Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/533

 SUGGESTIONS ON ESTHETIC. 517 it is the more easily submitted to. Perhaps also he is led to do violence to conventional symmetry just in so far as he has a natural veneration for the power to make the in- sufficient suffice in other departments of life ; or according to his natural love of freedom and revolt. Let us see what evidence can be had elsewhere. It is strange to find the same analysis applying again in other very different regions of aesthetic. Take the beauty of the human face. There is a beauty of a faultlessly sym- metrical kind ; there is also a beauty which we describe as depending on individuality and expressiveness. What is this expressiveness? If you could define what it expresses it would not be there ; it depends on the hiddenness of its own meaning ; if you could fully sum it up by saying that it expressed gentleness, or endurance, or trust, or any other quality, you would not feel in it the aesthetic charm you do feel. What is the clue ? I would suggest that this case is like that of the artist doing violence to strict symmetry in some distinct specific manner and thereby gaining an easy acceptance. When in a composition, or in a face, there is what may be called a perverse insistence on some one subtle defiance of symmetry, or a unity and singleness in the character of the contradic- tions ; then, as when among the vague outlines of a stone you see lines that show insistence, uniformity, and say that some primitive human bein^ was once at work on that stone with a purpose or meaning ; so we feel that the face must have a meaning, and mean a character ; one character ; it is too perversely thus, not to have a reason behind its perversity. This account is in reality coincident with that given above of the beauty of a statue, though different phrases have been employed. I said of the statue : " We welcome the subtle human quality when it persists on- wards into the contradictory medium of stone". Here I have two items : (1) human quality known in man ; (2) human quality seen in stone ; they are the same in spite of difference, and aesthetic quality, that is, beauty, is yielded. The same formulas may be applied even to the expressive face. In the face we have a contradictory variety of factors ; the features are irregular and unsymmetrical. Yet these unsymmetrical factors are accepted as expressive, relevant, symmetrical with an unseen symmetry. Thus there is a sameness in spite of contradiction, for one quality (the hidden meaning or symmetry) persists onwards from one factor to another, and thus aesthetic quality, or beauty, is yielded.