The distinguishing characteristics of aesthetic expression observed by us--the pleasurableness of the medium, the enhanced unity--serve intuition as that has been described by us. One of the strongest objections against the theory of art as intuition, as that theory has been developed by Croce, for example, is that it provides no place for charm. Yet without charm there is no complete beauty, and any interpretation of the facts of the aesthetic experience which neglects this element is surely inadequate. But charm although an indispensable, is not an independent, factor in the experience of art; for it serves intuition. It does so in two ways. The charm of the medium, by drawing attention to itself, increases the objectivity of the experience expressed. Even when the experiences felt into color and line and sound are poignantly our own, to live pleasantly in any one of these sensations is to live as an object to oneself, the life sharing the externality of the medium--we put our life out there more readily when it is pleasant there. And the charm of the medium serves intuition in another way. When the activities of thought and feeling and imagination released by the work of art are delightful, they become more delightful still if the medium in which they function is itself delightful. To imagine
Charm"d magic cas.e.m.e.nts, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn
is a pleasure by itself, but more pleasurable, and therefore more spontaneous, because of the melody of sound in which it is enveloped.
And when the activities expressed are not pleasant, the expression of them in a delightful medium helps to induce us to make them our own and accept them notwithstanding. The medium becomes a charming net to hold us, and because of its allurements we give ourselves the more freely to its spirit within. The following, for example, is not an agreeable thought:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.
Yet the expression of this thought is pleasant, among other reasons, because of the rhythmic charm of language. We shall come back to this fact in our chapter on "The Problem of Evil in Aesthetics." There is no contradiction between the fair form of a work of art and its content, however repellent. For if we value the sympathetic knowledge of life, we shall be glad of any means impelling us to undertake what alone can give this--a friendly dwelling with life itself. Thus the decorative and the expressive functions of art are reconciled--pleasure and intuition meet.
Just as from time to time pleasure in sensation has been one-sidedly thought to be the purpose of art, so likewise the unity characteristic of beautiful things. Indeed, beauty and order have become almost synonymous in popular thought. And, to be sure, this unity, as we have already remarked, has its own value; the mind delights in order just for its own sake, and the artist, who is bent on making something worthful on its own account, strives to develop it for that reason.
And yet unity is no more independent of expression and intuition than sensation is; it too enters into their service. Many forms of unity in works of art are themselves media of expression--the simplest and most striking example is perhaps the rhythmical ordering of sounds in poetry and music, the emotional value of which everybody appreciates.
In a later chapter, I shall try to show that the same is true of harmony and balance. In another way, also, unity serves intuition. For the existence of order in an experience is indispensable to that wholeness of view, that mastery in the mind, which is half of intuition. The merely various, the chaotic, the disorganized, cannot be grasped or understood. In order that an experience may be understood, its items must be strung together by some principle in terms of which they may demand each other and const.i.tute a whole. Organization _is_ understanding. Every work of art, every beautiful thing, is organized, and, as we have observed, organized not merely in the thought or other meaning expressed, but throughout, in the sensuous medium as well.
So far the value which we have discovered in artistic expression has been that of delightful and orderly sympathetic vision. This is supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen, the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear and orderly surface of the work of art; the emotions that weighed are lifted out and up into color and line and sound, where the mind can view and master them. Mere life gives place to the contemplation of life; and contemplation imposes on life some of the calm that is its own. The most violent and unruly pa.s.sions may be the material of art, but once they are put into artistic form they are mastered and refined.
"There is an art of pa.s.sion, but no pa.s.sionate art" (Schiller). Through expression, the repression, the obstruction of feeling is broken down; the mere effort to find and elaborate a fitting artistic form for the material diverts the attention and provides other occupation for the mind; an opportunity is given to reflect upon and understand the experience, bringing it somehow into harmony with one"s total life,--through all these means procuring relief. It is impossible to cite the famous pa.s.sage from Goethe"s "Poetry and Truth" too often:--
And thus began that bent of mind from which I could not deviate my whole life through; namely, that of turning into an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied my attention, and of coming to some certain understanding with myself thereupon....
All the works therefore that have been published by me are only fragments of one great confession.
[Footnote: English translation, edited by Parke G.o.dwin, Vol. I, p.66.]
This effect of artistic expression belongs, of course, to other forms of expression. Every confession, every confidential outpouring of emotion, is an example. We have all verified the truth that to formulate feeling is to be free with reference to it; not that we thereby get rid of it, but that we are able to look it in the face, and find some place for it in our world where we can live on good terms with it. The greatest difficulty in bearing with any disappointment or sorrow comes not from the thing itself--for after all we have other things to live for--but from its effect upon the presuppositions, so to speak, of our entire existence. The mind has an unconscious set of axioms or postulates which it a.s.sumes in the process of living; now anything that seems to contradict these, as a great calamity does, by destroying the logic of life, makes existence seem meaningless and corrupts that faith in life which is the spring of action. In order for the health of the mind to be restored, the contradictory fact must be somehow reconciled with the mind"s presuppositions, and the rationality of existence reaffirmed. But an indispensable preliminary to this is that we should clearly envisage and reflect upon the fact, viewing it in its larger relations, where it will lose its overwhelming significance.
Now that is what expression, by stabilizing and clarifying experience, enables us to do.
A great many works of art besides Goethe"s, not merely of lyric poetry, but also of the novel and drama, among them some of the greatest, like the _Divine Comedy_, so far as they spring intimately from the life of the artist, are "fragments of a great confession," and have had the sanitary value of a confession for their creators. It is not always possible to trace the personal feelings and motives lying behind the artist"s fictions; for the suffering soul covers its pains with subtle disguises; yet even when we do not know them, we can divine them. We are certain, for example, that Watteau"s gay pictured visions were the projection--and confession--of his own disappointed dreams.
The great advantage of art over ordinary expression, in this respect, is its universality. Art is the confessional of the race. The artist provides a medium through which all men can confess themselves and heal their souls. In making the artist"s expression ours, we find an equal relief. Who does not feel a revival of some old or present despair of his own when he reads:--
Un grand sommeil noir Tombe sur ma vie; Dormez toute espoir, Dormez toute envie!
Je ne vois plus rien, Je perds la memoire Du mal et du bien....
Oh, la triste histoire!
yet who does not at the same time experience its a.s.suagement? And this effect is not confined to lyrical art, for so far as, in novel and drama, we put ourselves in the place of the dramatis persona, we can pour our own emotional experiences into them and through them find relief for ourselves. Just so, Aristotle recognized the cathartic or healing influence of art, both in music and the drama--"through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." [Footnote: _Poetics,_ 6, 2. _Politics,_ 5, 7.]
The delightsomeness of the work of art and its self-sufficient freedom, standing in contrast with the drab or difficult realities of nature and personal striving, serve also to make of beauty a consoler and healer. In place of a confused medley of sense impressions, art offers orderly and pleasant colors or sounds; instead of a real life of duties hard to fulfill and ambitions painfully accomplished, art provides an imagined life which, while imitating and thus preserving the interest of real life, remains free from its hazards and burdens. I would not base the value of art on the contrast between art and life; yet it is unlikely, I think, if life were not so bound and disordered, that art would seem so free and perfect; and it is often true that those who suffer and struggle most love art best. The unity of the work of art, in which each element suggests another within its world, keeping you there and shutting you out momentarily from the real world to which you must presently return, and the sensuous charm of the medium, fascinating your eyes and ears, bring forgetfulness and a temporary release.
To sum the results of the last two chapters. Art is expression, not of mere things or ideas, but of concrete experience with its values, and for its own sake. It is experience held in a delightful, highly organized sensuous medium, and objectified there for communication and reflection. Its value is in the sympathetic mastery and preservation of life in the mind.
CHAPTER IV
THE a.n.a.lYSIS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: THE ELEMENTS OF THE EXPERIENCE
Thus far we have sought to define art, to form a concrete idea of the experience of art, and to place it in its relations to other facts.
We shall now pa.s.s from synthetic definition to psychological a.n.a.lysis.
We want to pick out the elements of mind entering into the experience of art and exhibit their characteristic relations. In the present chapter we shall concern ourselves chiefly with the elements, leaving the study of most of the problems of structure to the following chapter.
Every experience of art [Footnote: Throughout this discussion, I use "experience of art," "aesthetic experience," and "beauty" with the same meaning.] contains, in the first place, the sensations which are the media of expression. In a painting, for example, there are colors; in a piece of music, tones; in a poem, word-sounds. To this material, secondly, are attached vague feelings. It is characteristic of aesthetic expressions, as we have observed, that their media, quite apart from anything that they may mean or represent, are expressive of moods--the colors of a painting have a _stimmung,_ so have tones and words, when rhythmically composed. The simplest aesthetic experiences, like the beauty of single musical tones or colors, are of no greater complexity; yet almost all works of art contain further elements; for as a rule the sensations do not exist for their own sakes alone, but possess a function, to represent things. The colors of a landscape painting are not only interesting to us as beautiful colors, but as symbols of a landscape; the words of a ballad charm and stimulate us not only through their music, but because of actions or events which they bring before the mind. This involves, psychologically speaking, that certain ideas--of trees and clouds in the painting, of men and their deeds in the poem--are a.s.sociated to the sense elements and const.i.tute their meaning. Such ideas or meanings are the third cla.s.s of elements in the aesthetic experience. But these ideas, in their turn, also arouse emotions, only not of the indefinite sort which belong to the sense elements, but definite, like the emotions aroused by things and events in real life. For example, Rembrandt"s "Man with the Gold Helmet" will not only move us in a vague way through the character and rhythm of its lines and colors, but will, in addition, stimulate sentiments of respect and veneration, similar to those that we should feel if the old warrior were himself before us. In such definite feelings we have, then, a fourth cla.s.s of mental elements. A fifth cla.s.s will make our list complete. It consists of images from the various sense departments--sight, hearing, taste, smell, temperature, movement--which arise in connection with the ideas or meanings, making them concrete and full. For example, some of the colors in a landscape painting will not only give us the idea that there is sunlight there, but will also arouse faint images of warmth, which will make the idea more vivid; other colors, representing the clouds, will produce faint sensations of softness; still others, representing flowers, may produce faint odors.
Let us study sensation as an element in beauty, first. Sensation is the door through which we enter into the experience of beauty; and, again, it is the foundation upon which the whole structure rests.
Without feeling for the values of sensation, men may be sympathetic and intelligent, but they cannot be lovers of the beautiful. They may, for example, appreciate the profound or interesting ideas in poetry, but unless they can connect them with the rhythm-values of the sounds of the words, they have only an intellectual or emotional, not an aesthetic experience.
Yet, despite the omnipresence and supreme worth of sensation in beauty, not all kinds are equally fit for entrance into the experience. From the time of Plato, who writes of "fair sights and sounds" only, vision and hearing have been recognized as the preeminently aesthetic senses.
These senses provide the basis for all the arts--music and poetry are arts of sound; painting, sculpture, and architecture are arts of vision.
And there are good reasons for their special fitness. Most cogent of all is the fact that vision and hearing are the natural media of expression; sounds, be they words or musical tones, convey thoughts and feelings; so do visual sensations--the facial expression or gesture seen communicates the inner life of the speaker; and even abstract colors and s.p.a.ce-forms, like red and the circle, have independent feeling-tones. A taste or a temperature sensation may be pleasant or unpleasant, but has no meaning, either by itself, as a color or a tone has, or through a.s.sociation, as a word has. It has no connection with the life of feeling or of thought. Its chief significance is practical--sweet invites to eating, cold impels to the seeking of a warm shelter, touch is a preliminary to grasping. All the so-called lower senses are bound up with instincts and actions. Of course sights and sounds have also a significance for instinct--the color and form and voice of the individual of the opposite s.e.x, for example. But, before acting on the prompting of instinct, the lover may pause and enjoy the appealing color and form; he may connect his feelings with them and hold on to and delight in the resulting experience--an emotional appreciation of the object may intervene between the stimulus and the appropriate action, and even supplant it. In this way, vision and hearing may free themselves from the merely practical and become autonomous embodiments of feeling. The distance between the seen or heard object and the body is important. The objects of touch and taste, on the other hand, have to be brought into contact with the body; the practical reaction then follows; there is no time during which it may be suspended.
Important also, especially for the beauty of art, is our greater power to control sensations of vision and hearing. Only colors and sounds can be woven into complex and stable wholes. Tastes and odors, when produced simultaneously or in succession, do not keep their distinctness as colors and sounds do, but blur and interfere with each other. No one, however ingenious, could construct a symphony of odors or a picture of tastes. Nevertheless, the possibility of controlling colors and sounds and of creating stable and public objects out of them, is only a secondary reason for their aesthetic fitness. Even if one could construct instruments for the orderly production of tastes and odors--and simple instruments of this kind have been devised--one could not make works of art out of them; for a succession of such sensations would express nothing; they would still be utterly without meaning.
The fundamental reason for the superiority of sights and sounds is their expressiveness, their connection with the life of feeling and thought. They take root in the total self; whereas the other elements remain, for the most part, on the surface.
Under favorable conditions, however, all sensations may enter into the sthetic experience. Despite the close connection between the lower senses and the impulses serving practical life, there is a certain disinterestedness in all pleasant sensations. Fine wines and perfumes offer tastes and odors which are sought and enjoyed apart from the satisfaction of hunger; in dancing, movement sensations are enjoyed for their own sake; in the bath, heat and cold. But, as we have seen, it is not sufficient for a sensation to be free from practical ends in order to become aesthetic; it must be connected with the larger background of feeling; it must be expressive. Now, under certain circ.u.mstances and in particular cases, this may occur, even in the instance of the lower senses. The perfume of flowers, of roses and of violets, has a strong emotional appeal; it is their "soul" as the poets say. The odor of incense in a cathedral may be an important element in devotion, fusing with the music and the architecture. Or recall the odor of wet earth and reviving vegetation during a walk in the woods on a spring morning. Even sensations of taste may become aesthetic.
An oft-cited example is the taste of wine on a Rhine steamer. Guyau, the French poet-philosopher, mentions the taste of milk after a hard climb in the Pyrenees. [Footnote: _Les Problemes de l"esthetique contemporaine_, 8me edition, p. 63.] A drink of water from a clear spring would serve equally well as an example familiar to all. The warmth of a fire, of sunlight, of a cozy room, or the cold of a star-lit winter night have an emotional significance almost, if not quite, equal to that of the visual sensations from these objects. Touch seems to be irretrievably bound up with grasping and using, but the touch of a well-loved person may be a free and glowing experience, sharing with sight in beauty. The movement sensations during a run in the open air or in dancing are not only free from all practical purpose, but are elements in the total animation. And other examples will come to the mind of every reader. [Footnote: Compare Volkelt: _System der Aesthetik_, Bd. I, Zweites Capitel, S. 92.]
As our ill.u.s.trations show, the lower senses enter into the beauty of nature only; they do not enter into the beauty of art. Their beauty is therefore vague and accidental. It usually depends, moreover, upon some support from vision, with the beauty of which it fuses. Apart from the picturesque surroundings seen, the mountain milk and the Rhine wine would lose much of their beauty; the warmth of sunlight or of fire, without the brightness of these objects, the odor of flowers without their form and color, would be of small aesthetic worth. Through connection with vision the lower senses acquire something of its permanence and independence. People differ greatly in their capacity to render the lower senses aesthetic; it is essentially a matter of refinement, of power to free them from their natural root in the practical and instinctive, and lift them into the higher region of sentiment. But every kind of sensation, however low, may become beautiful; this is not to degrade beauty, but to enn.o.ble sensation.
From a psychological standpoint, sensation is the datum of the aesthetic experience, the first thing there, while its power to express depends upon a further process which links it up with thoughts and feelings.
We must inquire, therefore, how this linkage takes place--how, for example, it comes about that the colors of a painting are something more than mere colors, being, in addition, embodiments of trees and sky and foliage, and of liveliness and gayety and other feelings appropriate to a spring landscape. Let us consider the linkage with feeling first.
There are two characteristics of aesthetic feeling in its relation to sensations and ideas which must be taken into account in any explanation; its objectification in them and the universality of this connection. Expression is embodiment. We find gayety in the colors of the painting, joy in the musical tones, happiness in the pictured face, tenderness in the sculptured pose. We hear the feeling in the sounds and see it in the lines and colors. The happiness seems to belong to the face, the joy to the tones, in the same simple and direct fashion as the shape of the one or the pitch of the others. The feelings have become true attributes. It is only by a.n.a.lysis that we pick them out, separate them from the other elements of idea or sensation in the whole, and then, for the purpose of scientific explanation, inquire how they came to be connected. And this connection is not one that depends upon the accidents of personal experience. It is not, for example, like the emotional significance that the sound of the voice of the loved one has for the lover, which even he may some day cease to feel, and which other men do not feel at all. It is rather typified by the emotional value of a melody, which, through psychological processes common to all men, becomes a universal language of feeling.
The work of art is a communicable, not a private expression.
As we have observed, the elements of feeling in the aesthetic experience are of two broad kinds--either vague, when directly linked with the sensuous medium, or else definite, when this linkage is mediated by ideas through which the medium is given content and meaning. The former kind, which I shall consider first, comprises all cases of the emotional expressiveness of the medium itself,--of tones and word-sounds and their rhythms and patterns, of colors and lines and s.p.a.ce-forms and their designs. The detailed study of this expressiveness I shall leave to the chapters on the arts; here I wish merely to indicate the kind of psychological process involved.
In many cases the psychological principle of a.s.sociation operates. The tender expressiveness of certain curved lines, like those of the Greek amphora, for example, is due, partially at least, to a.s.sociation with lines of the human body, with which normally this feeling is a.s.sociated.
The a.s.sociated object, together with its feeling tone, are sufficiently common to the experience of all men to account for the universality of the emotion, and the isolation of the stimulus--abstract line--from its usual context of color and bulk accounts for the vagueness.
Sometimes, on the other hand, expressiveness seems to be due to a direct psychological relation between the sense-stimulus and the emotion. This is almost certainly the case with rhythms, and, as I shall argue in the chapters on painting and music, is at least partially true of colors and tones. The expressiveness is at once too immediate and too universal to depend upon a.s.sociation with definite things and events, or personal, emotional crises. A rhythm, for example, may be exciting the first time it is heard; one does not have to wait to hear it at a battle-charge; a melody may be sad even when one has never heard it sung by chance at parting. Of course the fact that a.s.sociations are not remembered is no proof that they do not operate; but it is difficult to conceive of any which could operate in these cases. For this reason, I think, we must suppose that certain sense-stimuli and combinations of stimuli not only produce in the sensory areas of the brain the appropriate sensations, but that their effects are prolonged, overflowing into the motor channels and there causing a total reaction of the organism, the conscious aspect of which is a vague feeling. The organic resonance is too slight and diffuse to produce a true emotion; hence only a mood results.
In all the representative arts the vague expressiveness of the medium is reinforced through emotions aroused by ideas which interpret sensation as an element of a thing. The green in the painting is not only green, but green of the sea; the red is not only red, but red of the sky; the curved line is not a mere curve, it is the outline of a wave. The totality of colors and lines is not a mere color and line composition, but a marine landscape. The feeling tones of the elements of this complex and of the complex itself are not only those of the colors and lines as such, but of the interpretative ideas as well; which in turn are the same as those of the corresponding real things.
The psychological process is here simple enough. The feeling tone of the sea is carried by the idea of the sea, which now fuses with the green color and wavy lines of the painting.
But in order fully to explain the phenomena of aesthetic expression, it is not sufficient to show how the connection between feeling and sensation and idea takes place; it is necessary, in addition, to explain the nature of this connection. The feeling is not experienced by us as what it is--our reaction to the sensations or represented objects--but rather as an objective quality of them. The sounds are sad, the curve tender, the sea placid and reposeful. Why is this?
The explanation is, I think, as follows. Despite their usual subjectivity, feelings tend to be located in the objective world whenever they are in conflict with or not directly rooted in the personal life or character of the individual. In listening to music, for example, feelings of despair and terror may be aroused in me who am perhaps secure and happy; and even if the feelings are joyous, they are not occasioned by any piece of personal good fortune--my situation in life is the same now as before. Hence, finding no lodgment in the ego, and having to exist somewhere, they seek a domicile in the sounds evoking them. And, in general, works of art arouse but offer no personal occasions for feeling, and therefore absorb it into themselves.
The process of objectification may, however, go further. It often happens in the aesthetic experience that feelings are not objectified alone, but carry with them the idea of the self--I come to feel _myself_ as joyous or despairing in the sounds. The extent to which the idea of the self thus follows the objectified feelings depends largely upon the amount of their reverberation throughout the organism. When this is small, and the feelings are vague and tenuous, as in color appreciation, there is little or no definite projection of the idea of the self; when, on the other hand, it is large and the emotions are strong, as oftentimes in music, where breathing, circulation, hand and foot are affected, then I myself seem to be there,--striving, pursuing, struggling, in the sounds. I am where my body is. The projection of the idea of the self is facilitated for the same reason when the body is actually employed in the creation of the work of art, as in singing and acting. It also occurs more readily when the life expressed in the work of art is akin to the spectator"s. Thus, an emotional and suggestible woman, in watching a fine performance of "Magda," inevitably puts herself in the place of the heroine if she has herself lived through a similar experience. But when the life expressed is strikingly foreign to our own, the projection of the idea of self is more difficult; the duality between subject and object tends to remain.
These phenomena have excited special attention when, as in painting and sculpture and the drama, a human being is represented. Suppose, for example, I see a statue of a runner ready to start. I not only see the form and color of the marble and recognize them as a man"s; I also feel emotions of excitement, tension, and expectation such as I should myself feel were I too posed and waiting to run a race. And these emotions I experience as the man"s, and as his, not in a vague way, but as definitely present in his sculptured form, even in particular parts of it,--in the swelling chest and tightened limbs. Or consider another case. Suppose I see Franz Hals" "Laughing Cavalier." I feel jollity in the face, as the cavalier"s. Yet in both cases I may feel the emotions as also my own--as if I too were about to run or were laughing. And the projection of the idea of the self will occur most readily if I am myself a runner or a jolly person. In both instances, moreover, the process will be mediated by impulses to movements that are the normal accompaniments of the emotions in question. If I observe myself carefully, I may find that my own chest is tending to swell and my own limbs to tighten, in imitation of the runner"s, or my own pupils to dilate and the muscles of my face to wrinkle and to part, in imitation of the Dutchman"s. And these movement-impulses I objectify.
I not only see jollity in the face, but laughter as well; in the statue, not only excitement, but running. And again--where my body is, there am I; so I am jolly with the cavalier and excited with the runner. The psychology of this process is simple enough. In my experience there is a plain connection between the sight of a movement and sensations attendant upon movement, and further, a connection between some of these movements, namely, the expressive movements, and the emotions which they express. In accordance with the law of a.s.sociation by contiguity, whenever any one of several mental elements usually connected together is present in the mind, the others tend to arise also. So here. Seeing the semblance of tight muscles and a smiling face, I feel the emotions which have these visual a.s.sociates, experience the correlated movement-sensations, project them all into the object which initiated the process.
In recent years, a great deal has been made of these movement-sensations in explaining aesthetic feeling. [Footnote: See the discussions in Lee and Thompson: _Beauty and Ugliness_.] Yet in the case of all people who are not strongly of the motor type, people in whose mental make-up movement plays a minor part in comparison with vision and other sensations, they play a secondary role, or even hardly any role at all. Most spectators, indeed, instead of actually making slight movements imitative of the movements seen or represented, and experiencing the corresponding sensations, make no movements at all and simply experience movement images; this subst.i.tution of image for movement probably occurs in the minds of all except the most imitative.
Most people, even of the motor type, do not smile when they see the "Laughing Cavalier" or start to run when they see the statue of the runner; careful observation of themselves would disclose only faint movement images which seem to play about their lips or limbs--mere images of movement have supplanted movements. And many visualists would not find any images at all. However, although the mistake has been committed by some investigators of supposing that everybody experiences movement because they themselves, being of the motor type, do, it cannot be denied, I think, that such people attain to a vividness of aesthetic living not reached by others. They appreciate beauty with their bodies as well as with their souls. And in their case too, as has been shown, aesthetic appreciation is more strongly histrionic--they not only put themselves into the work of art, but the idea of themselves as well.
Following the German school of einfuehlung, I have insisted throughout this discussion on the importance of feeling in the aesthetic experience; yet I do not think the voice of those people can be neglected who claim that their experience with works of art is of slight or no emotional intensity. There are people who would report that they feel no jollity when they see the "Laughing Cavalier," or anguish when they read the Ugolino Canto in the Inferno; yet such people often have a highly developed aesthetic taste. How can this difference be accounted for?
Starting with the emotional appreciation of art as primary, we can account for it in this wise. It is a familiar phenomenon in the mental life for a concept or idea of an emotional experience to take the place of that experience. What man has not rejoiced when the simple and cold judgment, "I suffered then," has come to supplant a recurring torment?