Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/241

Rh AESTHETICS 223 or magnitude, which draws our attention, and produces admiration arid awe. The beauty of proportion he very acutely resolves into the needs of fitness. Hogarth applies these principles to the determination of degrees of beauty in lines, and figures, and compositions of forms. Among lines he singles out for special honour the serpentine (formed by drawing a line once round from the base to the apex of a long slender cone) as the line of grace or beauty par excellence. Its superiority he places in its many varieties of direction or curvature, though he adds that more suddenly curving lines displease by their grossness, while straighter lines appear lean and poor. In this last remark Hogarth tacitly allows another principle in graceful line, namely, gentleness, as opposed to suddenness, of change in direction, though he does not give it distinct recognition in his theory, as Burke did. Hogarth s opinions are of great value as a set off against the extreme views of Alison and the association school, since he distinctly attri butes a great part of the effects of beauty in form, as in colour, to the satisfaction of primitive susceptibilities of the mind, though he had not the requisite psychological knowledge to reduce them to their simplest expression. In his remarks on intricacy he shows clearly enough that he understood the pleasures of movement to be involved in all visual perception of form. Burke s speculations on the Beautiful, in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, are curious as introducing physiological con siderations into the explanation of the feelings of beauty. They illustrate, moreover, the tendency of English writers to treat the problem as a psychological one. He finds the elements of beauty to be (1.) Smallness of size; (2.) Smoothness of surface; (3.) Gradual variation of direction of outline, by which he means gentle curves; (4.) Delicacy, or the appearance of fragility; (5.) Brightness, purity, and softness of colour. The Sublime he resolves, not very carefully, into astonishment, which he thinks always con tains an element of terror. Thus &quot; infinity has a ten dency to fill the mind with a delightful horror.&quot; Burke seeks what he calls &quot; efficient causes &quot; for these phenomena in certain affections of the nerves of sight, which he com pares with the operations of taste, smell, and touch. Terror produces &quot; an unnatural tension and certain violent emotions of the nerves,&quot; hence any objects of sight which pro duce this tension awaken the feeling of the Sublime, which is a kind of terror. Beautiful objects affect the nerves of sight just as smooth surfaces the nerves of touch, sweet tastes and odours the corresponding nerve fibres, namely, by relaxing them, and so producing a soothing effect on the mind. The arbitrariness and narrowness of this theory, looked at as a complete explanation of beauty, cannot well escape the reader s attention. Alison, in his well-known Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, proceeds on an exactly opposite method to that of Hogarth and Burke. He considers and seeks to analyse the mental process which goes on when we experience the emotion of beauty or sublimity. He finds that this consists in a peculiar operation of the imagination, namely, the flow of a train of ideas through the mind, which ideas are not arbitrarily determined, but always correspond to some simple affection or emotion (as cheerfulness, sadness, awe), awakened by the object. He thus makes association the sole source of the Beautiful, and denies any such attribute to the simple impressions of the senses. His exposition, which is very extensive, contains many ingenious and valuable contributions to the ideal or association side of aesthetic effects, both of nature and of art; but his total exclusion of delight (by which name he dis tinguishes aesthetic pleasure) from the immediate effects of colour, visible form, and tone, makes his theory appear very incomplete. This is especially applicable to music, where the delight of mere sensation is perhaps most conspicuous. He fails, too, to see that in the emotional harmony of the ideas, which, according to his view, make up an impression of beauty, there is a distinct source of pleasure over and above that supplied by the simple feeling and by the ideas themselves. Jeffrey s Essay on Beauty is little more than a modifica- Jeffrey. tion of Alison s views. He defines the sense of beauty as consisting in the suggestion of agreeable and interesting sensations previously experienced by means of our various pleasurable sensibilities. He thus retains the necessity of ideal suggestion, but at the same time discards the sup posed requirement of a train of ideas. Jeffrey distinctly saw that this theory excludes the hypothesis of an inde pendent beauty inherent in objects. He fails as completely as Alison to disprove the existence of a sensuous or organic beautiful, and, like him, is avowedly concerned to show the presence of some one, and only one, determining prin ciple in all forms of the Beautiful. D. Stewart s chief merit in the aesthetic discussions, con- DugaKl tained in his Philosophical Essays, consists in pointing out Stewart, this unwarranted assumption of some single quality (other than that of producing a certain refined pleasure) running through all beautiful objects, and constituting the essence of beauty. He shows very ingeniously how the successive transitions and generalisations in the meaning of the term beauty may have arisen. He thinks it must originally have connoted the pleasure of colour, which he recognises as primitive. His criticisms on the one-sided schemes of other writers, as Burke and Alison, are very able, though he himself hardly attempts any complete theory of beauty. His conception of the Sublime, suggested by the etymology of the word, renders prominent the element of height in objects, which he conceives as an upward direction of motion, and which operates on the mind as an exhibition of power, namely, triumph over gravity. Of the association psychologists James Mill did little Professor more towards the analysis of the sentiments of beauty than Bain, re-state Alison s doctrine. On the other hand, Professor Bain, in his treatise The Emotions and the Will, carried this examination considerably further. He asserts with Stewart that no one generalisation will comprehend all varieties of beautiful objects. He thinks, however, that the aesthetic emotions, those involved in the fine arts, may be roughly circumscribed and marked off from other modes of enjoyment by means of three characteristics (1.) Their not serving to keep up existence, but being gratifications sought for themselves only; (2.) Their purity from all repulsive ingredients; (3.) Their eminently sympathetic or sharable nature in contrast to the exclusive pleasures of the individual in eating, &c. The pleasures of art are divided, according to Mr Bain s general plan of the mind, into (1.) The elements of sensation sights and sounds ; (2.) The extension of these by intellectual revival ideal sug gestions of muscular impression, touch, odour, and other pleasurable sensations; (3.) The revival, in ideal form also, of pleasurable emotions, as tenderness and power, and in a softened measure of emotions painful in reality, as fear; (4.) The immediate gratification, that is in actual form, of certain wide emotional susceptibilities reaching beyond art, namely, the elating effect of all change of impression under the forms of artistic contrast and variety; and, secondly, the peculiar delight springing from harmony among im pressions and feelings, under its several {esthetic aspects, musical harmony and melody, proportion, &c. The details in Mr Bain s exposition are rich and varied in relation to the psychology of the subject. He finds the effect of sublimity in the manifestation of superior power in its highest degrees, which manifestation excites a sympathetic