Part 2 — APPENDIX

GREEK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF AN ETYMOLOGICAL PHANTASY[4]

During a period of lethargy I was petrified at a phantom, bounding from my lexicon, with this cataract of phrases: “Are you Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic, or Christian? Without me, you are anonymous. Do you stigmatize heresy and schism, hypocrisy and blasphemy. Do you blame schemers against the Mosaic decalog? Do you impose anathemas in apostates, idolaters and atheists or exorcise the devil and his demons with their diabolical pomps? Are you zealous for proselytes, and to baptize neophytes after catechism, and to canonize orthodox martyrs with halos and emblems, scandalizing frenzied iconoclasts? Then all that is done through me.

The ecclesiastical sphere is practically mine. I am the architect of churches, cathedrals and basilicas, from the asphalt base in the crypts of the catacomb, up to the apse and the chimes in the dome. I am architect of monasteries for monks and anchorites, and of asylums for orphans and lepers and maniacs. Mine is the Hierarchy, from the Pope on his dais with his tiara, to the mitered Bishop in his diocese, and to the parish priest in his presbytery. Deacons and acolytes, clergy and laity, Papal encyclicals, diocesan synods, parochial homilies, and all dogmatic theology, with its mysteries and myriad topics, are mine. The Bible is mine from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy of the Pentateuch, to the Paralipomenon and the Psalms, to patriarchs and prophets, to the Evangelists of Christ, to the Epistles and Apocalypse of His Apostles. Epiphany, Pentecost, the Parasceve are mine The tunes of the hymns, the quiring of anthems, the Gregorian tones of the litanies and antiphons are melodious through me and I composed the canon of liturgy with its symbols.

Go to your home with me. Bushels of anthracite for the chimney, and a diet of fancied nectar! Chairs and plates and dishes; oysters; butter and treacle; perch or trout or sardines in olive oil; the aroma of capon or partridge or pheasant; celery and asparagus and peppers; cherries and dates and currants, citrons and melons, prunes and quinces and plums; pumpkins marmalade and pastry; chestnuts and pippins; masses of purple hyacinths, with lily and crocus, with geraniums and heliotropes, with narcissus and peony, with asters and orchids and posies of roses. What zest! Isn’t that a panorama of paradise to tantalize you? Be not economical or dyspeptic. Masticate beneath your mustache. Let choruses echo in the parlor with music of organ and guitar, or let there be anecdotes on the piazza around a bottle of cheering tonic.

I telephone or telegraph for my “auto,” and my machine goes to my theater or hippodrome. There is on my program the symphony orchestra with harmonious melodies; or on my program are scenes melancholy with tragedy, or hilarious with pantomime and melodrama, with comic monolog or dramatic dialog, with cyclists, gymnasts and acrobats. After the drama or kinematic photography, with match and lamp you go to attic canopies, and to the climes of Morpheus. For all these you are to reimburse me with the treasuries of the purse.

Go with me to the ocean, opposing the stratagems and tactics of barbarous pirates, to meander by gulf and isthmus and archipelago, nomads through all climates, charting geography with my nautical atlases, from the Arctic to the Antarctic through the tropic zone, from Polynesia to its antipodes. Then for my astronomy! What a panorama through my telescope in the crystal atmosphere! Above the horizon in the empyrean are my planets and comets and meteors and galaxies of asteroids.

Without me where is your “zoo” with its panthers and leopards with dolphin and crocodile and hippopotamus, with lynxes and hyenas, with ostrich and pelican, with buffalo and dromedary, with ichneumons and scorpions, with the gigantic elephant and its proboscis and the pygmy squirrel! Oh, what of my chimerical and utopian “zoo,” with the phenix and dragon and griffins and chameleons and gorgons and gnomes and basilisks and sphinxes and hybrids!

But I am not archaic; the scope of my dynamic energy is practical and not eccentric. Mine are politics, the diadems of monarchs, the scepters of tyrants, barbarous anarchy and despotic autocracy, the panics of demagogue and the parliaments of autonomy and democracy. Chemistry and chemical analysis, physics with phenomena of electricity, acoustics, and optics, mechanics, botany, geology, entomology, and all the “ologies” with their technical glossaries; they are mine.

So are all the apothecaries and pharmacies with glycerine and licorice and creosote and the antidotes for quinsy; for catarrh, dropsy, neuralgia, and for every “-itis” and “-osis”; emetics for the stomach; the cathartics, calomel and castor-oil; doses of paregoric for colic; plasters for imposthumes; arsenic for spasms of epilepsy, and tonics for anemic arteries; a peptonoic diet for dysentery; oxygen against bronchial phlegm; bromides for asthma; iodine for pleurisy and parasites; narcotics to calm hysteria; antipyrin for agonizing rheumatism; antitoxins for diphtheria and for the deleterious microbes of cholera or typhoid, and bottles of panaceas.

Anatomy is mine and the surgeon, diagnosing symptoms, charting septic organs on the diagrams, trepanning the cranium, cauterizing for hemorrhage, is mine; so are his sponges and syringes and silk and his styptics, and his prophylactic hygiene, and his anæsthetics, chloroform and ether, and his antiseptics against bacteria and gangrene, and his autopsy and his skeletons.

The school is mine with its desks, its programs and schedule and the scholars, from their alphabet to their diploma, their arithmetic and geometry, their gymnasiums and athletics, and the school diamond and amphitheater. Pause before you ostracize me from my schools.

Would you be an essayist, sketching graphic stories or typical characters; an historian, cataloging the treasures of archives, and chronicling epochs of catastrophe and calm; or a philosopher, systematizing theories of Stoics, Hedonists, Peripatetics and Scholastics; or a poet, composing idylls and madrigals, lyrics and odes with strophes and the epics with episodes, you are mine. Without me you have not talents or ideas or paper or ink. Mine are your grammar and syntax, your syllables, your paragraphs with their commas and colons and parentheses, your lexicons and encyclopedias and card-catalogs, your topics and themes for ecstatic rhapsodies or for austere logic, your fantastic paradoxes and your idiotic theories. ’Tis I who phrase for you your axioms, caustic criticisms, laconic epigrams, all your irony and sardonic sarcasm. If your technique is idiomatic, your methods puzzling or crystal, your tropes are metaphors graphic, your fancies hectic or anæmic, you are mine. I am your enthusiastic stenographer, jotting down and synopsizing your ideas and typing them to be stereotyped in your authentic tomes, whether anonymous or under a pseudonym.

I apologize for my tautologies, for this monotonous labyrinth, for the phalanx of technicalities and for the etymological mosaic which strangles your larynx with “ics” and “isms.” Whether it is all abysmal bathos, or the climax and acme of the practical, I am to blame for it.

But pause before you ostracize me from my schools; pause ere the nemesis of chaos and disaster is yours; but if you are to be characterized as adamant and without sympathy, let the poets echo a threnody about my coffin; let there be a chorus of pæans under the cypress and cedar, the larch and osier, the myrtle and amaranth, about my cenotaph; let there be in my cemetery a mausoleum with a monolith, and on it my epitaph:

The Lexicons of Europe Are the Trophies of Greece.

Esthetic pleasure or the enjoyment of the beautiful is generally admitted to be disinterested. Possession and ownership do not enter into the esthetic act. The ownership of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is not an object of indifference or of disinterested attention. Thieves scheme for the ownership, thousands covet it, guards protect it. But the enjoyment of “Mona Lisa” is not selfish and exclusive in its nature. Esthetic enjoyment makes abstraction of possession and of selfish good. It follows therefore that esthetic enjoyment is a function of man’s knowledge, not of man’s desires and appetites. The only condition upon which the appetites, whether bodily or spiritual, can operate is that they be energized by personal good. Volition may be free, but it cannot be disinterested. You may enjoy another’s picture; you cannot eat his dinner, nor can you be indifferent to what you know to be for your good.

Some have asserted that esthetic enjoyment belongs to a special power apart from both knowledge and appetite. There is however no need of such power. Certainly beauty must be known to be enjoyed, but is not the knowledge itself adequate to produce the characteristic effect of beauty? Is not Aquinas right in saying, “Pulchrum dicitur id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet” (that is called beautiful which simply by its perception pleases)? Good, being an end, cannot delight solely by being perceived; good must be attained. But for beauty, is not its very perception an enjoyment? The solution of this question will be found in the nature of enjoyment.

Emotions and feelings, pleasure and pain are easy to understand and for that reason difficult to express in satisfactory formulas. By its very nature every faculty of man operating normally has an accompanying pleasure, while if operating abnormally it has pain. The faculty itself is therefore the subject of the feeling just as life is inherent in the organism. Indeed feeling is consciously localized life. The feeling of the toe is felt by the toe; the joy of seeing is felt by the eye. No distinct power is required to carry the feeling. So it is with esthetic emotions. The mind itself feels the delight of beauty. Esthetic enjoyment is a function of perception.

Does esthetic enjoyment belong to the senses and to the imagination? Here again there is difference of opinion. It is probable, however, that sensible perception has no accompanying esthetic pleasure. St. Augustine appealed to experience and declared that esthetic enjoyment of the beauty, say, of the sun, was possible, even when the sight suffered pain. A better reason may be found in the behavior of animals which, though clothed in beauty, give us no certain evidence of esthetic appreciation and enjoyment.

Esthetic enjoyment therefore belongs to intellectual cognition. Now the intellect has many operations. Which one of these carries the esthetic pleasure or esthetic pain, which one is charged with the vital thrill that creates and appreciates the world of art? The mind reasons, the mind judges, the mind apprehends. Esthetic enjoyment belongs to the last. Judgments and inferences may be objects of esthetic enjoyment; to reason, to judge may precede or follow or may be even necessary conditions, but the esthetic act is most probably one of simple apprehension. There would seem to be general agreement that contemplation is the characteristic attitude of the mind in the presence of beauty. Aquinas excludes distinctly the idea of end from beauty. Beauty is a form which we contemplate. Croce calls the esthetic perception intuition. Theodore Watts-Dunton seems to be describing the same act when he calls poetry “the renascence of wonder.” The efforts of reasoning and of judging appear to be alien to the mental attitude in the presence of beauty.

The simple apprehension is concerned with what is termed ontological truth, whereas reasoning and judging result in logical truth. Now, just as esthetic enjoyment abstracts from possession or good, so does it abstract from the affirmations belonging to the logical truth of judgment and of rational inference. There is esthetic enjoyment of fiction as well as of fact. Aristotle long ago saw that although the substance of art must be the persons, actions and feelings of man, the pleasure found in the work of art does not arise from its correspondence with reality. The correspondence with reality gives the satisfaction of logical truth, of scientific truth, of historical fact. The truth which is the object of esthetic pleasure in art is the truth of consistency, of realization of ideal, the truth of reasonable congruity, of plot in a wide sense of the term. This vision, this dream of the artist, scholastic philosophers call causa exemplaris or ideal. If we are right in our understanding of Croce, his intuition is nothing else but the simple apprehension of the ideal. Esthetic enjoyment comes also, as is clear, from the simple apprehension of beauty in natural realities where there is no fiction of art.

To localize the esthetic enjoyment in this way does not determine the constituent elements of beauty, but clear definitions help to exclude many false notions of beauty. The ideal of the artist is embodied in his imagination before it is expressed in its proper medium. The art of man always must have a medium which can be perceived by the senses. That is why a vigorous imagination, which stores up and dispenses to its owner quickly and abundantly of its riches, is so useful to the artist. Through his imagination the artist is original and personal. The pure thought of science is abstract and alike in all minds; the artistic vision formed from individual experience will be different in every one. Therefore no two artists expressing themselves in the concrete can be alike as no two scenes of nature are alike in beauty.

Aristotle put the pleasure of art in perception. Art for him is a mimesis, which does not mean an imitation, in the sense of mirroring or copying. That was Plato’s notion, which Aristotle combated. Art is, in Aristotle, a power analogous to nature, working like nature in another and limited world, of sound, of color, of human thoughts. Art is fiction, a dramatizing, a staging of life, to be judged, not by correspondence with fact, but by its own plausible and convincing rationalization. No one has done more for art than Aristotle in his insistence upon the necessity of cause and effect, of a motivation, sufficient at least for the artist’s public. Intrinsic unity, the fruit of perfect motivation, was another necessary requisite in Aristotle’s analysis of art. It is only when the varied elements of the artist’s imaginative experience have fused themselves into a unity by having a well-motivated beginning, middle and end that the mind feels the beauty of its vision.

Universality in art is another fruitful idea of Aristotle. While confined to his sensible medium, the artist must link up the separate elements of his vision more closely than in the realm of fact. He will by that very reason be general and universal because his motivation must approve itself to all. A moving picture of the death of Cæsar as it really occurred would be valuable history. It would, however, be individual. Shakespeare’s death of Cæsar has a beginning, middle and end, and the spectators see in it the working out of a plot in which every word and act has been carefully planned and fitted into the design. The individuating notes are left out, and the death of a Cæsar has universal appeal.

Artistic creation, motivation, unity, universality, these are great principles of art formulated by Aristotle and not likely ever to be superseded. The cognitive idea of beauty and those principles of Aristotle have been followed in the chapters of this book.

For further discussion of the nature of esthetic pleasure, see author’s “Art of Interesting,” Chap. V, Interest from Emotions; Chap. XVII, Is Esthetic Emotion a Spinal Thrill?