Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good Part 8

LECTURE VI.

THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN.

The method that must govern researches on the beautiful and art is, as in the investigation of the true, to commence by psychology.--Faculties of the soul that unite in the perception of the beautiful.--The senses give only the agreeable; reason alone gives the idea of the beautiful.--Refutation of empiricism, that confounds the agreeable and the beautiful.--Pre-eminence of reason.--Sentiment of the beautiful; different from sensation and desire.--Distinction between the sentiment of the beautiful and that of the sublime.--Imagination.--Influence of sentiment on imagination.--Influence of imagination on sentiment.--Theory of taste.

Let us recall in a few words the results at which we have arrived.

Two exclusive schools are opposed to each other in the eighteenth century; we have combated both, and each by the other. To empiricism we have opposed the insufficiency of sensation, and its own inevitable necessity to idealism. We have admitted, with Locke and Condillac, in regard to the origin of knowledge, particular and contingent ideas, which we owe to the senses and consciousness; and above the senses and consciousness, the direct sources of all particular ideas, we have recognized, with Reid and Kant, a special faculty, different from sensation and consciousness, but developed with them,--reason, the lofty source of universal and necessary truths. We have established, against Kant, the absolute authority of reason, and the truths which it discovers. Then, the truths that reason revealed to us have themselves revealed to us their eternal principle,--G.o.d. Finally, this rational spiritualism, which is both the faith of the human race and the doctrine of the greatest minds of antiquity and modern times, we have carefully distinguished from a chimerical and dangerous mysticism. Thus the necessity of experience and the necessity of reason, the necessity of a real and infinite being which is the first and last foundation of truth, a severe distinction between spiritualism and mysticism, are the great principles which we have been able to gather from the first part of this course.

The second part, the study of the beautiful, will give us the same results elucidated and aggrandized by a new application.

It was the eighteenth century that introduced, or rather brought back into philosophy, investigations on the beautiful and art, so familiar to Plato and Aristotle, but which scholasticism had not entertained, to which our great philosophy of the seventeenth century had remained almost a stranger.[96] One comprehends that it did not belong to the empirical school to revive this n.o.ble part of philosophic science. Locke and Condillac did not leave a chapter, not even a single page, on the beautiful. Their followers treated beauty with the same disdain; not knowing very well how to explain it in their system, they found it more convenient not to perceive it at all. Diderot, it is true, had an enthusiasm for beauty and art, but enthusiasm was never so ill placed.

Diderot had genius; but, as Voltaire said of him, his was a head in which every thing fermented without coming to maturity. He scattered here and there a ma.s.s of ingenious and often contradictory perceptions; he has no principles; he abandons himself to the impression of the moment; he knows not what the ideal is; he delights in a kind of nature, at once common and mannered, such as one might expect from the author of the _Interpretation de la Nature_, the _Pere de Famille_, the _Neveu de Rameau_, and _Jacques le Fataliste_. Diderot is a fatalist in art as well as in philosophy; he belongs to his times and his school, with a grain of poetry, sensibility, and imagination.[97] It was worthy of the Scotch[98] school and Kant[99] to give a place to the beautiful in their doctrine. They considered it in the soul and in nature; but they did not even touch the difficult question of the reproduction of the beautiful by the genius of man. We will try to embrace this great subject in its whole extent, and we are about to offer at least a sketch of a regular and complete theory of beauty and art.

Let us begin by establis.h.i.+ng well the method that must preside over these investigations.

One can study the beautiful in two ways:--either out of us, in itself and in the objects, whatever they may be, that bear its impress; or in the mind of man, in the faculties that attain it, in the ideas or sentiments that it excites in us. Now, the true method, which must now be familiar to you, makes setting out from man to arrive at things a law for us. Therefore psychological a.n.a.lysis will here again be our point of departure, and the study of the state of the soul in presence of the beautiful will prepare us for that of the beautiful considered in itself and its objects.

Let us interrogate the soul in the presence of beauty.

Is it not an incontestable fact that before certain objects, under very different circ.u.mstances, we p.r.o.nounce the following judgment:--This object is beautiful? This affirmation is not always explicit. Sometimes it manifests itself only by a cry of admiration; sometimes it silently rises in the mind that scarcely has a consciousness of it. The forms of this phenomenon vary, but the phenomenon is attested by the most common and most certain observation, and all languages bear witness of it.

Although sensible objects, with most men, oftenest provoke the judgment of the beautiful, they do not alone possess this advantage; the domain of beauty is more extensive than the domain of the physical world exposed to our view; it has no bounds but those of entire nature, and of the soul and genius of man. Before an heroic action, by the remembrance of a great sacrifice; even by the thought of the most abstract truths firmly united with each other in a system admirable at once for its simplicity and its productiveness; finally, before objects of another order, before the works of art, this same phenomenon is produced in us.

We recognize in all these objects, however different, a common quality in regard to which our judgment is p.r.o.nounced, and this quality we call beauty.

The philosophy of sensation, in faithfulness to itself, should have attempted to reduce the beautiful to the agreeable.

Without doubt, beauty is almost always agreeable to the senses, or at least it must not wound them. Most of our ideas of the beautiful come to us by sight and hearing, and all the arts, without exception, are addressed to the soul through the body. An object which makes us suffer, were it the most beautiful in the world, very rarely appears to us such.

Beauty has little influence over a soul occupied with grief.

But if an agreeable sensation often accompanies the idea of the beautiful, we must not conclude that one is the other.

Experience testifies that all agreeable things do not appear beautiful, and that, among agreeable things, those which are most so are not the most beautiful,--a sure sign that the agreeable is not the beautiful; for if one is identical with the other, they should never be separated, but should always be commensurate with each other.

Far from this, whilst all our senses give us agreeable sensations, only two have the privilege of awakening in us the idea of beauty. Does one ever say: This is a beautiful taste, this is a beautiful smell?

Nevertheless, one should say it, if the beautiful is the agreeable. On the other hand, there are certain pleasures of odor and taste that move sensibility more than the greatest beauties of nature and art; and even among the perceptions of hearing and sight, those are not always the most vivid that most excite in us the idea of beauty. Do not pictures, ordinary in coloring, often move us more deeply than many dazzling productions, more seductive to the eye, less touching to the soul? I say farther; sensation not only does not produce the idea of the beautiful, but sometimes stifles it. Let an artist occupy himself with the reproduction of voluptuous forms; while pleasing the senses, he disturbs, he repels in us the chaste and pure idea of beauty. The agreeable is not, then, the measure of the beautiful, since in certain cases it effaces it and makes us forget it; it is not, then, the beautiful, since it is found, and in the highest degree, where the beautiful is not.

This conducts us to the essential foundation of the distinction between the idea of the beautiful and the sensation of the agreeable, to wit, the difference already explained between sensibility and reason.

When an object makes you experience an agreeable sensation, if one asks you why this object is agreeable to you, you can answer nothing, except that such is your impression; and if one informs you that this same object produces upon others a different impression and displeases them, you are not much astonished, because you know that sensibility is diverse, and that sensations must not be disputed. Is it the same when an object is not only agreeable to you, but when you judge that it is beautiful? You p.r.o.nounce, for example, that this figure is n.o.ble and beautiful, that this sunrise or sunset is beautiful, that disinterestedness and devotion are beautiful, that virtue is beautiful; if one contests with you the truth of these judgments, then you are not as accommodating as you were just now; you do not accept the dissent as an inevitable effect of different sensibilities, you no longer appeal to your sensibility which naturally terminates in you, you appeal to an authority which is made for others as well as you, that of reason; you believe that you have the right of accusing him with error who contradicts your judgment, for here your judgment rests no longer on something variable and individual, like an agreeable or painful sensation. The agreeable is confined for us within the inclosure of our own organization, where it changes every moment, according to the perpetual revolutions of this organization, according to health and sickness, the state of the atmosphere, that of our nerves, etc. But it is not so with beauty; beauty, like truth, belongs to none of us; no one has the right to dispose of it arbitrarily, and when we say: this is true, this is beautiful, it is no longer the particular and variable impression of our sensibility that we express, it is the absolute judgment that reason imposes on all men.

Confound reason and sensibility, reduce the idea of the beautiful to the sensation of the agreeable, and taste no longer has a law. If a person says to me, in the presence of the Apollo Belvidere, that he feels nothing more agreeable than in presence of any other statue, that it does not please him at all, that he does not feel its beauty, I cannot dispute his impression; but if this person thence concludes that the Apollo is not beautiful, I proudly contradict him, and declare that he is deceived. Good taste is distinguished from bad taste; but what does this distinction signify, if the judgment of the beautiful is resolved into a sensation? You say to me that I have no taste. What does that mean? Have I not senses like you? Does not the object which you admire act upon me as well as upon you? Is not the impression which I feel as real as that which you feel? Whence comes it, then, that you are right,--you who only give expression to the impression which you feel, and that I am wrong,--I who do precisely the same thing? Is it because those who feel like you are more numerous than those who feel like me?

But here the number of voices means nothing? The beautiful being defined as that which produces on the senses an agreeable impression, a thing that pleases a single man, though it were frightfully ugly in the eyes of all the rest of the human race, must, nevertheless, and very legitimately, be called beautiful by him who receives from it an agreeable impression, for, so far as he is concerned, it satisfies the definition. There is, then, no true beauty; there are only relative and changing beauties, beauties of circ.u.mstance, custom, fas.h.i.+on, and all these beauties, however different, will have a right to the same respect, provided they meet sensibilities to which they are agreeable.

And as there is nothing in this world, in the infinite diversity of our dispositions, which may not please some one, there will be nothing that is not beautiful; or, to speak more truly, there will be nothing either beautiful or ugly, and the Hottentot Venus will equal the Venus de Medici. The absurdity of the consequences demonstrates the absurdity of the principle. But there is only one means of escaping these consequences, which is to repudiate the principle, and recognize the judgment of the beautiful as an absolute judgment, and, as such, entirely different from sensation.

Finally, and this is the last rock of empiricism, is there in us only the idea of an imperfect and finite beauty, and while we are admiring the real beauties that nature furnishes, are we not elevating ourselves to the idea of a superior beauty, which Plato, with great excellence of expression, calls the Idea of the beautiful, which, after him, all men of delicate taste, all true artists call the Ideal? If we establish decrees in the beauty of things, is it not because we compare them, often without noticing it, with this ideal, which is to us the measure and rule of all our judgments in regard to particular beauties? How could this idea of absolute beauty enveloped in all our judgments on the beautiful,--how could this ideal beauty, which it is impossible for us not to conceive, be revealed to us by sensation, by a faculty variable and relative like the objects that it perceives?

The philosophy which deduces all our ideas from the senses falls to the ground, then, before the idea of the beautiful. It remains to see whether this idea can be better explained by means of sentiment, which is different from sensation, which so nearly resembles reason that good judges have often taken it for reason, and have made it the principle of the idea of the beautiful as well as that of the good. It is already a progress, without doubt, to go from sensation to sentiment, and Hutcheson and Smith[100] are in our eyes very different philosophers from Condillac and Helvetius;[101] but we believe that we have sufficiently established[102] that, in confounding sentiment with reason, we deprive it of its foundation and rule, that sentiment, particular and variable in its nature, different to different men, and in each man continually changing, cannot be sufficient for itself.

Nevertheless, if sentiment is not a principle, it is a true and important fact, and, after having distinguished it well from reason, we ourselves proceed to elevate it far above sensation, and elucidate the important part it plays in the perception of beauty.

Place yourself before an object of nature, wherein men recognize beauty, and observe what takes place within you at the sight of this object. Is it not certain that, at the same time that you judge that it is beautiful, you also feel its beauty, that is to say, that you experience at the sight of it a delightful emotion, and that you are attracted towards this object by a sentiment of sympathy and love? In other cases you judge otherwise, and feel an opposite sentiment. Aversion accompanies the judgment of the ugly, as love accompanies the judgment of the beautiful. And this sentiment is awakened not only in presence of the objects of nature: all objects, whatever they may be, that we judge to be ugly or beautiful, have the power to excite in us this sentiment.

Vary the circ.u.mstances as much as you please, place me before an admirable edifice or before a beautiful landscape; represent to my mind the great discoveries of Descartes and Newton, the exploits of the great Conde, the virtue of St. Vincent de Paul; elevate me still higher; awaken in me the obscure and too much forgotten idea of the infinite being; whatever you do, as often as you give birth within me to the idea of the beautiful, you give me an internal and exquisite joy, always followed by a sentiment of love for the object that caused it.

The more beautiful the object is, the more lively is the joy which it gives the soul, and the more profound is the love without being pa.s.sionate. In admiration judgment rules, but animated by sentiment. Is admiration increased to the degree of impressing upon the soul an emotion, an ardor that seems to exceed the limits of human nature? this state of the soul is called enthusiasm:

"Est Deus in n.o.bis, agitante calescimus illo."

The philosophy of sensation explains sentiment, as well as the idea of the beautiful, only by changing its nature. It confounds it with agreeable sensation, and, consequently, for it the love of beauty can be nothing but desire. There is no theory more contradicted by facts.

What is desire? It is an emotion of the soul which has, for its avowed or secret end, possession. Admiration is in its nature respectful, whilst desire tends to profane its object.

Desire is the offspring of need. It supposes, then, in him who experiences it, a want, a defect, and, to a certain point, suffering.

The sentiment of the beautiful is to itself its own satisfaction.

Desire is burning, impetuous, sad. The sentiment of the beautiful, free from all desire, and always without fear, elevates and warms the soul, and may transport it even to enthusiasm, without making it know the troubles of pa.s.sion. The artist sees only the beautiful where the sensual man sees only the alluring and the frightful. On a vessel tossed by a tempest, while the pa.s.sengers tremble at the sight of the threatening waves, and at the sound of the thunder that breaks over their heads, the artist remains absorbed in the contemplation of the sublime spectacle. Vernet has himself lashed to the mast in order to contemplate for a longer time the storm in its majestic and terrible beauty. When he knows fear, when he partic.i.p.ates in the common feeling, the artist vanishes, there no more remains any thing but the man.

The sentiment of the beautiful is so far from being desire, that each excludes the other. Let me take a common example. Before a table loaded with meats and delicious wines, the desire of enjoyment is awakened, but not the sentiment of the beautiful. Suppose that if, instead of thinking of the pleasures which all these things spread before my eyes promise me, I only take notice of the manner in which they are arranged and set upon the table, and the order of the feast, the sentiment of the beautiful might in some degree be produced; but surely this will be neither the need nor the desire of appropriating this symmetry, this order.

It is the property of beauty not to irritate and inflame desire, but to purify and enn.o.ble it. The more beautiful a woman is,--I do not mean that common and gross beauty which Reubens in vain animates with his brilliant coloring, but that ideal beauty which antiquity and Raphael understood so well,--the more, at the sight of this n.o.ble creature is desire tempered by an exquisite and delicate sentiment, and is sometimes even replaced by a disinterested wors.h.i.+p. If the Venus of the Capitol, or the Saint Cecilia, excites in you sensual desires, you are not made to feel the beautiful. So the true artist addresses himself less to the senses than to the soul; in painting beauty he only seeks to awaken in us sentiment; and when he has carried this sentiment as far as enthusiasm, he has obtained the last triumph of art.

The sentiment of the beautiful is, therefore, a special sentiment, as the idea of the beautiful is a simple idea. But is this sentiment, one in itself, manifested only in a single way, and applied only to a single kind of beauty? Here again--here, as always--let us interrogate experience.

When we have before our eyes an object whose forms are perfectly determined, and the whole easy to embrace,--a beautiful flower, a beautiful statue, an antique temple of moderate size,--each of our faculties attaches itself to this object, and rests upon it with an unalloyed satisfaction. Our senses easily perceive its details; our reason seizes the happy harmony of all its parts. Should this object disappear, we can distinctly represent it to ourselves, so precise and fixed are its forms. The soul in this contemplation feels again a sweet and tranquil joy, a sort of efflorescence.

Let us consider, on the other hand, an object with vague and indefinite forms, which may nevertheless be very beautiful: the impression which we experience is without doubt a pleasure still, but it is a pleasure of a different order. This object does not call forth all our powers like the first. Reason conceives it, but the senses do not perceive the whole of it, and imagination does not distinctly represent it to itself. The senses and the imagination try in vain to attain its last limits; our faculties are enlarged, are inflated, thus to speak, in order to embrace it, but it escapes and surpa.s.ses them. The pleasure that we feel comes from the very magnitude of the object; but, at the same time, this magnitude produces in us I know not what melancholy sentiment, because it is disproportionate to us. At the sight of the starry heavens, of the vast sea, of gigantic mountains, admiration is mingled with sadness.

These objects, in reality finite, like the world itself, seem to us infinite, in our want of power to comprehend their immensity, and, resembling what is truly without bounds, they awaken in us the idea of the infinite, that idea which at once elevates and confounds our intelligence. The corresponding sentiment which the soul experiences is an austere pleasure.

In order to render the difference which we wish to mark more perceptible, examples may be multiplied. Are you affected in the same way at the sight of a meadow, variegated in its rather limited dimensions, whose extent the eye can easily take in, and at the aspect of an inaccessible mountain, at the foot of which the ocean breaks? Do the sweet light of day and a melodious voice produce upon you the same effect as darkness and silence? In the intellectual and moral order, are you moved in the same way when a rich and good man opens his purse to the indigent, and when a magnanimous man gives hospitality to his enemy, and saves him at the peril of his own life? Take some light poetry in which measure, spirit, and grace, everywhere predominate; take an ode, and especially an epistle of Horace, or some small verses of Voltaire, and compare them with the Iliad, or those immense Indian poems that are filled with marvellous events, wherein the highest metaphysics are united to recitals by turns graceful or pathetic, those poems that have more than two hundred thousand verses, whose personages are G.o.ds or symbolic beings; and see whether the impressions that you experience will be the same. As a last example, suppose, on the one hand, a writer who, with two or three strokes of the pen, sketches an a.n.a.lysis of intelligence, agreeable and simple, but without depth, and, on the other, a philosopher who engages in a long labor in order to arrive at the most rigorous decomposition of the faculty of knowing, and unfolds to you a long chain of principles and consequences,--read the _Traite des Sensations_ and _the Critique of Pure Reason_, and, even leaving out of the account the truth and the falsehood they may contain, with reference solely to the beautiful, compare your impressions.

These are, then, two very different sentiments; different names have also been given them: one has been more particularly called the sentiment of the beautiful, the other that of the sublime.

In order to complete the study of the different faculties that enter into the perception of beauty, after reason and sentiment, it remains to us to speak of a faculty not less necessary, which animates them and vivifies them,--imagination.

When sensation, judgment, and sentiment have been produced by the occasion of an external object, they are reproduced even in the absence of this object; this is memory.

Memory is double:--not only do I remember that I have been in the presence of a certain object, but I represent to myself this absent object as it was, as I have seen, felt, and judged it:--the remembrance is then an image. In this last case, memory has been called by some philosophers imaginative memory. Such is the foundation of imagination; but imagination is something more still.

The mind, applying itself to the images furnished by memory, decomposes them, chooses between their different traits, and forms of them new images. Without this new power, imagination would be captive in the circle of memory.

The gift of being strongly affected by objects and reproducing their absent or vanished images, and the power of modifying these images so as to compose of them new ones,--do they fully const.i.tute what men call imagination? No, or at least, if these are indeed the proper elements of imagination, there must be something else added, to wit, the sentiment of the beautiful in all its degrees. By this means is a great imagination preserved and kindled. Did the careful reading of t.i.tus Livius enable the author of the _Horaces_ to vividly represent to himself some of the scenes described, to seize their princ.i.p.al traits and combine them happily? From the outset, sentiment, love of the beautiful, especially of the morally beautiful, were requisite; there was required that great heart whence sprang the word of the ancient Horace.

Let us be well understood. We do not say that sentiment is imagination, we say that it is the source whence imagination derives its inspirations and becomes productive. If men are so different in regard to imagination, it is because some are cold in presence of objects, cold in the representations which they preserve of them, cold also in the combinations which they form of them, whilst others, endowed with a particular sensibility, are vividly moved by the first impressions of objects, preserve strong recollections of them, and carry into the exercise of all their faculties this same force of emotion. Take away sentiment and all else is inanimate; let it manifest itself, and every thing receives warmth, color, and life.

It is then impossible to limit imagination, as the word seems to demand, to images properly so called, and to ideas that are related to physical objects. To remember sounds, to choose between them, to combine them in order to draw from them new effects,--does not this belong to imagination, although sound is not an image? The true musician does not possess less imagination than the painter. Imagination is conceded to the poet when he retraces the images of nature; will this same faculty be refused him when he retraces sentiments? But, besides images and sentiments, does not the poet employ the high thoughts of justice, liberty, virtue, in a word, moral ideas? Will it be said that in moral paintings, in pictures of the intimate life of the soul, either graceful or energetic, there is no imagination?

You see what is the extent of imagination: it has no limits, it is applied to all things. Its distinctive character is that of deeply moving the soul in the presence of a beautiful object, or by its remembrance alone, or even by the idea alone of an imaginary object. It is recognized by the sign that it produces, by the aid of its representations, the same impression as, and even an impression more vivid than, nature by the aid of real objects. If beauty, absent and dreamed of, does not affect you as much as, and more than, present beauty, you may have a thousand other gifts,--that of imagination has been refused you.

In the eyes of imagination, the real world languishes in comparison with its own fictions. One may feel that imagination is his master by the _ennui_ that real and present things give him. The phantoms of imagination have a vagueness, an indefiniteness of form, which moves a thousand times more than the clearness and distinctness of actual perceptions.