Читать книгу Beauty of the Beast - John Bascom - Страница 3

In defining beauty, we say of it, first, that it is a simple and primary quality. It is uncompounded. No two or three qualities in any method present can compass it with their combined effects. No analysis can resolve it into other perceptions, but there always remains something unresolved and unexplained, which is beauty.

The Three Black Auks (detail)

Anonymous, c. 27,000-19,000 BCE

Cosquer Cave, Calanque de Morgiou

This is proved by the fact that the most successful of these resolutions, while they hit on qualities frequently concomitant with beauty and intimately related to it, are never able to go beyond this companionship and show the identity of those qualities with beauty, whenever and wherever found. Unity and variety are qualities usually, I think always, in some degree present in beautiful objects. But though this presence may show them to be a condition for the existence of beauty, it does not show them to be its synonym or equivalent. In fact, we find that these qualities exist in many things which have no beauty.

Bison Carved in Low Relief

Anonymous, c. 16,000 BCE

Limestone, length: 30 cm

Musée national de la Préhistoire, Les Eyzies-de-Tayac

Their range may include the field under discussion, but it certainly includes much more, and thereby shows that these qualities do not produce the distinguishing and peculiar effects of aesthetics. Thus is it with every combination of qualities into which we seek to analyse beauty. Either phenomena which should be included are left unexplained, or phenomena which do not belong to the department are taken in by the theory.

The Antelopes

Anonymous, c. 1550–1500 BCE

Fresco, 275 × 200 cm

National Museum of Athens, Athens

These analyses, either by doing too much or too little, indicate that the precise thing to be done has not been done by them, and only prove a more or less general companionship, and not an identity of qualities. It is one thing to show that certain things, even, always accompany beauty, and quite another to show that these always and everywhere manifest themselves as beauty, reaching it in its manifold forms, and leaving nowhere any residuum of phenomena to be explained by a new quality.

The Cat Goddess Bastet

Anonymous, 663–609 BCE

Bronze and blue glass, 27.6 × 20 cm

Musée du Louvre, Paris

The idea of beauty has been with patient effort and elaborate argument referred to in association, thus not only making it a derived notion, but one reached through a great variety of pleasurable impressions. It is clear, however, that association has no power to alter original feelings, but only to revive them. Therefore, if beauty is not as an original notion or apprehension entrusted to association, it cannot be given by it since this law of the mind has no creating or transforming, but simply a uniting power. Association can explain the presence of ideas, not their nature.

The Painted Garden of the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta

Anonymous, 1st century BCE. Fresco

Museo Nazionale Romano

Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome

On this theory, beauty must chiefly be confined to the old and the familiar, since upon these associations it has acted and been correspondingly excluded from the new, as not yet enriched by its relations. This is not the fact. The beauty of an object has no dependence upon familiarity, but is governed by considerations distinctly discernible at the first examination.

In individual experience, it is a matter of accident what objects ultimately become associated with pleasant or with unpleasant memories; and in community, association is as capricious as fashion. No such caprice, however, attaches to the decisions of taste.

Ducks and Antelopes

Anonymous, 1st century BCE. Fresco

Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

A uniformity indicative of many well-established principles belongs to these. So far as beautiful objects have been united by a firm association with wealth and elegance, this association itself must be explained by their prior and independent beauty. Beauty has occasioned this permanent and not groundless preference for wealth and elegance. The simplicity of this quality is seen in the presence of an unexplained and peculiar effect, after we have removed all the effects which can be ascribed to the known qualities present.

Detail of pictorial decoration with trompe l’oeil garden and fountain with birds

Anonymous, 25–5 CE. Fresco

House of the Golden Bracelets, Pompeii

It is underived. The primary nature of beauty presents a question of some difficulty, since there are qualities with which it is often so intimately associated that its own existence in particular cases is dependent on theirs. Compared to qualities with which it is often associated, beauty can have the appearance of a secondary and subsidiary quality.

Cat clawing a Turkey-Cock, Ducks, Birds, and Seashells

c. 5 CE. Roman mosaic from Pompeii

Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

In many things, their relations give limit and law to their beauty, and, as we here find the impression of beauty dependent on an obvious utility, coming and going therewith, it would seem an easy and correct explanation to refer this peculiar intuition and feeling to the perception and pleasure of an evident adaptation of means to an end in the object before us. The error of such a reference is clearly seen, however, in another class of cases, in which this quality is found to have no such connection with the useful and to exist in a high degree with no reference, or with a very obscure and remote reference, in the object to any use.

Ganesha

Hoysala Empire, 12th-13th century

Chloritic schist

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

The Avery Brundage Collection

If we undertake to deduce beauty from any quality or relation of things, however successful we may think ourselves in a few chosen instances, we will find a large number of objects which our theory should explain beyond its power.

A more careful examination of the very cases on which we rely will show us, that, while beauty may exist with, it exists in addition to the quality from which we would derive it; that the utility with which it is associated is not a cause, but a temporary condition of its existence, or rather that the same relations of the object include and determine both its beauty and its utility.

A Bear Walking

Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490

Metalpoint, 10.3 × 13.3 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

As it follows, therefore, in regular sequence, there is no one quality or set of qualities. Instead, we say that it itself is a primary and simple quality. There is involved in this assertion an inability to give any explanation of the attribute, or any definition of the word by which it is expressed. It is compound and derived from things which can be explained. Simple things can only be directly known and felt. Any explanation involves a decomposition of the thing explained, a consideration of its parts, and thus an apprehension of it as a whole, or the reference of it to some source or cause whence it proceeded, and in connection with which it is understood.

Lion

Albrecht Dürer, c. 1494

Gouache and gold layer on parchment, 12.6 × 17.2 cm

Kunsthalle, Hamburg

But no simple thing can be decompounded and explained through its parts; or can a primary thing be referred as a derivative to something back of it, and thus be explained in its cause.

Nor is the word by which such simplicity is expressed, capable of any other definition than that of a synonym. A definition must include one or more characteristic and distinguishing qualities by which the thing in hand is separated from all others.

Sea Crab

Albrecht Dürer, 1495

Watercolour, gouache, 26.3 × 35.5 cm

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

But in the case of a simple thing there is but one quality, and that alone can be mentioned, and this is to name a synonym.

All knowledge, therefore, of that which is simple and primary, whether in perception or intuition, must be direct. Mind must interpret mind, and only by the interpretation of similar faculties can this class of properties be apprehended. Certain original perceptions and intuitions must be granted us as the basis of every defining and explanatory process.

Detail of The Garden of Earthly Delights (left panel: Paradise)

Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1500-1505

Oil on panel

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Explanation cannot go back of its own postulates to throw light upon starting-points. Senses and faculties directly conversant with qualities the same for all, are these postulates. All simple and primary notions and attributes are directly known through these faculties, and the language which expresses them is only explicable to those who have the key, the chart, of kindred faculties. The term beauty is susceptible, then, of no definition, and the quality beauty of no further knowledge and explanation than that which the very power by which we perceive, feel, and know it is able to give.

A Young Hare

Albrecht Dürer, 1502

Watercolour and gouache on paper, 25 × 23cm

Grafische Sammlung, Albertina, Vienna

The conditions and relations of such an attribute may still invite our attention. The simple and primary character of beauty does not exclude our second assertion, which is, that this quality is reasonable, that is, a quality for whose existence a reason can be rendered. Certain other qualities occasion it to exist and these may be pointed out. Right is a primary quality, yet all our judgments of right proceed on certain premises which sustain them, and which can be rendered as a reason why we suppose this characteristic of action present.

Rearing Horse

Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1505

Pen and ink, red chalk, 15.3 × 14.2 cm

Royal Library, Windsor Castle

Thus beauty, when present, is so through causes which can be more or less distinctly assigned, and is not, like the properties of matter, merely known to be, without any knowledge of that which occasions them to be. The proof of this is in the fact that there are questions of beauty, by the concession of all, admitting and calling forth discussion; that men not only discuss points of taste, but are persuaded by the reasoning employed. Indeed, if it were as true of intellectual as of physical tastes, that there is no dispute concerning them, our whole department would be at once annihilated and fall back among the things incapable of explanation and knowledge.

Barn Owl (Syrnium aluco)

Albrecht Dürer, 1508

19.2 × 14 cm

Grafische Sammlung, Albertina, Vienna

Our progress, and the propriety of every effort toward progress, rest on the assertion, that beauty is a subject of reasoning, and is, in its existence, reasonable. The important and pregnant nature of this assertion will appear more and more as we advance, and its truth will be involved in the very fact, that, following in the steps of all who have preceded us, we make evident that we regard beauty as a reasonable quality, by actually reasonably concerning its existence and the manner of its action.

The Heron

Albrecht Dürer, c. 1515

Watercolour on parchment, 26.7 × 34.7 cm

Staatliche Museen, Berlin