Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/88

84 esthetic. Now it must be added that this conveyance of a mood is just the function of the artistic imagination, as can be illustrated by an investigation of a poetic treatment of historical material. All additions, all subtractions, character-groupings, emphasis, subordination, retardation and precipitation of the events of the plot, local color and diction—everything that makes the finished product a work of the imagination—is brought about through the selective power of the mood to be conveyed. Painting would furnish similar examples of the working of the imagination. The feeling of exuberant exultation interprets for me Böcklin's "Im Spiele der Wellen"—the grotesque forms, the color scheme, every tint and shade, the atmosphere, every detail. Again, the feeling of dauntless resolution is the key to Dürer's "Ritter, Tod und Teufel." From the point of view of the mood to be conveyed nothing in the picture seems superfluous or irrelevant. The feeling guides the imagination of artist and connoisseur.

The view here maintained of the interdependence of the artistic imagination, the feelings and the kinesthetic elements of consciousness finds further confirmation when we consider esthetic appreciation as accompanied by a sympathetic imputation of our states of consciousness to the object contemplated, whether this be a part of nature or a work of art. This ascription of our motor states lies at the basis of personification and dictates the terms of imaginative description. Columns and spires and mountains are felt to rise majestically, or the headland frowns with beetling brows, the landscape or the sea smiles, and the sun laughs a pitiless laugh. It is a commonplace of psychology that the imaginative use of terms like sweet, bitter and sour is explained by the similarity of the physiological concomitants of certain affective states and of certain gustatory sensations. Of these similar concomitants the kinesthetic element constitutes the important feature. A sudden grief that we would regret and cast from us is bitter, months of deferred hope and suspended activity the poet describes as sour. That this sympathetic imputation of our own states of consciousness to the object contemplated involves, not merely imaginative and kinesthetic elements, but also an emotional element, is best indicated perhaps by the German word Einfühlung. This term expresses far better than imputation, or inner imitation, or illusion, or conscious self-deception, the attitude of the mind at the moment of esthetic appreciation. I ascribe its superiority to its recognition of the feelings as the basis of artistic satisfaction.

The close relation between the poetic imagination and the feelings is also seen when we consider that conditions that reduce to a minimum the perceptions, and the activities of the critical understanding, arouse both the feelings and the imagination. In dreams, in reveries, in visions of the night, at twilight, upon vague, obscure, ambiguous,