Ethel Puffer Howes

“ Even to the minor elements of style, the tone-coloring, the rhythm, the melody,—the essence of beauty, that is, of the perfect moment, is given by the perfecting of the experience. The beauty of liquids is their ease and happiness of utterance. The beauty of rhythm is its aiding and compelling power, on utterance and thought. There is a sensuous pleasure in a great style; we love to mouth it, for it is made to mouth. As Flaubert says somewhat brutally, "Je ne said qu'une phrase est bonne qu'apres l'avoir fait passer par mon gueuloir." ”

“ It may be that personality is a hindrance and a barrier, and that we are only truly in harmony with the secret of our own existence when we cease to set ourselves over against the world. Nevertheless, the sense of individuality is a possession for which the most of mankind would pay the price, if it must be paid, even of eternal suffering. The delicious hour of fusion with the universe is precious, so it seems to us now, just because we can return from it to our own nest, and, close and warm there, count up our happiness. ”

“ How greatly to be desired we realize in divining that the present dearth of constructive and destructive criticism, of all, indeed, except interpretations and reports, is responsible for the modern mountains of machine-made literature. Will not the aesthetic critic be for us a new Hercules, to clear away the ever growing heap of formless things in book covers? If he will teach us only what great art means in literature; if he will give us never so little discussion of the first principles of beauty, and point the moral with some "selling books," he will at least have turned the flood. ”

“ I am the rhythm because I imitate it in myself. I march to noble music in all my veins, even though I may be sitting decorously by my own hearthstone; and when I sweep with my eyes the outlines of a great picture, the curve of a Greek vase, the arches of a cathedral, every line is lived over again in my own frame. And when rhythm and melody and forms and colors give me pleasure, it is because the imitating impulses and movements that have arisen in me are such as suit, help, heighten my physical organization in general and in particular. ”

“ It is an experience that we seek, multiplied, perfected, expanded—the life moment of a man greater than we. This, too, is the ultimate meaning of the demands of style. Lucidity, indeed, there must be,— identity with the thought; but besides the value of the thought in its approximation to the conditions of our being, we seek the vividness of that thought,—the perfect moment of apprehension, as well as of experience. It is the beauty of style to be lucid; but the beauty of lucidity is to reinforce the springs of thought. ”

“ VII But we ought to note a borderland in which the concern is professedly not with beauty, but with ideas of life. Aristotle's lover of knowledge, who rejoiced to say of a picture "This is that man," is the inspirer of drawing as opposed to the art of visual form.
It is not beauty we seek from the Rembrandt and Durer of the etchings and woodcuts, from Hogarth, Goya, Klinger, down to Leech and Keene and Du Maurier; it is not beauty, but ideas,— information, irony, satire, life-philosophy. Where there is a conflict, beauty, as we have defined it, goes to the wall. ”

“ Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; to-day we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; and that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation. ”

“ It is as truly a unity as if it were static. We may say that the beauty of a picture is only entered into when the eye has roved over the whole canvas, and holds all the elements indirectly while it is fixated upon one point. In exactly the same way music is not beauty unless it is ALL there; at every point a fusion of the heard tone with the once heard tones in the order of their hearing. The melody, as a set of implications, is as ESSENTIALLY timeless as the picture. By melody too, then, is given the perfect moment, the moment of unity and completeness, of stimulation and repose. ”

“ All is God, and the soul perceives only God. It has to strive no more for perfection, for growth, for approach to Him, for union. All is consummated in the unity, but in a manner so free, so natural, so easy, that the soul lives from the air which it breathes....The spirit is empty, no more traversed by thoughts; nothing fills the void, which is no longer painful, and the soul finds in itself an immense capacity that nothing can either limit or destroy. ”

“ In short, literature is the dialect of life—as Stevenson said; it is by literature that the business of life is carried on. Some one, however, may here demur: visual signs, too, are the dialect of life. We understand by what we see, and we live by what we understand. The curve of a line, the crescendo of a note, serve also for wordless messages. Why are not, then, painting and music the vehicles of experience, and to be judged first as evocation of life, and only afterward as sight and hearing? ”

“ The ideal musical consciousness would have an ideally great range; it would not only realize the concatenation, but it would take it in as one takes in a single phrase, a simple tune, retaining it from first not to last. The ordinary musical consciousness has merely a much shorter breath. It can "feel" an air, a movement; it cannot "feel" a symphony, it can only perceive the relation of keys and harmonies therein. With repeated hearing, study, experience, this span of beauty may be indefinitely extended—in the individual, as in the race. ”

“ If a piece of art can take us with its own beauty, there is no point in superimposing upon it shades of sentiment; if it cannot so charm, all the rose-colored lights of this kind of appreciative criticism are unavailing.
The "literary" treatment of art, as the "emotional" treatment of literature,—for that is what "appreciation" and "interpretation" really are,—can completely justify itself only as the crowning touch of a detailed aesthetic analysis of those "order of impression distinct in kind" which are the primary elements in our pleasure in the beautiful. ”

“ We can hardly even speak of the meaning of a word, but rather of what it is, directly, in the mental state that is called up by it. Every definition of a word is but a feeble and distant approximation of the unique flash of experience belonging to that word. It is not the sound sensation nor the visual image evoked by the word which counts, but the whole of the mental experience, to which the word is but an occasion and a cue. Therefore, since literature is the art of words, it is the stream of thought itself that we must consider as the material of literature. ”

“ Under just the conditions of the religious trance, the element of reverence, of joyous sentiment, is able suddenly to take on a more vivid aspect. It may not be that the emotion itself is greater, but it now holds the field. It may not be that it is more intense, but the intensity of concentration which takes on its color makes it seem so. The "rapture" is just the sense of being caught up into union with the highest; the joy of the rapture is the joy of every thought of God, here left free to brighten into ecstasy ”

“ It has sometimes been made a reproach to critics—more often, I fear, by those who hold, like myself, that beauty and excellence in art are identical—that they discourse too little of form in literature, and too much of content. But all our taking thought will have been vain, if it is not now patent that the first beauty of literature is, and must be, its identity with the central flame of life,—the primal conditions of our being. ”

“ They are changeless, just as the "eternal man" is changeless; and as the basis of aesthetic feeling they can be gathered into a system of laws which shall be subject to no essential metamorphosis. So long as we laugh when we are joyful, and weep when we are sick and sorry; so long as we flush with anger, or grow pale with fear, so long shall we thrill to a golden sunset, the cadence of an air, or the gloomy spaces of a cathedral. ”

“ But the sensuous beauty of art does not exhaust the aesthetic experience. What of the special emotions—the gayety or triumph, the sadness or peace or agitation—that hang about the work of art, and make, for many, the greater part of their delight in it? Those among these special emotions which belong to the subject-matter of a work—like our horror at the picture of an execution—need not here be discussed. To understand the rest we may venture for a moment into the realm of pure psychology. We are told by psychology that emotion is dependent on the organic excitations of any given idea. ”