Part 13 (1/2)

III

The problem stands, then: how to provide for the presence of ideas in the work of art, and the definite e them so how their presence is related to the full aesthetic experience But, first of all, we have to ask how the aesthetic pleasure even in formal beauty is constituted, and to what extent expression belongs to the beauty of pure forh its harmony with the conditions offered by our senses, prih the harestions and ianism I enjoy a well-composed picture like titian's ”Sacred and Profane Love,”

because the good composition means such a balanced relation of impulses of attention, of incipient anis to move toward both sides, and yet unified and stable; and because the co to my eyes So much for IMPRESSION, beauty of the first term But it is not only that haret out of the form of a picture No, I have, besides all this pleasure, a real exhilaration or eayety or triue of association, which yet certainly contributes toof the beauty of the experience, and so of the work of art How did it come out of the foranisanic reverberation as, the current theory of emotion asserts, must be at the bottom of all our emotional states A certain sequence of nervous shocks and of vasoes, certain stians have been set up as the ”diffusive wave” froe is the result That is a direct impression, but an expression too Take the salass of wine makes me cheerful, not because it arouses cheerful ideas directly, but because the organic changes it sets up are such as belong to the MOTIVATED expression of joy, and have the same effect A deep, slow movement played by an orchestra can affect me in tays It may be that I have usually connected that sort of ious experiences, and all the profound and inspiring feelings belonging thereto; and so I transfer those feelings to the ive it those adjectives Or the slowness of the rhytheness, the volu about in s to a reposeful and yet deeply h ies that the forh the s with it a feeling,--so to the music itself, but to my own individual experiences

This distinction between internal and external expressiveness is perfectly clear for , too, it can easily be traced We know the effect that is produced by broken lines, by upward ” of the Gothic cathedral The low-lying, wide expanses of soive us repose, not because they remind us of the peaceful happiness of the land, but because we cannot melt ourselves into all those horizontal lines without that restful feeling which accompanies such relaxation; and our emotion is read into the picture as AESTHETIC pleasure, because it came out of the abstract forms,--the PAINTING in the picture

The beauty of forree of emotional expressiveness in a way that does not distract, like the association of ideas, from the pure aesthetic experience This quality of expressiveness should not, however, become a part of the definition of beauty, so that it should be said that the greater the emotional expressiveness, the more beautiful the object For if that were true, such e quite mediocre, would be felt asand definite emotion; and a Strauss waltz, which makes us more merry than one by Mendelssohn, should be in so far more beautiful This, of course, we are not ready to concede; and it seeard the special emotional effects of formal beauty rather as a corollary to, than as a part of, the essential aesthetic ue but unmistakable excitement hich we respond to purely formal beauty,--that indescribable exaltation hich we listen to ”absolute”

music,--then we must say that that emotion is but another name for aesthetic pleasure Objectively, we have forical side, a haranism, and on the mental side the undefined exaltation which is known as aesthetic pleasure

IV

Up to this point, however, we have considered only the relation between purely formal beauty and the various shades of einal question which we set ourselves, how to provide, in our definition of beauty, for the presence of ideas in the work of art No one will deny that the full aesthetic experience cannot be dish Professor Santayana's ”beauty in the second term” may be rejected as a pure individual, arbitrary, interested, and hence unaesthetic elenored The suggested ideas aroused by an old rose garden may be no addition to its beauty, but the sareat ideas contained directly in Shakespeare's poetry Yet great ideas alone do not reat art, else we reat poets too Must we then be satisfied to rest in the dualisreat creations of art are the expression of great truths under the laws of poetic fornition of truth plus the feeling of beauty of form, or is it a fusion of these into a third undivided pulse of aesthetic e, for those arts which do express ideas, this dualism of form and content in our theory of the beautiful?

Let us analyze a little more closely this notion of the content

Music and architecture cannot properly be said to have any content, although they have a e and a hy is extraneous It is given by the work itself only in so far as the fore, sadness; the temple, awe The idea of burial or of worshi+p is nowhere to be found in the work of art

In the hierarchy of arts, paining and sculpture show the first trace of a content This content, however, is at once seen to be susceptible of farther analysis The ”Sistine Madonna”

pictures a mother and child worshi+ped, which may be called the subject,--but this does not exhaust the content The real iven the name of THEME, is the divine element in maternal love The subjects of Donatello's ”John the Baptist” and ”Saint George,” of Michael Angelo's ”David” and ”Moses,” can be described only as men of Different types in different attitudes; their thenificance of each personality The subject of ”The Angelus” is given in its name; its theme is humble piety From the infinite number of possible examples one more will suffice,--the well-known ”War”

by Franz Stuck, in the Neue Pinacothek,--the subject a youth, under a lurid sky, tra under his horse's feet the bodies of the slain The theain a moral idea,--the horrors of war

Ifask whether we can attribute beauty to the ideas of painting and sculpture, a negative answer is at once suggested

It is manifestly impossible to establish an order of aesthetic excellence between these subjects The idea of peasants telling their beads is more beautiful than the idea of a ruthless destroyer only in so far as it is her; and this distinction, therefore, has reference to the theme and not to the subject How far, however, moral and aesthetic excellence are coincident is a question for which we are not yet ready

At this point we care only to point out that the mere idea of a picture is neither aesthetic nor the reverse