James Sully

“ So far as his writings embody the notion of any common element in beautiful objects, it is proportion, harmony or unity among their parts. He emphasizes unity in its simplest aspect as seen in evenness of line and purity of colour. He recognizes in places the beauty of the mind, and seems to think that the highest beauty of proportion is to be found in the union of a beautiful mind with a beautiful body. ”

“ He exalts the state of artistic contemplation as the one in which, as pure intellect set free from will, the misery of existence is surmounted and something of blissful ecstasy attained. He holds that all things are in some degree beautiful, ugliness being viewed as merely imperfect manifestation or objectification of will. In this way the beauty of nature, somewhat slighted by Schelling and Hegel, is rehabilitated. ”

“ Both play and aesthetic contemplation are activities which are controlled by no extraneous end, which run on freely directed only by the intrinsic delight of the activity. Hence they both contrast with the serious work imposed on us and controlled by what we mark off as the necessities of life, such as providing for bodily wants, or rearing a family. They each add a sort of luxurious fringe to life. In aesthetic enjoyment our senses, our intelligence and our emotions are alike released from the constraint of these necessary ends, and may be said to refresh themselves in a kind of play. ”

“ Is beauty a single quality in objects?
Beauty not a physical quality.Common language certainly suggests that it is. Aesthetics, too, began its inquiry at the same point of view, and its history shows how much pains men have taken in trying to determine the nature of this attribute, as well as that of the faculty of the soul by which it is perceived. Yet a little examination of the facts suffices to show that the theory is beset with serious difficulties. Whatever beauty may be it is certainly not a quality of an object in the same way in which the colour or the form of it is a quality. ”

“ It is enough to recall what Helmholtz and others have told us about the limitations of the powers of pictorial art to represent the more brilliant degrees of light; the admissions of painters themselves as to the limits of their art when it seeks to render the finer gradations of light and colour in such common objects as a tree-trunk or a bit of old wall. Nature, moreover, in spreading out her spaces of earth, sea and sky, and in exhibiting the action of her forces, does so on a scale which seems to make sublimity her prerogative in which art vainly endeavours to participate. ”

“ It may be enough to say that as applied to forms generally, including those of sculpture and architecture, the theory is opposed by our ordinary way of speaking, which implies quite another point of view in the aesthetic contemplation of form, namely, that of a spectator external to the object contemplated. When our eye glides over the beauties of a statue, our imaginative activity so far from transporting us within the object carries us as tactual feelers outside the surface. ”

“ To this purity of aesthetic pleasure must be added its refinement, which implies not merely a certain remoteness from the bodily needs, but the effect of a union of sense and mind in giving amplitude as well as delicacy to our enjoyment of beauty. Marked off from practical activity, As the region of most pure and refined feeling, aesthetic experience is clearly marked off from practical life, with its urgent desires and the rest. In aesthetic contemplation desire and will as a whole are almost dormant. ”

“ While as the highest phase of feeling aesthetic experience appears to belong to our subjective life, the hidden region of the soul, it is connected just as clearly, through the act of sense-perception, with the world of objects which is our common possession. ”

“ We may instance the group of problems which have to do with the relation of art to “beauty” in its narrower sense, such as the function of the painful and of the ugly in art, the meaning of artistic imitation and truth to nature, of idealization, and the nature of artistic illusion; also the question of the didactic and of the moral function of art. Even more special problems of art, such as the effect of the tragic, the nature of musical expression, can only be adequately treated in the light of a general aesthetic theory. ”

“ It has, moreover, in all its stages a palpable utility—even though this is not realized by the player—serving for the exercise and development of body, intelligence and character. Beauty and art rise high above play in purity of the disinterested attitude, in placid detachment from the serviceable and the necessary, and, still more, in range and variety of refined interest, comprehended in “the love of beauty.” ”

“ Every aesthetic object is something unique, differing in individual characteristics from all others; and as the object, so the mood of the contemplator. One may almost say that there are as many modes of musical delight as there are worthy compositions. It would seem either that this feeling of a unique indivisible whole must be dismissed as an illusion, or that we have to admit an unexplained residue in our aesthetic experience, which may some day be explained by help of a larger and more exact conception of aesthetic harmony, of the laws of interaction and of fusion of psychical elements. ”

“ For example, a bit of brilliant colour in a bonnet which pleases the wearer but offends her superior in aesthetic matters takes its place as something which per se has a certain degree of aesthetic value even though the particular relations into which it has now thrust itself, palpable to the trained eye, may practically rob it of its value. In thus substituting the relative idea of aesthetic value for the absolute idea of beauty we may no doubt seem to be destroying the reality of the object of aesthetic perception. ”

“ To do so would be to run the risk of considering only the more general aspects and conditions of aesthetic enjoyment, whereas what we need is a theory of it as a specific kind of pleasurable experience. What is required at the present stage of development of the science is a deeper investigation of the aesthetic attitude of mind as a whole, of what we may call the aesthetic psychosis. We need to probe the act of contemplation itself, the mode of activity of attention involved in this calm, half-dreamlike gazing on the mere look of things unconcerned with their ordinary and weightier imports. ”

“ Touch is no doubt wanting in a prerogative of hearing and sight which we shall presently see to be important, namely, that being acted on by objects at a distance they admit of a simultaneous perception by a number of persons—as indeed even the sense of smell does in a measure. This is probably the chief reason why, according to certain testimony, the blind receive but little aesthetic enjoyment from tactual experience. ”

“ The beauty which is spread over the face of visible nature is an emanation from this spiritual beauty, and is beauty because it symbolizes and expresses the latter. Thus the beauty of a plant resides in its perfect adaptation to its end, a perfection which is an expression of the wisdom of its Creator. ”

“ Similarly, when scientific knowledge enables us in the mood of aesthetic contemplation to retrace imaginatively the mode of formation of a cloud or a mountain form, or the mode in which a climbing plant finds its way upwards. It is for aesthetics to recognize the fact, and to discriminate a legitimate aesthetic function of scientific ideas when they enlarge the scope of a pleasurable play of the imagination, and are freed from the control of a serious purpose of explaining what is seen. ”

“ Lessing was the exponent of German classicism; Herder, on the contrary, was a pioneer of the romantic movement. He fought against all imitation as such, and bade German writers be true to themselves and their national antecedents. As a sort of theoretic basis for this adhesion to national type in literature, he conceived the idea that literature and art, together with language and national culture as a whole, are evolved by a natural process, and that the intellectual and emotional life of each people is correlated with peculiarities of physical temperament and of material environment. ”

“ One serious obstacle to a scientific theory of aesthetic experience is the illusive character of many of its finer elements—for example, the subtle differences of feeling-tone produced by the several colours as well as by their several tones and shades, by the several musical intervals, and so forth. ”

“ According to Schelling a Schelling.new philosophical significance is given to art by the doctrine that the identity of subject and object—which is half disguised in ordinary perception and volition—is only clearly seen in artistic perception. The perfect perception of its real self by intelligence in the work of art is accompanied by a feeling of infinite satisfaction. Art in thus effecting a revelation of the absolute seems to attain a dignity not merely above that of nature but above that of philosophy itself. Schelling throws but little light on the concrete forms of beauty. ”

“ As to the precise forms of beauty, he supposed, in opposition to Aristotle, that a single thing not divisible into parts might be beautiful through its unity and simplicity. He gives a high place to the beauty of colours in which material darkness is overpowered by light and warmth. In reference to artistic beauty he said that when the artist has notions as models for his creations, these may become more beautiful than natural objects. This is clearly a step away from Plato’s doctrine towards our modern conception of artistic idealization. ”

“ A system of norms must further supply some comprehensive criterion by help of which degrees of aesthetic value may be determined, as determined by the degrees of completeness of the several pleasurable activities,—sensuous, perceptual and imaginative,—and justify the form of judgment “this object is more beautiful (or of a higher kind of beauty) than that.” Such regulative principles and standards of comparison will, it is clear, fail us just at the point where analysis stops. ”

“ The enjoyment of the pleasing aspects of land and sea, of mountain and dale, of the innumerable organic forms, has steadily grown with the development of culture; and this growth, though undoubtedly aided by that of the feeling for art—especially painting and poetry—is to a large extent independent of it. ”

“ In inquiring, for example, into the pleasing relations of colour we might have to wait long for a theory if we were dependent on what even so gifted a writer as Ruskin can tell us about nature's juxtapositions: whereas if it can be shown that throughout the history of chromatic art or during its better period there has been a tendency to prefer certain combinations, this fact becomes a piece of convincing evidence as to their aesthetic value. ”

“ Objects are ugly so far as they are unacted upon by reason, and therefore formless. The creative reason is absolute beauty, and is called the more than beautiful. There are three degrees or stages of manifested beauty: that of human reason, which is the highest; of the human soul, which is less perfect through its connexion with a material body; and of real objects, which is the lowest manifestation of all. ”

“ Similarly, when we delight in the divided spaces of a Gothic roof, so far from being imaginatively engaged in taking part in the efforts and strains of pillar, arch and the rest, we move in fancy along the pathways defined by the designer, tactually feeling and appreciating each dimension, each detail of form. ”

“ If a drinking-vessel please in part because of its perfect adaptation to its purpose, the aesthetic value ascribed to it seems to derive something from a feeling of respect for utility itself. In another way beauty reasserts in modern aesthetics that kinship with utility on which it insisted in the days of Socrates. The idea that typical beauty coincides with what is vigorous and conducive to the conservation of the species is as old as Hobbes. ”