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Æsthetic activity and physical concepts.

Æsthetic activity, distinct from the practical activity, is always accompanied by it in its manifestations. Hence its utilitarian or hedonistic side, and the pleasure and pain which are, as it were, the practical echo of æsthetic value and disvalue, of the beautiful and of the ugly. But this practical side of the æsthetic activity has in its turn a physical or psycho-physical accompaniment, which consists of sounds, tones, movements, combinations of lines and colours, and so on.

Does it really possess this side, or does it only seem to possess it, through the construction which we put on it in physical science, and the useful and arbitrary methods which we have already several times set in relief as proper to the empirical and abstract sciences? Our reply cannot be doubtful, that is, it must affirm to the second of the two hypotheses.

However, it will be better to leave this point in suspense, since it is not at present necessary to press this line of inquiry further. The mere mention suffices to secure our speaking (for reasons of simplicity and adhesion to ordinary language) of the physical element as something objective and existing, against leading to hasty conclusions as to the concepts of spirit and nature and their relation.

Expression in the æsthetic sense, and expression in the naturalistic sense.

It is important, on the other hand, to make clear that as the existence of the hedonistic side in every spiritual activity has given rise to the confusion between the æsthetic activity and the useful or pleasurable, so the existence of, or rather the possibility of constructing, this physical side, has caused the confusion between æsthetic expression and expression in a naturalistic sense; that is to say, between a spiritual fact and a mechanical and passive fact (not to say, between a concrete reality and an abstraction or fiction). In common speech, sometimes it is the words of the poet that are called expressions, the notes of the musician, or the figures of the painter; sometimes the blush which generally accompanies the feeling of shame, the pallor often due to fear, the grinding of the teeth proper to violent anger, the shining of the eyes and certain movements of the muscles of the mouth, which manifest cheerfulness. We also say that a certain degree of heat is the expression of fever, that the falling of the barometer is the expression of rain, and even that the height of the exchange expresses the depreciation of the paper currency of a State, or social discontent the approach of a revolution. One can well imagine what sort of scientific results would be attained by allowing oneself to be governed by verbal usage and classing together facts so widely different. But there is, in fact, an abyss between a man who is the prey of anger with all its natural manifestations and another man who expresses it æsthetically; between the appearance, the cries and contortions of some one grieving at the loss of a dear one and the words or song with which the same individual portrays his suffering at another time; between the grimace of emotion and the gesture of the actor. Darwin's book on the expression of the emotions in man and animals does not belong to Æsthetic; because there is nothing in common between the science of spiritual expression and a Semiotic, whether it be medical, meteorological, political, physiognomic, or chiromantic.

Expression in the naturalistic sense simply lacks expression in the spiritual sense, that is to say, the very character of activity and of spirituality, and therefore the bipartition into the poles of beauty and of ugliness. It is nothing but a relation between cause and effect, fixed by the abstract intellect. The complete process of æsthetic production can be symbolized in four stages, which are: a, impressions; b, expression or spiritual æsthetic synthesis; c, hedonistic accompaniment, or pleasure of the beautiful (æsthetic pleasure); d, translation of the æsthetic fact into physical phenomena (sounds, tones, movements, combinations of lines and colours, etc.). Any one can see that the capital point, the only one that is properly speaking æsthetic and truly real, is in b, which is lacking to the merely naturalistic manifestation or construction also metaphorically called expression.

The expressive process is exhausted when these four stages have been passed through. It begins again with new impressions, a new æsthetic synthesis, and the accompaniments that belong to it.

Representations and memory.

Expressions or representations follow one another, the one drives out the other. Certainly, this passing away, this being driven out, is not a perishing, it is not total elimination: nothing that is born dies with that complete death which would be identical with never having been born. If all things pass away, nothing can die. Even the representations that we have forgotten persist somehow in our spirit, for without this we could not explain acquired habits and capacities. Indeed the strength of life lies in this apparent forgetting: one forgets what has been absorbed and what life has superseded.

But other representations are also powerful elements in the present processes of our spirit; and it is incumbent upon us not to forget them, or to be capable of recalling them when they are wanted. The will is always vigilant in this work of preservation, which aims at preserving (we may say) the greater, the more fundamental part of all our riches. But its vigilance does not always suffice. Memory, as we say, abandons or betrays us in different ways. For this very reason, the human spirit devises expedients which succour the weakness of memory and are its aids.

The production of aids to memory.

How these aids are possible we have been informed from what has been said. Expressions or representations are also practical facts, which are also called physical in so far as physics classifies and reduces them to types. Now it is clear that if we can succeed in making those practical or physical facts somehow permanent, it will always be possible (all other conditions remaining equal) on perceiving them to reproduce in ourselves the already produced expression or intuition.

If that be called the object or physical stimulus in which the practical concomitant acts, or (to use physical terms) in which the movements have been isolated and made in some sort permanent, and if that object or stimulus be designated by the letter e; the process of reproduction will take place in the following order: e, the physical stimulus; d-b, perception of physical facts (sounds, tones, mimetic, combinations of lines and colours, etc.), which is together the æsthetic synthesis, already produced; c, the hedonistic accompaniment, which is also reproduced.

And what else are those combinations of words called poetry, prose, poems, novels, romances, tragedies or comedies, but physical stimulants of reproduction (the stage e); what else are those combinations of sound called operas, symphonies, sonatas; or those combinations of lines and colours called pictures, statues, architecture? The spiritual energy of memory, with the assistance of the physical facts above mentioned, makes possible the preservation and the reproduction of the intuitions produced by man. The physiological organism and with it the memory become weakened; the monuments of art are destroyed, and lo, all that æsthetic wealth, the fruit of the labours of many generations, diminishes and rapidly disappears.

Physical beauty.

Monuments of art, the stimulants of æsthetic reproduction, are called beautiful things or physical beauty. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man, to spiritual energy. But it is now clear through what transferences and associations, physical things and facts which are simply aids to the reproduction of the beautiful are finally called elliptically beautiful things and physical beauty. And now that we have explained this elliptical usage, we shall ourselves employ it without hesitation.

Content and form: another meaning.

The intervention of "physical beauty" serves to explain another meaning of the words "content" and "form," as used by æstheticians. Some call "content" the internal fact or expression (for us, on the other hand, form), and "form" the marble, the colours, the rhythm, the sounds (for us the antithesis of form); thus looking upon the physical fact as the form, which may or may not be joined to the content. It also serves to explain another aspect of what is called æsthetic "ugliness." Somebody who has nothing definite to express may try to conceal his internal emptiness in a flood of words, in sounding verse, in deafening polyphony, in painting that dazzles the eye, or by heaping together great architectural masses which arrest and astonish us without conveying anything whatever. Ugliness, then, is the capricious, the charlatanesque; and, in reality, if practical caprice did not intervene in the theoretic function, there might be absence of beauty, but never the real presence of something deserving the adjective "ugly."

Natural and artificial beauty.

Physical beauty is usually divided into natural and artificial beauty. Thus we reach one of the facts which have given the greatest trouble to thinkers: natural beauty. These words often designate facts of merely practical pleasure. Any one who calls a landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where the body moves briskly and the warm sun envelops and caresses the limbs, does not speak of anything æsthetic. But it is nevertheless indubitable that on other occasions the adjective "beautiful," applied to objects and scenes existing in nature, has a completely æsthetic signification.

It has been observed that in order to enjoy natural objects æsthetically, we must abstract from their external and historical reality, and separate their simple semblance or appearance from existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our legs, so as to cancel our wonted relations with it, the landscape appears to us to be an ideal spectacle; that nature is beautiful only for him who contemplates her with the eye of the artist; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful animals and flowers; that natural beauty is discovered (and examples of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and imagination, to which more or less æsthetic travellers and excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a kind of collective suggestion); that, without the aid of the imagination, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the same natural object or fact is, according to the disposition of the soul, now expressive, now insignificant, now expressive of one definite thing, now of another, sad or glad, sublime or ridiculous, sweet or laughable; finally, that a natural beauty which an artist would not to some extent correct, does not exist.

All these observations are just, and fully confirm the fact that natural beauty is simply a stimulus to æsthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production. Without the previous æsthetic intuitions of the imagination, nature cannot awaken any at all. As regards natural beauty, man is like the mythical Narcissus at the fountain. Leopardi said that natural beauty is "rare, scattered, and fugitive": it is imperfect, equivocal, variable. Each refers the natural fact to the expression in his mind. One artist is thrown into transports by a smiling landscape, another by a rag-shop, another by the pretty face of a young girl, another by the squalid countenance of an old rascal. Perhaps the first will say that the rag-shop and the ugly face of the old rascal are repulsive; the second, that the smiling landscape and the face of the young girl are insipid. They may dispute for ever; but they will never agree, save when they are supplied with a sufficient dose of æsthetic knowledge to enable them to recognize that both are right. Artificial beauty, created by man, supplies an aid that is far more ductile and efficacious.

Mixed beauty.

In addition to these two classes, æstheticians also sometimes talk in their treatises of a mixed beauty. A mixture of what? Precisely of natural and artificial. Whoever fixes and externalizes, operates with natural data which he does not create but combines and transforms. In this sense, every artificial product is a mixture of nature and artifice; and there would be no occasion to speak of a mixed beauty, as of a special category. But it sometimes happens that combinations already given in nature can be used a great deal more than in others; as, for instance, when we design a beautiful garden and include in our design groups of trees or ponds already in place. On other occasions externalization is limited by the impossibility of producing certain effects artificially. Thus we can mix colouring matters, but we cannot create a powerful voice or a face and figure appropriate to this or that character in a play. We must therefore seek them among already existing things, and make use of them when found. When, therefore, we employ a great number of combinations already existing in nature, such as we should not be able to produce artificially if they did not exist, the resulting fact is called mixed beauty.

Writings.

We must distinguish from artificial beauty those instruments of reproduction called writings, such as alphabets, musical notes, hieroglyphics, and all pseudolanguages, from the language of flowers and flags to the language of patches (so much in vogue in the society of the eighteenth century). Writings are not physical facts which arouse directly impressions answering to æsthetic expressions; they are simple indications of what must be done in order to produce such physical facts. A series of graphic signs serves to remind us of the movements which we must execute with our vocal apparatus in order to emit certain definite sounds. If, through practice, we become able to hear the words without opening our mouths and (what is much more difficult) to hear the sounds by running the eye along the stave, all this does not alter in any way the nature of the writings, which are altogether different from direct physical beauty. No one calls the book which contains the Divine Comedy, or the score which contains Don Giovanni, beautiful in the same sense in which the block of marble which contains Michæl Angelo's Moses, or the piece of coloured wood which contains the Transfiguration, is metaphorically called beautiful. Both serve the reproduction of the beautiful, but the former by a far longer and more indirect route than the latter.

Free and non-free beauty.

Another division of the beautiful, still found in treatises, is that into free and not free. By not-free beauties have been understood those objects which have to serve a double purpose, extra-æsthetic and æsthetic (stimulants of intuitions); and since it seems that the first purpose sets limits and barriers in the way of the second, the resulting beautiful object has been considered as not-free beauty.

Architectural works are especially cited; and just for this reason, architecture has often been excluded from the number of what are called the fine arts. A temple must above all things be for the use of a cult; a house must contain all the rooms needed for the convenience of life, and they must be arranged with a view to this convenience; a fortress must be a construction capable of resisting the attacks of given armies and the blows of given instruments of war. It is therefore concluded that the architect's field is restricted: he may embellish to some extent the temple, the house, the fortress; but he is bound by the object of those edifices, and he can only manifest that part of his vision of beauty which does not impair their extra-æsthetic but fundamental objects.

Other examples are taken from what is called art applied to industry. Plates, glasses, knives, guns and combs can be made beautiful; but it is held that their beauty must not be pushed so far as to prevent our eating from the plate, drinking from the glass, cutting with the knife, firing off the gun, or combing one's hair with the comb. The same is said of the art of typography: a book should be beautiful, but not to the extent of being difficult or impossible to read.

Criticism of non-free beauty.

In respect of all this we must observe in the first place that the extrinsic purpose is not necessarily, precisely because it is such, a limit or impediment to the other purpose of being a stimulus to æsthetic reproduction. It is therefore quite false to maintain that architecture, for example, is by its nature imperfect and not free, since it must also obey other practical purposes; in fact, the mere presence of fine works of architecture is enough to dispel any such illusion.

In the second place, not only are the two purposes not necessarily contradictory, but we must add that the artist always has the means of preventing this contradiction from arising. How? by simply making the destination of the object which serves a practical end enter as material into his æsthetic intuition and externalization. He will not need to add anything to the object, in order to make it the instrument of æsthetic intuitions: it will be so, if perfectly adapted to its practical purpose. Rustic dwellings and palaces, churches and barracks, swords and ploughs, are beautiful, not in so far as they are embellished and adorned, but in so far as they express their end. A garment is only beautiful because it is exactly suitable to a given person in given conditions. The sword bound to the side of the warrior Rinaldo by the amorous Armida was not beautiful: "so adorned that it may seem a useless ornament, not the free instrument of war," or it was beautiful, if you will, but to the eyes and imagination of the sorceress, who liked to see her lover equipped in that effeminate way. The æsthetic activity can always agree with the practical, because expression is truth.

It cannot however be denied that æsthetic contemplation sometimes hinders practical usage. For instance, it is a quite common experience to find certain new objects seem so well adapted to their purpose, and therefore so beautiful, that people occasionally feel scruples in maltreating them by passing from their contemplation to their use. It was for this reason that King Frederick William of Prussia showed such repugnance to sending his magnificent grenadiers, so well adapted to war, into the mud and fire of battle, while his less æsthetic son, Frederick the Great, obtained from them excellent service.

Stimulants of production.

It might be objected to the explanation of the physically beautiful as a simple aid to the reproduction of the internally beautiful, or expressions, that the artist creates his expressions by painting or by sculpturing, by writing or by composing, and that therefore the physically beautiful, instead of following, sometimes precedes the æsthetically beautiful. This would be a somewhat superficial mode of understanding the procedure of the artist, who never in reality makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination; and if he has not yet seen it, he will make the stroke, not in order to externalize his expression (which does not yet exist), but as a kind of experiment and in order to have a point of departure for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical point of departure is not the physically beautiful instrument of reproduction, but a means that may be called pedagogic, like retiring into solitude, or the many other expedients frequently very strange, adopted by artists and scientists, who vary in these according to their various idiosyncrasies. The old æsthetician Baumgarten advised poets seeking inspiration to ride on horseback, to drink wine in moderation, and (provided they were chaste) to look at beautiful women.