The Psychology of Beauty | Page 9

be subject to no essential
metamorphosis. So long as we laugh when we are joyful, and weep
when we are sick and sorry; so long as we flush with anger, or grow
pale with fear, so long shall we thrill to a golden sunset, the cadence of
an air, or the gloomy spaces of a cathedral.
The study of these forms of harmonious functioning of the human
organism has its roots, of course, in the science of psychology, but
comes, nevertheless, to a different flower, because of the grafting on of
the element of aesthetic value. It is the study of the disinterested human
pleasures, and, although as yet scarcely well begun, capable of a most
detailed and definitive treatment.
This is not the character of those studies so casually alluded to by the

author of "Impressionism and Appreciation," when he enjoins on the
appreciative critic not to neglect the literature of aesthetics: "The
characteristics of his [the artist's] temperament have been noted with
the nicest loyalty; and particularly the play of his special faculty, the
imagination, as this faculty through the use of sensations and images
and moods and ideas creates a work of art, has been followed out with
the utmost delicacy of observation." But these are not properly studies
in aesthetics at all. To find out what is beautiful, and the reason for its
being beautiful, is the aesthetic task; to analyze the workings of the
poet's mind, as his conception grows and ramifies and brightens, is no
part of it, because such a study takes no account of the aesthetic value
of the process, but only of the process itself. The same fallacy lurks
here, indeed, as in the confusion of the scientific critic between literary
evolution and poetic achievement, and the test of the fallacy is this
single fact: the psychological process in the development of a dramatic
idea, for instance, is, and quite properly should be, from the point of
view of such analysis, exactly the same for a Shakespeare and for the
Hoyt of our American farces.
The cause of the production of a work of art may indeed by found by
tracing back the stream of thought; but the cause of its beauty is the
desire and the sense of beauty in the human heart. If a given
combination of lines and colors is beautiful, then the anticipation of the
combination as beautiful is what has brought about its incarnation. The
artist's attitude toward his vision of beauty, and the art lover's toward
that vision realized, are the same. The only legitimate aesthetic analysis
is, then, that of the relation between the aesthetic object and the lover of
beauty, and all the studies in the psychology of invention--be it literary,
scientific, or practical invention--have no right to the other name.
Aesthetics, then, is the science of beauty. It will be developed as a
system of laws expressing the relation between the object and aesthetic
pleasure in it; or as a system of conditions to which the object, in order
to be beautiful, must conform. It is hard to say where the task of the
aesthetician ends, and that of the critic begins; and for the present, at
least, they must often be commingled. But they are defined by their
purposes: the end and aim of one is a system of principles; of the other,

the disposal of a given work with reference to those principles; and
when the science of aesthetics shall have taken shape, criticism will
confine itself to the analysis of the work into its aesthetic elements, to
the explanation (by means of the laws already formulated) of its
especial power in the realm of beauty, and to the judgment of its
comparative aesthetic value.
The other forms of critical activity will then find their true place as
preliminaries or supplements to the essential function of criticism. The
study of historical conditions, of authors' personal relations, of the
literary "moment," will be means to show the work of art "as in itself it
really is." Shall we then say that the method of appreciation, being an
unusually exhaustive presentment of the object as in itself it really is, is
therefore an indispensable preparation for the critical judgment? The
modern appreciator, after the model limned by Professor Gates, was to
strive to get, as it were, the aerial perspective of a masterpiece,--to
present it as it looks across the blue depths of the years. This is without
doubt a fascinating study; but it may be questioned if it does not darken
the more important issue. For it is not the object as in itself it really is
that we at last behold, but the object disguised in new and strange
trappings. Such appreciation is to aesthetic criticism as the sentimental
to the naive