Bernard Bosanquet

“ So that really, in the naïve praise of successful imitation, we have, if we read it rightly, the germ of the fundamental doctrine of aesthetic semblance. That is to say, what matters is not the thing, but the appearance which you can carry off, and deal with apart from it, and recreate. And the real sting of even the crudest glorification of copying is this wonder that you can carry off with you a thing’s soul, and leave its body behind. ”

“ This is a new factor, and it introduces not only quite a different motive in art, but the entire problem of what passes as the beauty of nature. Because obviously a drawing of a bull hunt recalls to us things rather than patterns. For a pattern, as a rule, you want the help of a draughtsman; but for things you can see all round you every day, you seem to want no help at all. Only they do not prima facie show you simple abstract patterns; and so, how do you bring them to act as an aesthetic embodiment of feeling? ”

“ Man is not civilised, aesthetically, till he has learned to value the semblance above the reality. It is indeed, as we shall see, in one sense the higher reality — the soul and life of things, what they are in themselves.
So far the aesthetic attitude seems to be something like this: preoccupation with a pleasant feeling, embodied in an object which can be contemplated, and so obedient to the laws of an object; and by an object is meant an appearance presented to us through perception or imagination. Nothing which does not appear can count for the aesthetic attitude. ”

“ Every work of art and every thing of beauty presents such a pattern, so to speak, on its surface. But we must contrive to understand how the same principle can extend into the sphere of the representation of things; of which things, prima facie, we know only what we have learned from experience, and can say, it would seem, little that is necessary or inevitable as to the connection of appearances with any character or quality which could help to embody feeling. For instance, a man’s laughing might be the expression of pain or anger, if we had not learned by experience that it is otherwise. ”

“ If our view of the distinction and connection of the arts is right, and it is simply a question of the medium adopted by each, and the capacities of that medium as proved by experience, what is to be said of the distinctive character of poetry? It seems in a sense to have almost no material element, to work directly with significant ideas in which the objects of the imagination are conveyed. Language is so transparent, that it disappears, so to speak, into its own meaning, and we are left with no characteristic medium at all. ”

“ I think we shall be on the right lines if we demand in principle that the substratum of the critical attitude shall be the full imaginative experience, certainly of the spectator who enjoys, and as far as possible of the artist who creates. The true critic, indeed, is he, and he only, who can teach us rightly to enjoy. And we must bear in mind that the imagination itself is necessarily very sensitive to checks and failures in its efforts after satisfactory form — and this genuine sensitiveness, I should suppose, must be the basis of the true critical estimate. ”

“ The only thing that need be added is that by nature we mean, for aesthetic purposes, the fulness of the soul or semblance of external things, that which imaginative perception freely apprehends, and remodels in the interest of feeling. There is no reason to cut down our meaning to the attenuated constructions of physical science. They are not nature as it appears, and nature as it appears is what we love and admire. It is the living external world, as we relive it in our fullest imaginative experience. ”

“ And so, when we said that you can carry away the soul of a thing and leave its body behind, we always added that you must in doing so confer its soul upon a new and spiritualised body. Your imagination must be an imagination of something, and if you refuse to give that something a definite structure, you pass from the aesthetic semblance to the region of abstract thought. ”

“ We seem forced in some way and degree to admit knowledge and fact as instruments of expression; to use our experience of the character and qualities which things have really and in actuality, to help our imagination in its exploration of the forms which respond satisfactorily to feeling.
It is plain that we are not to lose hold of what we have got; the simple pattern or rhythm which we ventured to call expressive a priori. ”

“ We have spoken constantly of the fusion of feeling with the object or semblance, and more especially with its form, or connecting and pervading correlations — what we have briefly summarised as its life or soul. The root of this possibility we mentioned at the beginning; it is that every feeling is a feeling of something. It is the sense of the special difference made in the vitality of our body-and-mind by living in a certain experience. ”

“ All the material and the physical process which the artist uses — take our English language as used in poetry for an example — has been elaborated and re fined, and, so to speak, consecrated by ages of adaptation and application in which it has been fused and blended with feeling — and it carries the life-blood of all this endeavour in its veins; and that is how, as we have said over and over again, feelings get their embodiment, and embodiments get their feeling. ”

“ And so, for example, representation of nature and imitation and idealisation are very different things according as we hold that nature has in it a life and divinity which it is attempting to reveal, — so that idealisation is the positive effort to bring to apprehension the deeper beauty we feel to be there, — or as we hold that nature is at bottom a dead mechanical system, and idealisation therefore lies in some way of treating it which weakens or generalises its effect and makes it less and not more of what its fullest character would be. ”

“ But it does not seem to me to fit, prima facie, the attitude of the person who is surely most to be considered in aesthetic, that is, the artist. And I should not be easily persuaded that an attitude in the spectator and the nature-lover, which is wholly alien to that of the creative artist, can be the true aesthetic attitude. The arts which appeal to the eye exercise too much glamour over us. Think of singing, acting, dancing; the feeling of following music or reading poetry with true poetic appreciation. ”

“ Beauty, we have seen, is an ambiguous term. If it means some given ideal which lays restrictions beforehand upon individual expressiveness, something of the nature of the easy beauty, which rules out what is beyond our capacity to grasp at a given moment, then it is very dangerous to say that beauty is the aim of art. It is dangerous, that is, if it means to us that we know beforehand what sort or type of thing our beauty is to be. For beauty is above all a creation, a new individual expression in which a new feeling comes to exist. ”

“ It lies here; that without the heavy matter and whole natural process of the reality, man’s mind possesses a magic by which it can extract the soul of the actual thing or event, and confer it on any medium which is convenient to him, the wall of a cave, or a plate of gold, or a scrap of paper. And when these great poets insist on the likeness of the imitation, I take it that the real underlying interest is in the conquest of the difference of the medium. ”

“ This is the central problem of the aesthetic attitude; and, as we have seen, the best material for solving it for us who are not great artists comes from any minor experience we may have at command in which we have been aware of the outgoing of feeling into expression. We must think not merely of the picture in the gallery or the statue in the museum, but of the song and the dance, the dramatic reading, the entering into music, or the feel of the material in the minor arts, or simply, of the creative discovery of the right word. ”

“ It is a stable feeling — our pleasure in the something pleasant does not of itself pass into satiety, like the pleasures of eating and drinking. We get tired, e.g. at a concert, but that is not that we have had too much of the music; it is that our body and mind strike work. The aesthetic want is not a perishable want, which ceases in proportion as it is gratified. ”

“ It is a curious question how far a great work of imagination might conceivably be more consistent and more solid than what we call real reality. The objection of principle would be, that, just because imagination and reality only differ in degree, any such solid and consistent . imagination would of itself pass over to the enemy and fortify and enlarge the world of real facts, just as Shakespeare’s imagination reinforces our knowledge of real human nature. ”

“ It has been thought that you must come to higher aesthetic quality as you go up the scale of creation, because in that way you come to higher structures. But the fact is, that in a sense these higher structures, e.g. of animals, limit your imagination. They do not merge in a new context so readily as do the sea or the clouds, which can take on innumerable variations of appearance. And it is the task of aesthetic perception — perception when it passes into imagination — to choose or create the object, the appearance, whose form or soul or life will satisfy feeling. ”

“ Therefore there can be no classification of the arts, and no fruitful discussion of what can better be done by one art than by another. And aesthetic — the philosophy of expression — is set down as all one with linguistic — the philosophy of speech. For there is no meaning in distinguishing between language in the sense of speech, and other modes of expression. Of course, if he had said that speech is not the only form of language, but that every art speaks to us in a language of its own, that would have had much to be said for it. ”

“ The imagination is precisely the mind at work, pursuing and exploring the possibilities suggested by the connection of its experience. It may operate, of course, in the service of logical enquiry, and of exact science itself — the scientific use of the imagination is a well-known topic. The only difference is that when imagination is free, when the mind is operating, for instance, not in the service of theoretical truth, but in that of aesthetic feeling, .then it altogether ceases to be bound by agreement with what we call reality as a whole. ”

“ Green trees might be the withering ones, and brown trees the flourishing ones; without special experience of human bodies you could not know how or when their appearance indicates vitality or character; without experience of animals you could not know that the drawing of the bull hunt indicates activity, courage, ferocity. You cannot read these things off from the patterns or the colour-combinations; you have ultimately to arrive at them from the knowledge of facts. ”

“ But we have now seen that the pleasant feeling which is one with the appreciation of beauty is not a previous condition of beauty. It is not on some other ground a pleasure, and then by being expressed becomes beautiful. It is a pleasantness not antecedent to the appreciation of beauty, but arising in and because of it, in the freedom or expansion which the mind enjoys in and through the act which gives or finds adequate embodiment for its feeling, and so makes the feeling what it is. Therefore, you must not say pleasantness is a condition precedent of beauty ”

“ This gives us the clue to a reasonable estimate of the current idea that ugliness is all of man’s making and not of nature’s. It seems in principle to rest upon the fact we have noted, that man alone has in him the capacity for the attempt to achieve pure expression for its own sake, in other words, beauty, and therefore he is much more likely to produce the appearance of the combined attempt and failure which we have seen to be the essence of the ugly.
One further ambiguity in a common phrase seems worth clearing up. Is beauty the aim of art? ”

“ In common life your sorrow is a more or less dull pain, and its object—what it is about—remains a thought associated with it. There is too apt to be no gain, no advance, no new depth of experience promoted by the connection. But if you have the power to draw out or give imaginative shape to the object and material of your sorrowful experience, then it must undergo a transformation. The feeling is submitted to the laws of an object. ”

“ The festal or social view of art will help us here. Suppose a tribe or a nation has won a great victory; “they are feeling big, and they want to make something big,” as I have heard an expert say. That, I take it, is the rough account of the beginning of the aesthetic attitude. And according to their capacity and their stage of culture they may make a pile of their enemies’ skulls, or they may build the Parthenon. The point of the aesthetic attitude lies in the adequate fusion of body and soul, where the soul is a feeling, and the body its expression, without residue on either side. ”

“ Therefore our imagination, or imaginative perception, has a practically infinite choice of objects, because all appearances of things, in any context or connection, are open to it. Now, obviously, the possibilities of discerning “form” vary as much as the apparent objects do. A cloud, e.g., we know to be a mass of cold wet vapour; but taken as we see it with the sun on it, it has quite different possibilities of revealing aesthetic form, because its wonderful structure is all variously lit up, and so lit up it is the object or semblance which matters. ”

“ In a word, imaginative expression creates the feeling in creating its embodiment, and the feeling so created not merely cannot be otherwise expressed, but cannot otherwise exist, than in and through the embodiment which imagination has found for it. ”