Chapter II · The Phantom Æsthetic State

CHAPTER II The Phantom Æsthetic State

None of his follies will he repent, none will he wish to repeat; no happier lot can be assigned to man.—Wilhelm Mester.

A more serious defect in æsthetics is the avoidance of considerations as to value. It is true that an ill-judged introduction of value considerations usually leads to disaster, as in Tolstoy’s case. But the fact that some of the experiences to which the arts give rise are valuable and take the form they do because of their value is not irrelevant. Whether this fact is of service in analysis will naturally depend upon the theory of value adopted. But to leave it out of account altogether is to run the risk of missing the clue to the whole matter. And the clue has in fact been missed.

It is true that many of these experiences do present peculiarities, both in the intellectual interest which is present and in the way in which the development of desires within them takes place, and these peculiarities—detachment, impersonality, serenity and so forth—are of great interest. They will have to be carefully examined in the sequel.

We shall find that two entirely different sets of characters are involved. They arise from quite different causes but are hard to distinguish introspectively. Taken as marking off a special province for inquiry they are most unsatisfactory. They would yield for our purposes, even if they were not so ambiguous, a diagonal or slant classification. Some of the experiences which most require to be considered would be left out and many which are without importance brought in. To choose the Æsthetic State as the starting-point for an inquiry into the values of the arts is in fact somewhat like choosing ‘rectangular, and red in parts’ as a definition of a picture. We should find ourselves ultimately discussing a different collection of things from those we intended to discuss.

But the problem remains—Is there any such thing as the æsthetic state, or any æsthetic character of experiences which is sui generis? Not many explicit arguments have ever been given for one. Vernon Lee, it is true, in Beauty and Ugliness, p. 10, argues that “a relation entirely sui generis between visible and audible forms and ourselves” can be deduced from the fact “that given proportions, shapes, patterns, compositions have a tendency to recur in art.” How this can be done it is hard to divine. Arsenic tends to recur in murder cases, and tennis in the summer, but no characters or relations sui generis anywhere are thereby proved. Obviously you can only tell whether anything is like or unlike other things by examining it and them, and to notice that one case of it is like another case of it, is not helpful. It may be suspected that where the argument is so confused, the original question was not very clear.

The question is whether a certain kind of experience is or is not like other kinds of experience. Plainly it is a question as to degree of likeness. Be it granted at once, to clear the air, that there are all sorts of experiences involved in the values of the arts, and that attributions of Beauty spring from all sorts of causes. Is there among these one kind of experience as different from experiences which don’t so occur as, say envy is from remembering, or as mathematical calculation is from eating cherries? And what degree of difference would make it specific? Put this way it is plainly not an easy question to answer. These differences, none of them measurable, are of varying degree, and all are hard to estimate. Yet the vast majority of post-Kantian writers, and many before him, have unhesitatingly replied, “Yes! the æsthetic experience is peculiar and specific.” And their grounds, when not merely verbal, have usually been those of direct inspection.

It requires some audacity to run counter to such a tradition, and I do not do so without reflection. Yet, after all, the matter is one of classification, and when so many other divisions in psychology are being questioned and re-organised, this also may be re-examined.

The case for a distinct æsthetic species of experience can take two forms. It may be held that there is some unique kind of mental element which enters into æsthetic experiences and into no others. Thus Mr Clive Bell used to maintain the existence of an unique emotion ‘æsthetic emotion’ as the differentia. But psychology has no place for such an entity. What other will be suggested? Empathy, for example, as Vernon Lee herself insists, enters into innumerable other experiences as well as into æsthetic experiences. I do not think any will be proposed.

The æsthetic mode is generally supposed to be a peculiar way of regarding things which can be exercised, whether the resulting experiences are valuable, disvaluable or indifferent. It is intended to cover the experience of ugliness as well as that of beauty, and also intermediate experiences. What I wish to maintain is that there is no such mode, that the experience of ugliness has nothing in common with that of beauty, which both do not share with innumerable other experiences no one (except Croce; but this qualification is often required) would dream of calling æsthetic. But a narrower sense of æsthetic is also found in which it is confined to experiences of beauty and does imply value. And with regard to this, while admitting that such experiences can be distinguished, I shall be at pains to show that they are closely similar to many other experiences, that they differ chiefly in the connections between their constituents, and that they are only a further development, a finer organisation of ordinary experiences, and not in the least a new and different kind of thing. When we look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to music, we are not doing something quite unlike what we were doing on our way to the Gallery or when we dressed in the morning. The fashion in which the experience is caused in us is different, and as a rule the experience is more complex and, if we are successful, more unified. But our activity is not of a fundamentally different kind. To assume that it is, puts difficulties in the way of describing and explaining it, which are unnecessary and which no one has yet succeeded in overcoming.

This view of the arts as providing a private heaven for æsthetes is, as will appear later, a great impediment to the investigation of their value. The effects upon the general attitudes of those who accept it uncritically are also often regrettable; while the effects upon literature and the arts have been noticeable, in a narrowing and restriction of the interests active, in preciousness, artificiality and spurious aloofness. envisaged as a mystic, ineffable virtue is a close relative of the ‘æsthetic mood’, and may easily be pernicious in its effects, through the habits of mind which, as an idea, it fosters, and to which, as a mystery, it appeals.