Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/278

 264 NEW BOOKS. by its own direct simple stimulation a moment of unity and self-com- pleteness ". It remains for the author to endeavour to translate unity and self-completeness into psychological terms. The basis of any aesthetic experience, she says, is beautiful through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of the suggestions and impulses it arouses within the whole organism. This is the whole essence of Beauty the possession of a quality which excites the human organism to a functioning harmonious with its own nature. The means of Beauty are the possibilities of stimu- lation in the motor, visual, auditory and purely ideal fields ; its end a moment of perfection, of self-complete unity of experience, of favourable stimulation with repose. A beautiful object possesses the permanent possibility of creating this perfect moment which yields the unique aesthetic emotion. The aesthetic repose is characterised by that loss of the feeling of self which is associated with certain other important ex- periences as religious and scientific absorption. It is, as I should prefer to say, simply a case of the most completely implicit attention. Transi- tion, says the author, between the background and the foreground of attention is no longer possible ; the self forms one with the object in the foreground, itself an indissoluble unity. There remains the troubled question of the relation of meaning to Beauty. It is not, the author holds, an integral and essential part : The Idea is subordinate a bye- product unless it can enter into, melt into the form. Visual beauty is first beauty to the eye and to the frame, and the mind cherishes and enriches this beauty with all its own stored treasures. The author's main position is developed in essays on "Criticism and ./Esthetics," "The Nature of Beauty" and "The Esthetic Repose," and is followed out in detail in other essays dealing with Visual Form, Space Composition, Music, Literature, Drama and Ideas. In dealing with the problem of the presence of Ideas in the work of art, the author denies to Music and Architecture any meaning that is not extraneous. Painting and Sculpture show the first traces of a content, while of Literature ideas are the very material, so that when we speak of the beauty of ideas in Literature we are attempting an artificial sundering of elements that are properly in fusion. As I understand the writer, the Idea can only be integral to the aesthetic effect if we implicitly affirm or accept it, if it in no way disturbs our aesthetic repose. Art that presents a moral ideal against which we rebel is ipso faeto bad art. Thus literature like that of Thomas Hardy which ignores the freedom of the will fails of beauty. Against such a crude employment of the judgment of value in aesthetics as this I must protest. Who is to judge in such cases ? Many highly endowed natures would find perfect harmony and repose in the con- templation of such an idea as determinism. The chapter on Music is very interesting. Rhythm is defined as expectation based on the natural functioning of the attention-period, and as such capable of being brought under the full aesthetic formula of favourable stimulation with repose. It is a good deal harder to follow the author in her effort to bring the Drama under this rubric. The peculiar aesthetic experience connected with the Drama is said to arise out of the tension or balance of emotion in the confrontation of opposing forces. Only in the simultaneous realisation of two opposing forces is the full mutual checking of emo- tional impulses possible, and the dramatic form gives repose through equilibrium of impulses. Altogether I am left with the feeling that our author's theory works fairly well up to a certain point, and continues to be illuminating throughout on the formal side, but that it begins to prove unsatisfying as form becomes infused with content. The peycho- ogical foundation of the work, resting on the extremely doubtful theory