Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/627

611 record of the most vivid and yet refined aesthetic feeling, in which no student of æsthetics will fail to find suggestion and instruction.

This volume consists of two separate studies on the emotion of the beautiful and the poetic emotion, as they are produced primarily by poetry. The separation of the two studies turns out, indeed, to be the main point of the book, through the distinction which is thus made between elements of the æsthetic experience not usually so dealt with. The basis of this is found in the Preface, which makes a general classification of æsthetic feelings into three groups: first, the sensations from the sensible elements of a work of art; secondly, the representations of objects; thirdly, the suggestions evoked by both sense-elements and represented objects. The first group gives rise to the emotion of the beautiful; the second, to those of the comic, tragic, sublime, etc.; the third, to the poetic emotion. "Evidently, then, the emotions of the beautiful, the pretty ... attach to the form of works of art; those of the comic, tragic ... are bound up with their content; as for the poetic emotion, it resides, properly speaking, neither in the form nor in the content of works of art, but in that which their form and their content let us perceive beyond them." The method proposed is, first, to analyze the different elements of each of these emotions in turn; and, secondly, to explain the pleasure which is involved in them. The material taken for study is exclusively French poetry, as the only valid introspection of poetic effects is that applied to one's own language. "How can we know what, in the poetry of Heine or Shelley, for instance, appears beautiful or poetic to Germans or English?"

The first book, on the emotion of the beautiful, is introduced by the distinction between the emotion of the beautiful in the widest sense, covering the whole field of aesthetic experience, and that feeling which attaches to the form of works of art,—for poetry, the feeling which is bound up with the form of verse taken independently of its meaning. This form consists in rhythm and harmony, or the numerical division and arrangement of syllables, and the quality of sounds. It may be said at once that the chapter on rhythm, for an essay which purports to be based on psychological analysis, glides