII.) and especially by Legowski, a pupil of Kiilpe's {BeitrSge zur experimentalen jEsthetik : Leipzig, Englmann, 1908). The part played by formal-dynamic empathy would have been better tested had the experimenters avoided elementary geometrical figures drawn with ruler and compass, and used simple geometrical shapes as they occur in patterns and architecture, that is to say, altered, accentuated, and phrased into aesthetic significance. The mosaic pattern of my frontispiece loses at least half of its etnpathic powers if " mechanically " reproduced, i.e. if reduced to absolute regularity. All great artistic periods have practised such
" phrasing," and Ruskin, among many other merits, has that remarking on its necessity for what he calls the Lamp of Life.
of
CONCLUSION
361
in current aesthetic literature, but woefully far away from those more elementary examinations, or rather
give
examinations of more elementary facts, necessary to all the psychology of the work of art and the
artist its scientific basis.
leads
The psychology of art and of the artist This me to repeat a statement made in several pages
!
but likely to be forgotten by my and opponents the eesthetic problem, as narrowed down by me to that ojpreference in the realm of
of this volume,
critics
:
mere visible, audible or verbalform, this eesthetic problem met by the hypothesis of empathy, by no means covers the whole ground of artistic phenomena. The presence of an aesthetic, that is to say (according to the hypothesis of empathy) a formal-imaginative-
dynamic principle of selection, is what differentiates activity from a great number of equally disinterested and pleasurable groupings of contemplative activities in which this aesthetic selection does not exist ; and still more, of course, what differentiates artistic activities from those grouped
artistic
in subservience to practical uses, worldly or otherworldly. But art itself, though thus distinguished, invariably partakes of one or more of these nonaesthetic interests, attractions or uses there never has been or ever can be an art which neither records, nor expresses, nor designates, nor satisfies the need for intensive enlotion, which does not make something easier to see, to think, to feel, or to employ whether in the most mystical or the most material manner. There has never been and never can be an art purely aesthetic ; the art for art's sake of which we used to hear being pre-eminently an art for the display of technical skill or scientific novelty of problem, or for the stimulation of emotions very
:
362
far
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

aesthetic, in fact
from
or
perversity
is
of
everything
an art covering the futility appeal by the excuse that permissible and dignified in the
its
service of itself.
Such is my conception of the relation between the aesthetic principle and the various arts which it has, by its peculiar imperative, differentiated into art.* And such being my conception, it is obvious that the artistic phenomenon, not only in the artist but also in the beholder or hearer, must, in my opinion, be a constantly varying interplay of the specially aesthetic with the non-aesthetic interests. Stated in the terms of our hypothesis, artistic contemplation is a combination, usually a rapid and, so to speak, contrapuntal alternation of many other mental processes with the particular one we have
und Einfiihlung (Munich, 191 1), reacting which derive artistic form from utilitarian or technical necessities and desire for imitation, boldly asserts that only that should be considered art (he excludes the work of cave-dwellers, children, and much primitive representative art) which obeys either the desire for anthropomorphic empathy or that for geometric abstraction and negation of the organic, two desires he treats as opposed and as explaining all the history of art by their warfare and their alliances, I wish this most interesting and readable little book had come into my hands before my own was going to press, for its
against the theories Worringer, Abstraktion
exaggerations are full of suggestion.
I will
only remark that the
author, like
confining
life
it
confuses the various kinds of empathy, to organic form, and explaining by a supposed horror of
all aestheticians,
those so-called geometrical forms whose peculiarities depend
upon formal-dynamic empathy. From the aesthetic standpont all aesthetic form is equally abstract, because the aesthetic standpoint is that of a play of abstract forces. I do not believe that any artistic
form, except in periods of utter perfunctoriness like our own, was ever really geometrical, however much it resembled one of the schemata of geometry. Redraw my frontispiece with ruler and compasses I venture to believe, a -priori, that Egyptian and Arab
!
art
is
no
less explicable
by dynamic empathy.
CONCLUSION
called Msthetie
363
Empathy ; such aesthetic empathy never arising except where the attention has been directed on to given visual, audible, or verbal forms by some of the dozen practical uses, emotional needs,
and
intellectual interests which press into their service or accidentally appeal to, the eye, the ear, and
the habit of speech. The Wiirzburg experiments have shown, as well as those of C. AnstrutherThomson and my own, that there is in all artistic contemplation a perpetual interference or co-operation between all manner of factors and what I have called the purely aesthetic one ; and that not only the origin of art, but its richness and radiating power, depends upon such action and reaction nay, there exists a whole literature, and a valuable one, in which, as in the case of Hildebrand or at least
;
of Cornelius, aesthetic preference

artistic
is
explained by
methods for making things easy to understand, to interpret, and even merely easy to perceive ; while, in the question of the third dimension in painting, it is obvious that no aesthetic preference takes place until we have decided, for totally unaesthetic reasons, which of the lines we are looking at are to be considered as verticals and which as horizontals in other words, that we do interpret a painting as form until we know what it is intended to
;
represent,
hope now to have explained the limited range empathy in the explanation of artistic phenomena. But in so doing let me remind the reader that though thus limited, the importance
I I give to aesthetic
of the Einfiihlung hypothesis
is
central
the attribu-
tion of our vital modes, of our movement, connation, intention, will, and character to assemblages of lines
and sounds
is
what explains preference
for certain
364
BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

visible
forms rather than others
among
art.
and it is this selection and audible forms which constitutes

;
We have spoken so far exclusively of the relation between the aesthetic form and its beholder or But the hypothesis of aesthetic Empathy is hearer.
destined also to explain the other question of the relation between the aesthetic form and the artist and the generations of artists who have made it. According to my hypothesis of formal-dynamic Empathy every aesthetic form embodies in its type in the rough, so to speak, the empathic preferences of a group, of a succession, nay, in the last resort, But every of all groups and successions, of men. aesthetic form embodies, in its individual reality, the of this empathic preferences of one individual artist or that, who informs that type, that schematic abstract form, given him by school, country, or all mankind, with the modes of his individual psychic, swift or and, very probably, of his physical life languid, complex or simple, rich or poor, harmonious or chaotic. So that, if we may give our hypothesis a metaphysical, or rather an intellectually symbolical extension, the aesthetic form which gives us joy is giving us the finest vital rhythms and patterns of a great, rich, and harmonious individual, and the scheme, so to speak, of what has proved most beneficial and enduring in the vital modes of the race. The foregoing considerations will suggest to the reader my reasons for adding to the analyses and discussions of the earlier part of this volume the mass of seemingly heterogeneous notes which I have kept in their chronological order under the heading of varieties and fluctuations of aesthetic responsiveness. I have done so, instead of working them into
;
:
CONCLUSION
365
orderly essays, because I wanted to place my materials unspoilt at the disposal of other students. And I have left a few notes of theoretic character mixed up with what I tried to make mere sincere observations on my own relations with works of art, in order to show how my hypotheses have arisen from the contact of what I have read and thought with what I have really experienced, allowing my spontaneous aesthetic life to circulate freely among my thoughts on art to leave its, I hope fertile, alluvium and to wash away mere verbal and a 'priori definitions. And finally, I have wanted to suggest by the example of my own, though extremely imperfect, attempts, that the realm of art, so long given up to mere metaphysical and literary dissertation, is very well fitted for the typical, normal study of the more complex, indeed the inevitably and essentially complex, processes of real mental life. Our aesthetic preference is a residue of many other activities, a function not merely complicated and in great part vicarious, but one excessively sensitive to moods, thoughts, and mental habits of all kinds. It is at once emotional and lucid, by its very essence contemplative rather than active ; and where it vents in action, expressing itself not in passing gestures and untraceable practice, but in the most stable register of human feeling : the forms visible, audible, or verbal, of the work of art.
Maiano, near Florence Adel, near Leeds Easter- August 191
INDEX
Aberdeen Head, 223 Accent in visual art, 333
Esthetic, as distinguished from
form, its in31 ; trinsic satisfactoriness or unsatisfactoriness, 81 ; imperative, 12 ; instinct as regulator,
artistic,
Aggressible Humour, 300, 315 Amazon, Polycletan, 275^ Amiens, portal of, 202
Anatomic form, 282 Anatomical beauty,
its specific
Andrea del Sarto,

Antique
looked
statues,
at,
pleasurableness, 262 281
not begetter of instincts, 177

;
art,
32-34,
isola-
34
Angelico, 339 Antinous, C^pitoline, 258
phenomenon 185 ; defined as function regulating perception of form, 156; preference, Munsterberg on,
tion,
how
originally
274
;
146; problem defined, i spec problem, its importance for general psychology, 72
; ;
Antiques, realism of, 1 54 Apollo, Belvedere, 259 Sauroktonos, 259; Terme, 261 302
,
Apoxyomenos, 257 Arch, aesthetic versus
con-
qualities
of
;
asymmetry,
accent,
symmetry and balance and
regulation of 177 shapes of useful objects, 177 Êsthetics, and art of children,
structive interest in, 196 Archôlogists' attitude before statues aesthetically false, 274
savages,
and
criminals,
Ares, Ludovici, 276 Ariadne, Vatican, 259 Aridity, aesthetic (or
non-
based upon psychology and

Kunstwissenschaft and iiistic archaeology, 2 ; Central Problem of. III ; Central Problem of, limited to that of beauty
responsiveness), 247, see also Coleridge ; typical day of,
320
Arrbat, M. Lucien, 98 Art, evolutional and defensive

function
of,
;
and ugliness, 80 difference between scientific and a priori aesthetics, i helped on by Kunstwissenschaft and archae;
;
345
sake, 32, 361
for art's ; for art's sake,

; ;
a mistaken tendency, 178 purifies life, 346 as a school

of co-ordination of
ology, 1 1 for introspective studies, advantages of, 347

;
study of, vii modern, their rudimentary or fragmentary nature, i of music, very backward, 13;
;
laboratory
Association, sions of, 343
mood, 345 various dimenacts

of,
;
Attention,
aesthetic,
how voluntarily induced, 248

and
310
aesthetic
;
psychological, their main question regards reason for preference, 13
responsiveness, alternation of, 319-44 ; pleasant as such, 281 ; Segal on variations of, 242
367
368
Automatism,
action,
tion,
INDEX
of
;
aesthetic
life
re-
270
and objectivatends
practical
towards, 159
Cappella Pazzi, 309 Cardellino, Madonna del, 292 Catena's St. Jerome, 228 Charcot's motor type, 24
Chest,
sensations
of
discomin
Bad
Air, 16
fort in, 283
Baerwald's enquHe on motor

type, 24
Children,
aesthetic
why
deficient
Balanced Movement
tures, 233-5
empathy, 337
in
pic-
Church,
Baldovinetti, 287 Baldwin, Mark, 340 Baptistery floor pattern (The

Swirl),
altered sensation on entering, 191, footnote Circular character of artistic
contemplation, 344
Circumference, the church as

our larger, 193 Clinging, grasping,
etc.,
319
Bassano's Burning Bush, 308 Beardsley, 330 Beauty, problem of, as distinguished from artistic prob-
emo-
tional condition of, 141
Beauty and Ugliness,

by
Vernon
tion from, 8
lems, 4
Coleridge quoted, 247 Collaboration, appeal for, 98 Colour, 304 bodily sensations
;
essay
produced by, 203, footnote
Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, quotaco-operation between artist and, 274 Bellini's Allegory, 267 ; floor
in,
and
breathing,
;
204,
231
Beholder,
296
on our ocular movements, 204 its perception and attraction primary, 267 pleasure, 288 pleasure comits effect
;
Berenson,
B., on inner mimicry, 108 ; quoted, 112, 115 Binet, definition of perception, 15, footnote.
pared with, smell or touch, 270 Coloured Surface, looking at, and bodily accompaniments,
173
Competition between art and

life,
Blank Wall,
paniment
173
in
bodily accomlooking at,
341
peculiarities of
Complete Form,
Bodily participation in aesthetic perception, 157

Body, aesthetic enjoyment makes one forget one's own,
109 BoNiFAZio's Dives, 304 Botticelli's Une, 329
vera, 322
bodily accompaniments of perception of, 175 Conrad, W., on ocular sensation and dimensional perception, 181, footnote
Constructive ferent from

;
necessities, difaesthetic raison
Prima
d'Hre of shape, 195
Breathing,
accompanying
movement
of eyes, 185 ; and balance adjustment, 163, 225 ;

;
Co-ordination of lines in pictures, 229 Co-ordination of Mood, see
Art
363 ; follower of Hildebrand, 116 CosiMO, Piero di, 285 Creative and expressive impulses regulated by aesthetic
instinct, 177 Crivelli, 316 Cubic existence of work of art,
Groos's experiments on, and aesthetic emotions, 127 sensations

of,
Cornelius,
connected
with
aesthetic perception, 121
Bulk,
sensations
accomof,
;
163 psychological origin and aesthetic value of illusion of, 318
panying perception
264-s
INDEX
versus roof, diflferent effects in feelings, 194 Curtain tassel as doll, 337
369
Cupola
Empathy,
aesthetic {Msthetische Einfuhlung), checked in
Practical life, 337 ; dramatic uman versus dynamic, 255-
Dauriac, 13 De Bles' Madonna, 283 Dimension, first, more felt in art than in nature, 211 third, and locomotion, 181,
;
66
third, in art, 212 footnote third in painting, 213 Dimensional and other spatial linear perceptions, 158 ; perception and ocular sensa;
hypothesis explains deepseated effects of art, 34 inner mimicry, organic participation and dynamic, confused in Beauty and Ugliness, 78 aesthetic empathy limited
; ; ;
but central phenomenon in

localised sensations and, 334 modifications in theory since 1897, 153; its origin concerns general psychology, not aesthetics, 46; its alleged physiological concomitants, 71 purely mental facts prove it, 87-89 sense of gravity in ourselves transferred to work of art, 212 Titchener's invention of term, 20 ; its use to the race, 70 Wiirzburg experiments on, 148
art, 361
;
;
tions,
W. Conrad
on,
181,
footnote
Dimensions
208-1 5 ; in art, simultaneous realisatheir tion imposes confidence and serenity, 192 Direction and velocity, senses
of,
228
Divergence
process, 224
from
everyday
experience a part of artistic
DoMENico Veneziano, 268 DoRiA pictures. 317 Doric Column, Lipps on,
Enclosure
aesthetic,
of
276
attention, sense of, 193
19
Enjoying
different
from under-
and abacus, Lipps on, 49 Prof. Schmarsow on, 75 Doryphoros, 257 et seq. Dramatic and other nonaesthetic
standing, 247
Enjoyment, aesthetic, of one kind of work of art frequently

inhibits that of other kinds,
factors
in
aesthetic
248
pleasure, 140
"
Drums
Kiilpe's
Cymbals," and metaphor of, 143,
Equilibrium, human, 93 Evolutional importance

aesthetic instincts, 34
of
footnote
of Florence, 272 " Dynamic Unity of strenuousness," 282 Dynamical mechanical experi-
DuoMO
Expectancy, 291 Experiment of seeing chair, see Breathing, balance and

muscular adjustment Bulk, accompanying
sations, 163
;
see
sen-
ences
crystallised
into
law,
Lipps on, 61
antiques Ear and Jaw anatomically false, 222 Ego, metaphysical, to be excluded from aesthetics, 339
in
Experiments
mentioned in Beauty and Ugliness, by whom made, 97
Expressive power of form, 189 Expressiveness of good antiques mainly due to line, 223
EiNFiJHLUNG, etymology
see also
of,
46
Empathy, aesthetic Embrasures, part of pleasure in church and pictures, 319 Emotional tone, effect on
aesthetic response
Fechner, 359 Feeling of strain and impulse

projected
pression,
into
visual
imon,
Munsterberg
299
145
2A
; ; ;
370
INDEX
Gibbering
of antiques, on 301
;
FiLipPiNO, Uffizi Madonna, 291 Finding Likenesses, 306, 308,
badly
some days,
restored 300,
310
Flattening, subjective, of horizontals, 296 subjective, of

;
verticals into horizontals, 267 of verticals of verticals, 283 into horizontal planes, 327 Flesh, quality of painted, 270 quality of sculptured, 273 tangible quaUties, representation of, 267 Focusing of statues, 218 Forces, play of conflicting, expressed in Gothic lines,
; ; ;
Giorgione's small pictures in Ufi&zi, 269 Solomon, 297 Gladiator, Dying, 258 Glance of statues, 260, 276 Gothic architecture, excitement and sense of lucidity given by good French, 191, 195, 199201
quality in painting, ; 286, 287 sculpture, 201
;
Grasping and holding with the

attention, 130
202
Gravity, bulk and pressure in pictures, 269
Form,
difficulty of saying why we like or dislike, 270 geometrical forms experimented individual artistic, on, 359 perception, 160 form329 perception versus interpretation of subject, 249 formperceptions, bodily sensa; ; ; ; ;
Gravity
Griffin
in
statues,
pressure
downwards, 222
Grecian Urn,
Groos,
Keats's, 292 tripod, Capitoline
Museum, 300
Karl, 98, 154, 352; answers about inner mimicry and muscular sensations, 1 2 1 experiments on respiration
;
accompanying, 360 ; non-perception of form when expected to be ugly, 179 and subject, corresponds to seeing and recognising, 14tions
17
of,
and
subject, interaction
artistic pleasure,
and aesthetic emotions, 127 on inner mimicry, 23 his Innere Nachahmung, 63, 91-2 on ocular movement, theory compared with 1 34
;
; ; ;
298
Freedom and
Einfiihlung, 91-2 quoted on aesthetic superiority

;
Lipps's
Groos's theory, 6
of
motor individuals, 72
Fretting of surface, its effect on eye, 185 Frontality, footnote 210, Lowy's theory of sculptural,
252
;
Hamann, Richard,
Hanging
297
102 ; on the notion of movement, 84
of
Pictures,
293,
of
pre-Lysippian sta-
tues and Michelangelo's, 219, footnote Fusion, psychological, in aesthetic enjoyment, 270
Hanslick, 13 Height and narrowness

terior of church, 195
of in-
"
Hemmung,"
psychological,
Diary, evidence of inner mimicry, 105 ; notebook, introspective data obtained from, 241-2 Galton, 24, footnote Garment of Life, art as the,
294
ALLERY
checking or partial inhibition, 336 Hermes, Belvedere, 259 Hildebrand, Adolf, 10, 1 1, 363
;
and
of
on
Cornelius, real meaning problem of form, 81 frontaUty, 210 ; problem

;
of form, 116
picture,
Gasping emotion at
294
HippoLYTus, invocation Artemis in, 304
to
Gesture
(represented)
of
Homogeneousness
282
of
effect,
statues, 25s
INDEX
Honeysuckle pattern, 186 HoRTUs Inclusus, the work
of
371
KiNiESTHESiA, aesthetic, not conscious normally, 1 37
Humanly
;
art a, 347
Kinesthetic
(organic
and
Emotional
or
muscular) and
mimetic ac-
secondary aesthetic quality, character and asthetic 189 character, distinction between, 226 Hyperesthesia, day of, 322 Hypnos, head of, 223
Individuality, artistic, 359 Inner Mimicry, 253 et seq., developed by Schmar286 sow, 74 Innere Nachahmung tested on of Groos, 106
; ; ;
et seq. ; or images, Titchener on, 148 or organic sensations, 71. 337 ; sensations, Wiirzburg experiment on, 148 ; sensations, i.e. sensations from internal organs, 92 et seq.
companiment, 351
;
movement
Kinesthetic
ments, 122-6
;
Accompani-
Sodoma's St. Sebastian, 281 two kinds of, 139 Wiirzburg experiment on, 148
;
;
Nachahmung (Inner Mimicry), 23, 63-4 ; C. Anstruther-Thomson's adhesion Kiilpe and Stratton to, 1 54 on, 143, footnote Intense aesthetic emotion, a
Innere
;
possibility of objective verification of, 137 ; state of question, 134KiJLPE, 212, 354; on aesthetic factors, 143, footnote ; metaphor of " drums and cymbals," 143 ; physiological subconscious, 236, footnote; and pupils, vii
Landscape
Old Masters of correct to images when moving

about, 207
26, 27,
specimen of, 294 Interior of church, sensation due to, 190 Intimacy, sense of, given by easily grasped size, 193 Introspection, aesthetic, how originated, 242 facility of
;
Lange-J AMES hypothesis,

footnote,
142,
Laocoon, why supportable, no Lassitude, day of, and dreaminess, 323
theory accepted and defined, 157; theory applied, 173-6

353;
habitual, 32 5 158
how practised,
;
Legowski,
141, 360
Leisure, 293
L' Element Moteur, answers to Questionnaire on, 105 etseq.
Isolation, aesthetic, 86
direc;
tion and feelings of, 84, 85 of works of art, need of, 333
Leonardo, 307 Adoration and presumed Annunciation, 291

;
James, 26
Jar,
William, on LangeJames hypothesis, 26, footnote on senses of direction,

;
how perceived, and with what bodily accompaniment,

175
Joan of Naples, 318 " JUGEND Styl," art nouveau,

76
286 unfinished Adoration, possible Annunciation, 286 perpendiculars, treatment of 211 Lessing, no, 331 Liberation, aesthetic sense of, 272 Life, separation of our art from, 293
Lifelikeness in reality
liness,
live-
231
;
Kant's
Urtheilskraft,
an
imto
portant
aesthetics,
contribution
Lighting, 299, 307, 311, 322 effect of insufiicient, 289 Line as element of form, 329 as force. Van de Velde on, gesture, 217 75
;
372
Lines,
INDEX
of, see
;
movement ment OF Lines

330
Move351-
kinaesthetic
tentative or
352, 357
accompaniment, movements, 216

;
inartistic,
Lipps, Theodor, 22, 143,

;
criticism and 3. 354. 359 review of Beauty and Uglicritiness, 64, 184, footnote cism on application of Lange;
in musical perception and memory, 237 Mimicry, aesthetic, Innere
movements
Nachahmung, 90
et seq.
;
et
seq.,
iii
dramatic inner, con;
67 founder of a new aesthetic, RaumcBsthetik, 81 Ap45 pendix of quotations from, 35 Literary Interest, 304, 313
;
;
theory, his Betrachtung cBsthetische die Bildende Kunst,
James
Die
und
fined to inferior or ill-restored statues, 257 dTa.ma.tic, versus movement of lines, 164, foot-
and empathy, 335-6; when remembering statues,

note
;
256 Mimicry,
Inner,
;
see
Inner
Local Signs,
Localisation
30, 53
Sensation, individual differences in, 136 objective, Locomotion, diffrom ferentiated motorround dynamic images, of
Mimicry Miterleben, 23 K. Groos's new

Mono-Ideism,
344
asthetisches,
expression, 95 not artistic. 341,
Moods,
statues, by C. Ans'trutherThomson, denied by Vernon
Lee, 225
different, connected with dimensional perceptions, 209 Morell School, ii Morris and Ruskin on Art
LoGGiE of Raphael, 278 Lorenzo Monaco, large Florentine Madonna, 267
and
Utility, 32
Lo Spagna's Muses, 277 Lotto's movement of lines, 217

Lotze quoted,
mos, 47
17
;
Mikrokostheory
of
LowY,
Emanuel,
frontality, 219, 252
Mantegna,
Marcus Aurelius,
triptych, 297 statue
of,
277 Martini, Simone, 294, 307

difference beMasterpiece, tween it and merely good
picture, 231
(locomotion) repreversus movement of lines in Marcus Aurelius's horse, repetition of 277 ; represented, 286 of represented object versus movement of lines, 290, 295 Motor Adjustments, sense of. corresponds to pattern, 226attitudes, Titchener on 7 conflict of, ideas or 147 images, individuals, 142 Groos's alleged superiority
Motion
sented
of,
72
24, footnote, 99,
Motor Type,
135
Mediocrity and
detail,
realism, 329
Movement of
262
et
Melozzo da Forli, 315 Memory-Images explain optical
Memory-Revival
versus form, 266 of musical timbre, mistaken notion of its impossibility, 169
318
Michelangelo's Moses, 317 Microcosm against the MacroMimetic

cosm, 345 adjustment in perception would explain our and power of mimicry, 235
;
Lines, 216, 222, 282, 284, 295, versus anatomical reality of movement in looking at them, 197 are our movements in looking at them, or architectural con197 struction of pictures, 318 ; or architectural quality, 199 versus dramatic mimicry, 164; versus motion in real life, 295, in Gothic, 328 in 199 pictures, how followed, 217 j
seq.,
;
302, 312
INDEX
and
;
;
373
real
Sacred 232 inSistine Chapel ceiling, 279 swiftness and congruity of Leonardo's, 286 Movement, projection and object! vation of our unlocalised modes of, 84 sensations of, 90 sense of, 295 MiJNSTERBERG, 84 on aesthctic preference, 146 on dynamic
; ; ; ;
movement, 102 in and Profane Love,

;
Old Masters
reintegrated the perspective impression of moving through landscape, 183 Optical Illusions, 212, foot-
note
examples of so-called,
activialleged importance
326, 327
Organic and locomotor

ties, their
in aesthetic
resonances,
phenomena, 177; sensations, 1 40

;
ideas in aesthetic form -perception, 145 on projection of feeling of strain and impulse, quotation 145 from his Principles of Art Education, 144 MuSAGETES, Apollo, large, 262 smaller, 257
; ; ;
314
Pace, or Tempo, of movements

lines, 291 of pictures, in picture quicker than 312 that of moving persons, 295
; ;
of
adjustments. Empathy, whether explicable by sensation and bodily adjustment, 89 et seq. ; sensations, 1 39 so-called sensations and Empathy, 334 ; (socalled) accompanying the sight of motion, 24 strain, 106 Muse of Tragedy, 255 Music, formal and expressive interest in, 189
Muscular
Painters' Portraits, 310-n Palpitations, see Rhythmic Obsession, 281 Pattern, 185 in Florence Baptistery, its apparent movement, 319 Perception of form, theory of
;
bodily mechanism
of,
167
Pergolese's Exules, 278 Periods, artistic, their contradictory effect on one another,
281
Perpendicular
211
in
Old Masters,
Personal Preoccupation and

Naturalness,
feeling of, one of the differentia of aesthetic
aesthetic responsiveness, 312 ; cured by aesthetic influence,
phenomena, 186 sense of, produced by deviation from

;
313
reality,
223
of aesthetic
Negative working
instincts,
179
Perugino, 315 Picture, difference between looking at a picture and looking at reality through
NOVALIS, 46
Novelty,
effect of,
339
sensations, unlocalised
window pane, 207 Planes in pictures, 282 Play differentiated from

tic pleasure, 5
;
Objectivation
13S1
159;
of of
on,
artisinstinct, Groos Theory of Schiller
inner states, 238
Ocular
Ocular
Movements,
355
Groos on, 134

sensations and dimensional perception, W. Conrad on, 181, footnote Ogival arch popularly and correctly considered as differentiating Gothic, 198
and Spencer, 5 Pleasure, 267 Plenitude, aesthetic, 305 POHL, Dr., pupil of Kulpe, vii Poignancy of aesthetic phenomenon, its possible origin,
1
40-
Poise, 268
PoLLAiuoLO's embroideries, 328

Virtues, 288
374
Preference
aesthetic
;
INDEX
" Responsive " day, 316
for form, main for problem, 141 visual impressions got in walking, 180
Responsiveness
art
and
247
to work of to physical mental conditions, 217,
according
Preoccupation
tic response,
inhibits aestheof
308 Pressure in lower limbs statues, 222, footnote
Projection
frame, 284
of
figure
beyond
Mile. C's memorandum ; on, 250 stimulated by nonaesthetic interests, 274-5 ; its variations, 243 Dr. WaserKrebs's memorandum on, 245 Rhythm of lines, Berenson on,
; ;
Prud'hon effect, i.e. suddenness and reiterated gesture, 284,

291
114
Psychology, experimental, and

aesthetics, vii
Rhythmic auditive accompaniment of aesthetic states, 97 Rhythmic or Melodic Obsession, 41 et seq., 62 et seq., 246, 248, 278, 281 et seq., 304
et seq.
Purification by
note
art. 266, foot-
Pursuit and hurry, 179
Rhythmical
185
efiect of pattern,
Questionnaire sur l'6l^.ment MoTEUR, etc., 99 et seq. Questions on Inner Mimicry

put to Prof. Groos, answered by C. Anstruther-Thomson,
120
Rito6k, Emma von, and Wurzburg experiments, 148 RossELLi, Cosimo, 288
Round
arch versus pointed, 197

of Henry IV, of lines in, 282
;
Rubens, Battle
movement
frescoes,
Raphael's Stanze
zyj
transfiguration, 316 Raum^sthetik of Lipps,
81,
RusKiN, II drawings, 331 on positive nature of beauty and ugliness, 170 on no great work of art ever begun
; ;
"5
Real People compared with
statues, 301, 302 ; and their gesture, 315 Realism of antiques, 75 Reality, how the work of art differs from, 12
without ulterior object, 178
on
utility,
178
Sacred and Profane Love,

Titian, 232 Sta. Croce, Florence, 320 San Lorenzo, Florence, church and sacristy, 323 Sta. Maria Novella, Florence, fa9ade of, 187 St. Mark's, 305 St. Ouen, Rouen, 195 St. Peter in Vincoli, 316 Peter's, 314 size and St. impression compared to Florence Duomo, 564 Sta. Trinita, Florence, mass at,
;
Receptivity,
art,
aesthetic,
see
Responsiveness
243
to
work
of
Recognition of subject represented and perception of form, 265, 270 and visual
;
contemplation, 179
Regulative
and
imperative
function of aesthetic instinct as distinguished from creative or expressive, 177 Repainting, effect on expressiveness, 317 Repetition of action, 291
341
Santayana, George, on sexual

element in
aesthetics,
140
Sargent's drawings, 331
Respiration
attention, attention,
tion,
connected with 280 in visual

;
ScHMARSOw, Prof., development of inner mimicry, 74;

versus Lipps, 75
93
and
palpita-
294
Schopenhauer, 347
INDEX
Seeing
according to Beauty and Ugliness, 28 statues, unsophisticated manner of, 274 unlocalised activity of, 1 1 Segal, 242, footnote
; ;
375
of art, 344
;
and
recognising
Summation, 341 Synthetic process
Tactile imagination, 288 imagination and values, Berenson on, absence

of,
Semon's Mnemische Empfindungen, 236, 357 agreeableness of colour and tone as opposed to form satisfaction, 159 Serenity and confidence due to realisation of all three dimensions, 192 Sergi, Prof., on aesthetic pleasure being organic, 171, footnote ; upholder of LangeJames theory, 1 57 Showman, the work of art its own, 261 SisTiNE Chapel, natural way of seeing it, architectural quality of figures of frescoes,
112; 302
impression, impression
Sensory
and thermic, 309 Taine on antiques doing nothing

in particular,
no
Tangible
qualities, representa-
tion of flesh, 267
Tempo, musical, 286 Thomson, C. Anstruther-, her case compared with that
of Wiirzburg subject, 150;
experimental and Inner
Mimicry,
training,
54
on technical
Vernon
of,
163, footnote; and Lee, relative position
as authors of Beauty and
Ugliness, 351
279
Size of building, effect, 193
its
Three-Dimensional Form, differentia of accompanying senTie

sation, 187 in pictorial
emotional
composition,
Sodoma's
St. Sebastian,
290
SouRiAU, 18; on quasi-hypnotism of art, 331 Spatial enclosure, architecture as, 193
230 Time, being
Time necessary
in, in a picture, 229 for appreciation of picture, 282
Spencer, H., Play -theory, 5 Grant Allen and Guyau, 172 Spots rudiments and of forms, bodily accompaniments in looking at, 174 Stanze di Raffaello, 277 Statues, mimetic response to, people in love with, 2x8 266 Strain, sensation accompan5dng attention, Tit; ;
TiNTORET, 306 TiTCHENER, 357 on Conflict of motor attitudes, 147; on, kinaesthetic images, 148 on
;
;
sensations of strain, 168, footnote translated Einfuhlung as Empathy, 20, 46 Titian, Baptism, 313 Flora Duke and Duchess 289, 309 of Urbino, 308 Tracks of ocular perception in
;
;
chener on, 168 Stratton's experiments, 143 Stricker and Ballet, 24
Sacred and Profane Love, 232 Tradition in art represents

satisfaction
instinct, 32
of
aesthetic
;
Stumpf, 13 Subconscious mechanical experience, Lipps upon, 61 SuBiAco NioBiD, so-called, 254,
256, 301
Transient motion, 285

sing on, 331
Les-
Transmutation of useful objects and functions into

artistic ones, 177
Subject, deciphering the, 325
Triangle, 174
versus form, 249, 253, 255 Suggestion alters with progressive realism, 328
Values, tactile, and movement, Berenson on, 112
376 Van der

ture
of,
INDEX
Goes, restored pic283
H., on line as
Watts,
330
G.
Mrs.
F.
drawing
R.,
of,
Van de Velde,
force, 75
Watts,
in
teaches
221,
versus
system of muscular tension

attitude,
aesthetic,
Velasquez's Innocent X, 318 Venus, Capitoline, 258, 277 by Titian, 290 Veronese's Esther, 297, 307 ViSCHER, 46 Vitalising power of artistic form, Berenson on, 115 Vitality widened and height;
footreal-
note
Weight,
istic,
264
of,
Westminster Chapter House,

sculptures 201
Whole,
292
complex,
286
and
parts of picture,
how
related,
ened, 23s
Vocabulary,
richness and poverty of, with reference to recognition and aesthetic appreciation, 271 Vocal parts, sensations in, accompansdng memory, 238, footnote
WoLFFLiN, on Inner Mimicry,
"3
Word,
substituted
for
form
in our attention,
266
visual delu-
Wordsworth, on
sion, 102
Work
of Art,
a joint pro-
Walk, tempo of Waser-Krebs, memorandum
people's, 288
duction of holder, 274
artist
and
be-
Dr. Maria, her on variation in individual response to work of art, 244-7
Worringer, 362 WuNDT, on memory, 1 WiJRZBURG ExPERIMBNTS,

360, 363
148,
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
HORTUS VITAE
ESSAYS ON
Times. "There
THE GARDENING OF LIFE

Crown
%vo.
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flowers in
it
.
are
many charming
mind
the swift to
and
. . .
fro of her vivid,
capricious
carries the reader hither
and
in
thither at her will,
and she has such
wise, suggestive things to say.
this
Whenever and wherever she speaks of Italy, the sun shines garden of hers, the south wind stirs among the roses."
Westminster Gaxttte.
Hazlitt, just as those derive

. . .
family of Lamb, Hunt and from the Augustans, Addison and Steele. Vernon Lee possesses the best gifts of the essayists the engaging
" They are of the
turn, the graceful touch, the subtle allusiveness."
The Spectator. "The grace of diction that marks one who is at once a mondaine and a cosmopolitan, and a grace of thought that sometimes recalls Mrs. Meynell and sometimes R. L. Stevenson, and even here and there reminds one of Emerson. No book quite so good of its kind has lately been published."
. , .
THE ENCHANTED WOODS

AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE
GENIUS OF PLACE
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style
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:
book is one to be enjoyed for its sheer beauty of by those who have never visited the places described but those who have will enjoy the amazing aptness of epithet ... in her extraordinary sensitiveness to modes of time and place, Vernon Lee's attitude recalls that of Mr. Henry James."
;
Guardian.
"Vernon
'
Lee's peculiar gift
is
.
to be seen at
.
.
its
best in
her latest book,
The Enchanted Woods.'
feelings in broad, bright touches, at
She represents her once powerful and delicate."
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
THE
SPIRIT OF ROME LEAVES FROM A DIARY

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Lee is sure of a welcome from all readers who appreciate literary artistry. The author is well equipped for the difScult task which she has essayed that of representing the 'spirit' of the most fascinating of cities by means of the printed word she is gifted with the power of seeing the essential items in a scene."
.
'
HAUNTINGS
FANTASTIC TALES
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35 6</ net.
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.
romantic and delightful reading There is enough imagination in these short stories to furnish any number of present-day novels, and people with strong nerves who enjoy thrills can be unhesitatingly recommended to read the book."
.
.
"Most
Saturday Review. "Seldom have any stories of pure fantasy contained more genuine and excellent qualities tiian the four ghost stories of Vernon Lee passages of real beauty, sensitive and glowing descriptions of some Italian scene, breathing the very spirit and essence of what she describes."
.
.
.
THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER

NOTES ON PLACES
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artistic interest.
.
" Full of human as well as of
No
one
will question the
written many suggestive and charmingly convincing than the
Vernon Lee has originality and charm. . , delightful things ; but nothing, perhaps, more keenly
first
chapter of her
new book."
LONDON
JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
LIMBO AND OTHER ESSAYS

TO WHICH
3J
IS
ADDED "ARIADNE MANTUA"

Second Edition
IN
dd
net.
Maukick Baring in
in a brief space
in giving
the Morning Post. " It is impossible to give any idea of the richness and beauty of this drama, for
all
a mere skeleton of the plot
that
is
important
is
omitted
and power of the play depend entirely on subtle graduations of thought and feeling answering to and playing upon each other, built up note by note. Quotations from this play are like bars of music torn from a beautiful song, or squares of canvas cut out
since the beauty
from a noble picture. To touch this play is to mutilate it to it one must read it all, or better still, should some intelligent manager prove enterprising and give us the opportunity, see it acted
;
appreciate
on the
stage."
ALTHEA
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" There
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gift
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delightful."
Standard.
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.
'
'
written with brains
Ought to win wide audience among and the magic of style."
cultivated readers
Literary World.
"
It
goes without sajnng that
it is
both beautiful
and
wise."
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY
:
BOOKS BY VERNON LEE
VANITAS: POLITE STORIES

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'
Few writers can convey, as she does in Vanitas,' the sense of pathos and tragedy in the lives of outwardly comfortable people. Probably there is not in English a better synopsis of that strange philosophy of life than Vernon Lee gives us."
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Vernon Lee-Beauty and Ugliness

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& Humanities Library

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Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

AND OTHER STUDIES

LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXII

THE BALLANTYNE PRESS TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN LONDON

HIS WORKS TO HIS KINDNESS

Lody^ we receive but what we ^ve,

alone does "Nature live ;

her wedding-garment, ours her shroud !

accordingly conjecture that the ersthetic feeling

the perceived impression to

the reproduction which it excites."

KtrLPE, " Outlines of Psychology/'

Titchencr's translation, p. 252

venture to think, not only

Quotations from Lipps

The Central Problem

The Wurzburg Experiments

Beauty and Ugliness

V. Esthetic Responsiveness, its Variations AND Accompaniments

Mosaic Floor Pattern

Baptistery Drawn by C. Amtruther-Thomson

Doric Column from Parthenon

Honeysuckle Pattern from Greek Vases

Facade of Santa Maria Novella

Gothic Arches at Venice

Catena's St. Jerome

Diagram of Titian's " Sacred AND Profane Love "

Debased Garden Houseleek

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

between art and

and indicate a different from

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

who are often existence and, oftener

ignorant of each other's ignorant of the very

materials for an eventual science of aesthetics have

past exist as fragmentary facts, and lopsided hypotheses, scat-

its boundaries and its tracks, and thorough systematic cultivation.

The first problem

of aesthetics involves a definition

any more than with the adventures of the word

need not with other

" means " that which has to do with art,"

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

for self-expression, for construction,

for skilful handicraft.

All these demands, involved of art, are of course demands for

beautiful " to whatever peculi-

BEAUTY AND UGLINESS

not a specific activity, but merely one of

the modes in which

or most human activities Professor Groos has there-

characteristic of all other kinds of

play, namely, the sense of