The Psychology of Beauty | Page 8

and forms and colors
give me pleasure, it is because the imitating impulses and movements
that have arisen in me are such as suit, help, heighten my physical
organization in general and in particular. It may seem somewhat trivial
to say that a curved line is pleasing because the eye is so hung as to
move best in it; but we may take it as one instance of the numberless
conditions for healthy action which a beautiful form fulfills. A well-
composed picture calls up in the spectator just such a balanced relation
of impulses of attention and incipient movements as suits an organism
which is also balanced--bilateral--in its own impulses to movement,
and at the same time stable; and it is the correspondence of the

suggested impulses with the natural movement that makes the
composition good. Besides the pleasure from the tone relations,--which
doubtless can be eventually reduced to something of the same kind,--it
is the balance of nervous and muscular tensions and relaxations, of
yearnings and satisfactions, which are the subjective side of the beauty
of a strain of music. The basis, in short, of any aesthetic
experience--poetry, music, painting, and the rest-- is beautiful through
its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, primarily of
sight and hearing, and through the harmony of the suggestions and
impulses it arouses with the whole organism.
But the sensuous beauty of art does not exhaust the aesthetic experience.
What of the special emotions--the gayety or triumph, the sadness or
peace or agitation--that hang about the work of art, and make, for many,
the greater part of their delight in it? Those among these special
emotions which belong to the subject-matter of a work--like our horror
at the picture of an execution--need not here be discussed. To
understand the rest we may venture for a moment into the realm of pure
psychology. We are told by psychology that emotion is dependent on
the organic excitations of any given idea. Thus fear at the sight of a
bear is only the reverberation in consciousness of all nervous and
vascular changes set up instinctively as a preparation for flight. Think
away our bodily feelings, and we think away fear, too. And set up the
bodily changes and the feeling of them, and we have the emotion that
belongs to them even without the idea, as we may see in the unmotived
panics that sometimes accompany certain heart disturbances. The same
thing, on another level, is a familiar experience. A glass of wine makes
merriment, simply by bringing about those organic states which are felt
emotionally as cheerfulness. Now the application of all this to
aesthetics is clear. All these tensions, relaxations,--bodily "imitations"
of the form,--have each the emotional tone which belongs to it. And so
if the music of a Strauss waltz makes us gay, and Handel's Largo
serious, it is not because we are reminded of the ballroom or of the
cathedral, but because the physical response to the stimulus of the
music is itself the basis of the emotion. What makes the sense of peace
in the atmosphere of the Low Countries? Only the tendency, on
following those level lines of landscape, to assume ourselves the

horizontal, and the restfulness which belongs to that posture. If the
crimson of a picture by Bocklin, or the golden glow of a Giorgione, or
the fantastic gleam of a Rembrandt speaks to me like a human voice, it
is not because it expresses to me an idea, but because it impresses that
sensibility which is deeper than ideas,--the region of the emotional
response to color and to light. What is the beauty of the "Ulalume," or
"Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln"? It is the way in which the
form in its exquisite fitness to our senses, and the emotion belonging to
that particular form as organic reverberation therefrom, in its exquisite
fitness to thought, create in us a delight quite unaccounted for by the
ideas which they express. This is the essence of beauty,--the possession
of a quality which excites the human organism to functioning
harmonious with its own nature.
We can see in this definition the possibility of an aesthetic which shall
have objective validity because founded in the eternal properties of
human nature, while it yet allows us to understand that in the limits
within which, by education and environment, the empirical man
changes, his norms of beauty must vary, too. Ideas can change in
interest and in value, but these energies lie much deeper than the idea,
in the original constitution of mankind. They belong to the instinctive,
involuntary part of our nature. They are changeless, just as the "eternal
man" is changeless; and as the basis of aesthetic feeling they can be
gathered into a system of laws which shall