Smoothness

“ Finish is not surface, but expression; and completeness of expression may demand roughness and avoidance of detail and surface at one time quite as positively as it demands more detail and consequent smoothness at another. ”

“ So that to form a finished human beauty, and to give it its full influence, the face must be expressive of such gentle and amiable qualities as correspond with the softness, smoothness, and delicacy of the outward form. ”

“ We acquire many more ideas by the aid of this sense than by either hearing, smell, or taste. By these last we become acquainted with only one particular quality in a body, either of taste, smell, or sound; but by means of the touch we learn such qualities as heat and cold, roughness and smoothness, hardness and softness, figure, solidity, and extension. ”

“ CHAPTER II. SMOOTHNESS. At first, the student may find it difficult to concentrate the minds of his hearers upon his theme steadily and continuously. His ability to do this may come spasmodically. This irregular mental activity reports itself in unevenness of delivery; life appears in gleams not in steady shining. But with continued effort to concentrate other minds upon his subject, this unevenness gives place to ease in delivery, to smoothness of voice. Continuity of thought impels smoothness of expression. ”

“ But in things whose excess is not judged by greater or smaller, as smoothness and roughness, hardness and softness, darkness and light, the shades of colours, all these are very easily distinguished when the difference is any way considerable, but not when it is minute, for want of some common measures, which perhaps may never come to be discovered. ”

“ When we detach the feeling of resistance, we, of course, detach those of hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, which are but different modifications of resistance. And when these, and the feelings of extension and figure, are detached, a very simple sensation seems to remain, the feeling which we have when something, without being seen, comes gently in contact with our skin, in such a way, that we cannot say whether it is hard or soft, rough or smooth, of what figure it is, or of what size. ”

“ And there are intermediate varieties, as of the genial business-man, with the narrow forehead and the wide, smooth—the too wide and too smooth—lower face. Smoothness is the one unfailing characteristic. Why do American faces hardly ever wrinkle? ”

“ The senses which we have hitherto considered, are very simple and uniform, each of them exhibiting only one kind of sensation, and thereby indicating only one quality of bodies. By the ear we perceive sounds, and nothing else; by the palate, tastes; and by the nose, odours. These qualities are all likewise of one order, being all secondary qualities: whereas by touch we perceive not one quality only, but many, and those of very different kinds. The chief of them are heat and cold, hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, figure, solidity, motion, and extension. ”

“ Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness, the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? ”

“ The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. ”

“ But, first of all, we have to ask how the aesthetic pleasure even in formal beauty is constituted, and to what extent expression belongs to the beauty of pure form. Form is impressive, or directly beautiful, through its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of sight and hearing, and through the harmony of its combinations of suggestions and impulses with the entire organism. ”

“ Now we have considered, in this and the preceding chapters, extension, figure, solidity, motion, hardness, roughness, as well as colour, heat and cold, sound, taste, and smell. We have endeavoured to shew, that our nature and constitution lead us to conceive these as qualities of body, as all mankind have always conceived them to be. We have likewise examined, with great attention, the various sensations we have by means of the five senses, and are not able to find among them all, one single image of body, or of any of its qualities. ”

“ It cannot very well be done by reasoning. It must be done by visual feeling. The principle of Balance being clearly understood, finding the center of any tone-contrasts is a matter of experimental practice in which those persons succeed best who are most sensitive to differences of tone, and who make the greatest effort to feel the centers and to indicate them accurately. Experience and practice are necessary in all cases.
Fig. 228
Here, within this circle, are the attractions to be balanced. ”

“ Texture appeals to our sense of touch. It excites in us a variety of feelings, pleasant or unpleasant. I need not tell you how disagreeable the texture of sharp rocks may be to your bare feet, when{182} you are bathing; what a relief it is to them to feel the texture of sand. Some of you, I am sure, are conscious of the pleasure you derive from handling things. You have discovered for yourselves what a lot of feeling you have in the tips of your fingers. You would enjoy handling the red box in Whistler’s picture: and your touch would be very careful and delicate. ”

“ Aesthetics has to prove the sensuous value, the pleasure which is due not only to the feeling-tones of the several sensations but to those of their various combinations. Spite of a tendency of late to disparage the co-operation of the “motor sensations” connected with movements of the eye in the aesthetic appreciation of linear form, e.g. curves, evidence suggests that certain curves, like fine gradations of colour, may owe a considerable part of their value to a mode of varying the sensuous experience which is in a peculiar manner agreeable. ”

“ To declare this a little, we must assume, that the Surfaces of all such Bodies how Smooth or polite soever they may appear to our Dull Sight and Touch, are exactly smooth only in a popular, or at most in a Physical sense, but not in a strict and rigid sense. ”

“ Crush the colors of the rainbow into a single hue possessed of the attributes of all the others, and multiply that entity to infinity, and you have less richness than rested in any of the complex colors shown in the trimming of her raiment. Lighten the softness of eiderdown a thousand times, and yet maintain its sense of substance, and you have not conceived of the softness of the gauze that decked her simple, flowing garments. ”

“ Why a curve is more pleasing to the eye than a straight line may be too deep a question; but none the less may one safely appeal to the universal experience that there are certain lines, certain forms, certain colors, certain sounds which give us pleasure. ”

“ WHEN any body is composed of parts smooth and polished without pressing upon each other, without showing any ruggedness or confusion, and at the same time affecting some regular shape, I call it elegant. ”

“ This then must conclude our discussion of the several organs of sense-perception.
Part 6 One might ask: if every body is infinitely divisible, are its sensible qualities- Colour, Savour, Odour, Sound, Weight, Cold or Heat, [Heaviness or] Lightness, Hardness or Softness-also infinitely divisible? ”

“ The feeling for the medium, the sense of what can rightly be done in it only or better than in anything else, and the charm and fascination of doing it so — these, I take it, are the real clue to the fundamental question of aesthetics, which is “how feeling and its body are created adequate to one another.” ”

“ Every sense mechanically abstracts the impressions which it receives as distinguished from the impressions received from other senses. The eye abstracts sense impressions of light, the ear abstracts sense impressions of sound, the nose abstracts sense impressions of odor, the mouth abstracts sense impressions of taste, the skin abstracts sense impressions of touch, the muscles abstract sense impressions of force, as stress and strain, etc. ”

“ By this means alone can life assume coherent shape under his hands, and it is coherence and shape which alone can give us the impression of beauty, of that coherent shapeliness of matter drawn into the semblance of a living organism. ”

“ His emotional preferences among the visible facts of nature, his feeling for the relative importance and charm of line, colour, light and shade, used whether for the interpretation and heightening of natural fact or for producing a pattern in itself harmonious and suggestive to the eye, his sense of the special modes of handling most effective for communicating the impression he desires, all these together inevitably appear in, and constitute, his style and technique. ”

“ Now this new, and comparatively newly discovered element in our perception of shape is the one to which, leaving out of account the pleasantness of mere colour and sound sensations as such, we probably owe the bulk of whatever satisfaction we connect with the word Beautiful. And I have already given the Reader an example of such Empathy when I described the landscape seen by the man on the hill as consisting of a skyline "dropping down merely to rush up again in rapid concave curves" ”

“ Consequently even shapes and passion-like qualities, in so far as they are considered to be suitable or unsuitable to the nature of a thing, belong to habits or dispositions: for shape and color, according to their suitability to the nature of thing, concern beauty; while heat and cold, according to their suitability to the nature of a thing, concern health. And in this way heat and cold are put, by the Philosopher, in the first species of quality. ”

“ It will be apparent that the swell is the basis of shading, a quality that is so highly appreciated in this refined age. He who can manage the swell perfectly has the secret of this effect in his possession as have none others. ”

“ Granting that the aim of every aesthetics is to determine the Nature of Beauty, and to explain our feelings about it, we may say that the empirical treatments propose to do this either by describing the aesthetic object and extracting the essential elements of Beauty, or by describing the aesthetic experience and extracting the essential elements of aesthetic feeling, thereby indicating the elements of Beauty as those which effect this feeling. ”

“ But it is different in the case of what we call Beautiful. Beautiful means satisfactory for contemplation, i.e. for reiterated perception; and the very essence of contemplative satisfaction is its desire for such reiteration. The older psychology would perhaps have explained this reiterative tendency by the pleasurableness of the sensory elements, the mere colours and sounds of which the easily perceived shape is made up. ”

“ Every single phenomenon of the outer world has, as a rule, not only one quality, but many; and since that which we call a quality is the assumed cause of a definite sensation, it results that phenomena appeal at once to several senses, are simultaneously seen, heard, felt, and moreover are seen in different degrees of light and colour, heard in various nuances of timbre, etc. ”

“ Yet this statement, equivalent to saying that hot objects give us the sensation of heat, and wet objects the sensation of wetness, is well worth repeating, because we so often forget that the fact of beauty in anything is merely the fact of that thing setting up in ourselves a very specific feeling. ”

“ We have assigned the first division of natural beauty to sound, which we distinguish from diction in that propriety and force of meaning are looked to in this; in sound it is the pleasantness or harshness that is regarded, flattering or offending the ear, or it is a kind of imitation of the subject-matter—sad things recited tearfully, excited rapidly, or harsh harshly. ”

“ As, therefore, it appears from all evidence that it is the sense of felicity which we first desire in organic form, it is evident from reason, as demonstrable by experience, that those forms will be the most beautiful (always, observe, leaving typical [Page 96] beauty out of the question) which exhibit most of power, and seem capable of most quick and joyous sensation. ”

“ In form, simplicity and long, unbroken lines give dignity, while complicated and short lines express vivacity. Curves, particularly if long and sweeping, give grace while straight lines and angles indicate power and strength. ”

“ We know one of the purest sources of beauty may be traced to the godliness of light and its ancillaries—shade and colour. Even slightly serated or rough parts on the face will intercept the effect of light and shade, thereby evincing how subtle and delicate is the influence. ”

“ In doing which, we shall soon find that it is chiefly to be effected by means of the nice sensation we naturally have of what certain quantities or dimensions of parts, are fittest to produce the utmost strength for moving, or supporting great weights; and of what are most fit for the utmost light agility, as also for every degree, between these two extremes. ”

“ Hence it is that certain features, not in themselves, perhaps, particularly attractive, wanting, it may be, in certain regularity of outline, or in certain delicacy and softness, are still invested with a peculiar charm and radiance of beauty from their peculiar expressiveness and animation. ”