Reflections on a Certain
Book[1]
I
Punctually at five minutes to five Lampe, his
servant, waked professor Kant and by five, in his slippers, dressing-gown and
night-cap, over which he wore his three-cornered hat, he seated himself in his
study ready for breakfast. This consisted of a cup of weak tea and a pipe of
tobacco. The next two hours he spent thinking over the lecture he was to
deliver that morning. Then he dressed. The lecture room was on the ground floor
of his house. He lectured from seven till nine and so popular were his lectures
that if you wanted a good seat you had to be there by six-thirty. Kant, seated
behind a little desk, spoke in a conversational tone, in a low voice, and very
rarely indulged in gesture, but he enlivened his discourse with humour and
abundant illustrations. His aim was to teach his students to think for
themselves and he did not like it when they busied themselves with their quills
to write down his every word.
‘Gentlemen, do not scratch so,’ he said once. ‘I am
no oracle.’
It was his custom to fix his eyes on a student who
sat close to him and judge by the look of his face whether or no he understood what
he said. But a very small thing distracted him. On one occasion he lost the
thread of his discourse because a button was wanting on the coat of one of the
students, and on another when a sleepy youth persistently yawned he broke off
to say:
‘If one cannot avoid yawning, good manners require
that the hand should be placed before the mouth.’
At nine o’clock Kant returned to his room, once more
put on his dressing-gown, his night-cap, his three-cornered hat and his
slippers and studied till exactly a quarter to one. Then he called down to his
cook, told her the hour, dressed and went back to his study to await the guests
he expected to dinner. They were never less than two nor more than five. He
could not bear to eat alone and it is related that once when it happened that
he had no one to bear him company he told his servant to go out into the street
and bring in anyone he could find. He expected his cook to be ready and his
guests to arrive punctually. He was in the habit of inviting them on the day he
wished them to come so that they might not, to dine with him, be tempted to
break a previous arrangement; and though a certain Professor Kraus for some
time dined with him every day but Sunday he never failed to send him an
invitation every morning.
As soon as the guests were assembled Kant told his
servant to bring the dinner and himself went to fetch the silver spoons which
he kept locked up with his money in a bureau in the parlour. The party seated
themselves in the dining-room and with the words: ‘Now, gentlemen,’ Kant set
to. The meal was substantial. It was the only one he ate in the day, and consisted
of soup, dried pulse with fish, a roast, cheese to end with and fruit when in
season. Before each guest was placed a pint bottle of red wine and a pint
bottle of white so that he could drink whichever he liked.
Kant was fond of talking, but preferred to talk
alone, and if interrupted or contradicted was apt to show displeasure; his
conversation, however, was so agreeable that none minded if he monopolised it.
In one of his books he wrote: ‘If a young, inexperienced man enters a company
(especially when ladies are present) surpassing in brilliance his expectations,
he is easily embarrassed when he is to begin to speak. Now, it would be awkward
to begin with an item of news reported in the paper, for one does not see what
led him to speak of that. But as he has just come from the street, the bad
weather is the best introduction to conversation.’ Though at his own table
ladies were never present, Kant made it a rule to start the conversation with
this convenient topic; then he turned to the news of the day, home news and
foreign, and from this went on to discourse of travellers’ tales, and
peculiarities of foreign peoples, general literature and food. Finally he told
humorous stories, of which he had a rich supply and which he told uncommonly
well, so, he said, ‘that the repast may end with laughter, which is calculated
to promote digestion.’ He liked to linger over dinner and the guests did not
rise from table till late. He would not sit down after they had left in case he
fell asleep and this he would not permit himself to do since he was of opinion
that sleep should be enjoyed sparingly, for thus time was saved and so life
lengthened. He set out on his afternoon walk.
He was a little man, barely five feet tall, with a
narrow chest and one shoulder higher than the other, and he was thin almost to
emaciation. He had a crooked nose, but a fine brow and his colour was fresh.
His eyes, though small, were blue, lively and penetrating. He was natty in his
dress. He wore a small blond wig, a black tie, and a shirt with ruffles round
the throat and wrists; a coat, breeches and waistcoat of fine cloth, grey silk
stockings and shoes with silver buckles. He carried his three-cornered hat
under his arm and in his hand a gold-headed cane. He walked every day, rain or
fine, for exactly one hour, but if the weather was threatening his servant
walked behind him with a big umbrella. The only occasion on which he is known
to have omitted his walk is when he received Rousseau’s Emile, and then, unable to tear himself away from it, he remained
indoors for three days. He walked very slowly because he thought it was bad for
him to sweat, and alone because he had formed the habit of breathing through
the nostrils, since thus he thought to avoid catching cold and, had he had a
companion with whom courtesy would oblige him to speak, he would have been constrained
to breathe through his mouth. He invariably took the same walk, along the
Linden Allee, and this, according to Heine, he strolled up and down eight
times. He issued from his house at precisely the same hour, so that the people
of the town could set their clocks by it. When he came home he returned to his
study and read and wrote letters till the light failed. Then, as was his habit,
fixing his eyes on the tower of a neighbouring church, he pondered over the
problems that just then occupied him. A story is attached to this: it appears
that one evening he noticed that he could no longer see the tower, for some
poplars had grown so tall that they hid it. It completely upset him, but
fortunately the owners of the poplars consented to cut off their tops so that
he could continue to reflect in comfort. At a quarter to ten he suspended his
arduous labour and by ten was safely tucked up in bed.
But one day somewhere between the middle and the end
of July, in the year 1789, when Kant stepped out of his house to take his
afternoon walk, instead of turning towards the Linden Allee he took another
direction. The inhabitants of Königsberg were astounded and they said to one
another that something must have happened in the world of shattering
consequence. They were right. He had just received the news that on the
fourteenth of July that Paris
Kant was born in very humble circumstances. His
father, a harness maker, was a man of high character, and his mother a deeply
religious woman. Of them he said: ‘They gave me a training which in a moral
point of view could not have been better, and for which, at every remembrance
of them, I am moved with the most grateful emotions.’ He might have gone
further and said that the rigid pietism of his mother had no small influence on
the system of philosophy he eventually developed. He went to school when he was
eight and at sixteen entered the University
of Königsberg
‘Friend, why will you disturb the ancient rust?’ he
asked. ‘Is not such a hanging, which arose of its own accord, better than one
which is purchased?’
Though he lived to be eighty, he never went more than
sixty miles away from the town in which he was born. He suffered from frequent
indispositions and was seldom free from pain, but he was able by the exertion
of his will to turn his attention away from his feelings just as though they
did not concern him. ‘He was accustomed to say that one should know how to
adapt oneself to one’s body.’ He was of a cheerful disposition, amiable to all,
and considerate; but he was punctilious. He expected the same deference to be
paid to him as he paid to others. So when his celebrity made people eager to
meet him and a common acquaintance tried to arrange that they should do so by
inviting him to his own house he would not consent to go till, however
distinguished they were, they had paid him a visit of courtesy.
II
I have given this brief account of what sort of man
Kant was, and what sort of life he led, in the hope of sufficiently whetting
the readers’ interest in this great philosopher to induce him to have patience
with me while I submit to him the reflections that have occurred to me during
the reading of a book of his with the somewhat forbidding title of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It deals with two subjects, aesthetics and teleology, but
I hasten to add that it is only with the first of these, aesthetics, that I
propose to concern myself; and that only with diffidence, for I am well aware
that it may be thought presumptuous in a writer of fiction to concern himself
with such a matter. I do not pretend to be a philosopher, but merely a man who
has throughout his life been profoundly interested in art. All I venture to
claim is that I know from experience something of the process of creation and
as a writer of fiction can look upon the question of beauty, which is of course
the subject matter of aesthetics, with impartiality. Fiction is an art, but an
imperfect one. The great novels of the world may deal with all the passions to
which man is subject, discover the depths of his variable and disconsolate
soul, analyse human relations, describe the civilisation or create immortal
characters; it is only by a misuse of the word that beauty can be ascribed to
them. We writers of fiction must leave beauty to the poets.
But before I begin to speak of Kant’s aesthetic ideas
I must tell the reader one very odd thing: he appears to have been entirely
devoid of aesthetic sensibility. One of his biographers writes as follows: ‘He
never seemed to pay much attention to paintings and engravings, even of a
superior kind. In galleries and rooms containing much admired and highly
praised collections, I never noticed that he specially directed his attention
to the pictures, or in any way gave evidence of his appreciation of the
artist’s skill.’ He was not what was called in the eighteenth century a man of
feeling. Twice he thought seriously of marrying, but he took so long to
consider the advantages and disadvantages of the step he had in mind that in
the interval one of the young women he had his eye on married somebody else and
the other left Königsberg before he reached a decision. I think this argues
that he was not in love, for when you are, even if you are a philosopher, you
have no difficulty in finding very good reasons for doing what your
inclinations prompt. His two married sisters lived in Königsberg. Kant never
spoke to them for twenty-five years. The reason he gave for this was that he
had nothing to say to them. This seems sensible enough, and though we may
deplore his lack of heart, when we remember how often our pusillanimity has led
us to rack our brains in the effort to make a conversation with persons with
whom we have nothing in common but a tie of blood, we cannot but admire his
strength of mind. He had intimate acquaintances rather than friends. When they
were ill, he did not care to go to see them, but sent every day to enquire
after them, and when they died he put them out of his mind with the words: ‘Let
the dead rest with the dead.’ He was neither impulsive nor demonstrative, but
he was kindly, within his scanty means generous, and obliging. His intelligence
was great, his power of reasoning impressive, but his emotional nature was
meagre.
It is all the more remarkable then that, writing on a
subject which depends on feeling, he should have said so much that was wise and
even profound. He saw, of course, that beauty does not reside in the object. It
is the name we give to the specific feeling of pleasure which the object gives
us. He saw also that art can give beauty to things which are in nature ugly or
displeasing, but he made the reservation, which certain modern painters might
well bear in mind, that some things may be so ugly in their representation as
to excite disgust. And in suggesting that when experience proves too
commonplace the artist by means of his imagination may work up the material he
borrows from nature into something that surpasses nature, Kant may almost be
supposed to have foreseen the non-representational art of modern day.
Now, the ideas of a philosopher are largely
conditioned by his personal characteristics, and, as one might have expected,
Kant’s approach to the problems of aesthetics is rigidly intellectual. His aim
is to prove that the delight we take in beauty is one of mere reflection. It is
interesting to see how he sets about doing this. He starts by making a
distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. The pleasure which the
beautiful occasions is independent of all interest. The agreeable is what the
senses find pleasing in sensation. The agreeable arouses inclination, and
inclination is bound up with desire, and so with interest. A trivial
illustration may make Kant’s point clear: when I look at the Doric temples at Paestum the pleasure they
afford me is quite obviously independent of all interest and so I may safely
call them beautiful; but when I look at a ripe peach the pleasure it causes me
is not disinterested, for it excites in me a desire to eat it and therefore I
am bound to call it no more than agreeable. The senses of man differ and what
causes me pleasure may leave you indifferent. Each of us may judge the
agreeable according to his own taste and there is no disputing that. The
satisfaction it gives is mere enjoyment, and so, states Kant, has no worth.
That is a hard saying, which, I think, can only be explained by his conviction
that the faculties of the mind alone have real value. But now, since beauty has
no connection with sensation (which is bound up with interest) colour, charm
and emotion, which are mere matters of sensation and so only cause enjoyment,
have nothing to do with it. This of course is rather startling, but why Kant
makes a statement at first sight so outrageous is plain. Since the senses of
men differ, if the beautiful depends on the senses your judgement and mine are
as good as that of anybody else, and aesthetics will not exist. If a judgement
of taste, or what, I think, we would now more conveniently call appreciation of
the beautiful, is to have any validity it must depend not on anything so
capricious as feeling, but on a mental process. When you come to consider an
object with a view to deciding its aesthetic value, you must discard
everything, its colour, such charm as it has, the emotions it excites in you,
and attend only to its form; and if then you become aware of a harmony between
your imagination and your understanding (both faculties of the mind) you will
receive a sensation of pleasure and be justified in calling the object
beautiful.
But then, having performed this singular operation,
you may demand that everyone else should agree with you. The judgment that a
thing is beautiful, though a subjective judgment since it is based not on a
concept, but on the feeling of pleasure it arouses, has universal validity, and
you have the right to claim that everyone ought
to find beautiful what you find beautiful. In fact it is in a way the duty of
others to fall in with your judgment. Kant justifies this contention thus: ‘For
where anyone is conscious that his delight in an object is with him independent
of interest, it is inevitable that he should look on the object as one
containing a ground of delight for all men. For, since the delight is not based
on any inclination of the subject (or on any other deliberate interest), but
the subject feels himself completely free in respect of the liking which he
accords to the object, he can find as the reason for his delight no personal
conditions to which his own subjective self might alone be party. Hence he must
regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in every other person; and
therefore he must believe that he has reason for demanding a similar delight
from everyone.’
Yet it looks as though Kant had an inkling that this
was rather thin. It may even have occurred to him that the imagination and the
understanding were in no better case than the senses, for it is obvious that
these two faculties of the mind are not the same in all men. There must have
been many people in Königsberg who had more imagination than our philosopher,
but none who had so solid an understanding. Kant is forced to presuppose that
we can only exact from others agreement with our estimate of what is beautiful
by a sense common to all men. But he admits almost in the same breath that
people are often mistaken in judging that an object is beautiful it does not
seem to get us much further. And in another place he remarks that an interest
in the beautiful is not common: one would have thought that if there were a sense
common to all men, all men should be interested in the beautiful. Indeed in the
section of his treatise called Dialectic
of Aesthetic Judgment he states that the only means of saving the claim of
the judgment of taste, that is the appreciation of beauty, to universal
validity is by supposing a concept of the supersensible lying at the basis of
the object and of the judging subject; if I understand aright he means by this that
the object of beauty and the person who considers it are both appearances of reality,
and reality is one. They are, as it were, a coat and a pair of trousers made
out of a bolt of the same fabric. I find this unconvincing. The assumption that
in the appreciation of beauty there is a sense common to all men looks to me
like nothing more than a futile attempt to prove something that all experience
refutes. If the pleasure that is afforded by a beautiful object is subjective, and
that of course Kant insists upon, it must depend on the idiosyncrasies of the
observer, idiosyncrasies of the mind as well as idiosyncrasies of the senses;
and though we, inheritors of Hebraic, Greek and Roman civilisation, have many
traits in common we are none of us alike as two peas. Though we may agree more
or less on the beauty of certain familiar things, and then perhaps only because
they are familiar, it is only natural that our judgments of the beautiful should
be as diverse as those of the agreeable admittedly are.
Kant then claimed that when you have decided that an
object is beautiful by the process I have just described, you can not only
impute the pleasure (a feeling) you experience to everyone else, but also
suppose that your pleasure (a feeling, I repeat) is universally communicable. This
seems very strange. I should have thought the peculiarity of feeling is that it
is not communicable. If I am looking at Giorgione's Virgin Enthroned at Castel Franco, I can, if I have any gift of expression, tell you what I feel about it, but I
cannot make you feel my feeling. I
can tell you I am in love; I can even describe the feelings that my love
excites in me; but I cannot communicate my love, a feeling, to you. If I could
you would be in love with the object of my affections, and that might be highly
embarrassing to me. Our feelings are surely conditioned by our dispositions. So
much is this so that I do not think it an exaggeration to say that no two
persons see exactly the same picture or read exactly the same poem. I can only
suppose that Kant came by this notion of the universal communicability of
feeling owing to his conviction that feeling was negligible except in so far as
by means of the imagination and the understanding it gave rise to ideas; and since
the ideas by the nature of our cognitive faculties are universally communicable, the feeling that occasioned them must
be so too. He was not, as I ventured at the beginning of this essay to point
out, a man who felt with intensity. That may, perhaps, be the reason why he
insisted that the appreciation of beauty is merely contemplative.
But contemplation is a passive state. It does not
suggest the thrill, the excitement, the breathlessness, the agitation with
which the sight of a beautiful picture, the reading of a beautiful poem, must
affect a person of aesthetic sensibility. It may well describe his reaction to
the agreeable, but surely not to the beautiful. It is difficult for me to
believe that any such person can read certain passages of Shakespeare or
Milton, listen to certain pieces by Mozart or Beethoven, see certain pictures
by El Greco or Chardin
with so tepid a feeling that it can be justly called contemplation.
III
Kant’s doctrine of the communicability of feeling
leads not unnaturally to a consideration of the question of communication. It
is obvious that the artist, be he poet, painter or composer, makes a
communication, but from this the writers on aesthetics infer that this is his
intention. There I think they are mistaken. They have not sufficiently examined
the process of creation. I don't believe the artist who sets to work to create
a work of art has any such purpose as they ascribe to him. If he has he is a
didactic or a propagandist, and as such not an artist. I know what happens to a
writer of fiction. An idea comes to him, he knows not whence, and so he gives
it the rather grand name of inspiration. It is as slight a thing as the tiny
foreign body that finds its way into the oyster’s shell and so creates the
disturbance that will result in the creation of a pearl. For some reason the
idea excites him, his imagination goes to work, out of his unconscious arise
thoughts and feelings, characters crowd upon him and events suggest themselves
that will express them, for character is expressed by action, not by
description, till at length he is possessed of a shapeless mass of material.
This sometimes, but not always, falls into a pattern that enables him to see a
path, as it were, which he can follow through the jungle of this confused medley
of feelings and ideas till he is so obsessed by the muddle of it that to
liberate his soul from a burden that has grown intolerable he is constrained to
put it all down on paper. Having done this he regains his freedom. What
communication the reader gets from it is not his affair.
So it is, I surmise, with the landscape painter, the
young Monet for
instance or Pissarro;
he cannot tell you why some scene, the bend of a river, say, or a road under
the snow, bordered by leafless trees, gives him a peculiar thrill so that the
creative instinct is stirred in him and he has the feeling that here is
something that he can deal with, and because nature has made him a painter he
is able to transmute his emotion into an arrangement of colour and form that
does not satisfy his sensibility, for I think it doubtful whether the artist,
whatever art he practises, ever achieves the full result he saw in his mind’s
eye, yet allays the urge of creation which is at once his delight and his
torment. But I do not believe it has ever entered his head that he was making a
communication to the persons who afterwards see his picture.
So it is, I submit, with the poet and the composer of
music, and if I have spoken of painting rather than of poetry or music it is,
frankly, because it is not so difficult to deal with. A picture can be seen at
once. Not that I mean a glance will give you all that it has to give. That you
can get, if you get it at all, only by giving it your continued and renewed
attention. Poetry deals with words and words have overwhelming associations,
associations different in different countries and in different cultures. Words
affect by their meaning as well as by their sound, and so are addressed to the
mind as well as to the sensibility. The only meaning of a picture is the
aesthetic delight it gives you. In any case I would not venture to speak of
music; the peculiar gift which enables someone to invent it is to me the most
mysterious of the processes which produce a work of art. One is taken aback at
first to find that Kant placed music (along with cooking) among the inferior
arts because, though perhaps the highest among the arts which are valued for
their agreeableness, it merely plays with sensation. It was natural that he
should do this since he estimated the worth of the arts by the culture they
supply to the mind. He has, however, a good word to say of poetry because it
gives the imagination an impetus to bring more thought into play than allows of
being brought into the embrace of a concept, or therefore being definitely
formulated in language; but ‘among the formative arts,’ he writes ‘I would give
the palm to painting because it can penetrate much further into the region of
ideas.’
IV
And now, since this does not pretend to be a
philosophical dissertation, but merely a discourse on a subject that happens to
interest me, I propose to permit myself a digression. The intellectual attitude
towards aesthetic appreciation is that of pretty well all the writers on
aesthetics. This is perhaps inevitable, for they are compelled to reason about
what has little or nothing to do with reason, but almost only with feeling. It
was certainly the attitude of Roger Fry. He was a charming man, a lucid writer
and an indifferent painter. He rightly earned a high reputation as a critic of
art, but, as all but few of us are, he was swayed by certain prejudices of his
time. He claimed that a work of art should be conceived in response to a free
aesthetic impulse and so condemned the patron unless he allowed the artist to
go his own way regardless of the patron’s wishes. He had little patience with
portraiture because, according to him, people have their portraits painted for
social prestige or for purposes of publicity. He regarded the painters who
accept such commissions as useless, probably mischievous, parasites upon
society. He divided works of art into two distinct classes – ‘one in which for
some reason the artist can express his genuine aesthetic impulse, the other in
which the artist uses his technical skill to gratify a public incapable of responding
to aesthetic appeal.’ This seems very high-handed. Because the Pharaohs had
colossal statues made of themselves presumably with the same intention as
Mussolini and Hitler had when they plastered walls with portraits of themselves,
namely to impress themselves on the imagination of their subjects, there are Bellini's Doge, Titian’s Man with a Glove, Velasquez' Pope Innocent, to prove that a portrait can be a work of art and a thing of
beauty. We can only suppose that they satisfied their patrons. It is unlikely
that had Philip IV been displeased with the portraits Velasquez painted of him,
he would have sat to him so often.
The flaw in Roger Fry’s argument lies in the
presumption that the motives which have led the artist to create a work of art
are any business of the critic’s or of the layman’s. He may, if he is a
novelist, start writing a novel to ridicule another novelist, as Fielding
started to write Joseph Andrews to
mock at Richardson
A generation or two ago a claim was made that
painting was an esoteric business that only painters could adequately
appreciate since they alone knew its technique. This claim, probably first made
in France, where during the last hundred years most aesthetic ideas have
arisen, was launched in England, I believe, by Whistler. He asserted that the
layman was by his nature a Philistine, and his duty was to accept what the
artist oracularly told him. His only function was to buy the painter’s picture
in order to provide him with bread and butter, but his appreciation was as
impertinent as his censure. That was a farrago of nonsense. There is nothing
mystical about technique; it is merely the name given to the processes by means
of which the artist achieves the effects he aims at. Every art has its
technique. It has nothing to do with the layman. He is only concerned with the
result. When you look at a picture, if you are of a curious turn of mind it may
interest you to examine the way in which the painter has achieved integration
through relations of colour, line, light and space; but that is not the
aesthetic communication which it has to give you. You do not look at a picture
only with your eyes, you look at it with your experience of life, your
instinctive likes and dislikes, your habits and feelings, your associations, in
fact with the whole of your personality. And the richer your personality the
richer is the communication the picture has to give you. The notion, foolish to
my mind, that painting is a mystery accessible only to the initiated, is flattering
to the painters. It has led them to be scornful of the writers on art who see
in pictures what from their professional standpoint is of no interest. I think
they are wrong. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is not a
picture that everyone can care for now, but we know the communication it had to
make to Walter Pater; it was not a purely aesthetic communication, but it is
surely not the least of this particular picture’s merits that it had it to make
to a man of peculiar sensibility.
There is a painting by Degas in the Louvre which is
popularly known as L'Absinthe, but in
fact represents an engraver well-known in his day and an actress called Ellen
André. There is no reason to suppose that they were more disreputable than
other persons of their calling. They are seated side by side at a marble-topped
table in a shabby bistro. The surroundings
are sordid and vulgar. A glass of absinthe stands before the actress. Their
dress is slovenly and you can almost smell the stench of their unwashed bodies
and grubby clothes. They are slumped down on the banquette in an alcoholic stupor. Their faces are heavy and sullen.
There is an air of apathetic hopelessness in their listless attitude and you
would say that they were dully resigned to sink deeper and deeper in shameless
degradation. It is not a pretty picture, nor a pleasing one, and yet it is surely
one of the great pictures of the world. It offers the authentic thrill of
beauty. Of course I can see how admirable the composition is, how pleasing the
colour and how solid the drawing, but to me there is much more in it than that.
As I stand before it, my sensibilities quickened, at the back of my mind,
somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious, I become aware of Verlaine’s poems, and of Rimbaud’s, of Manette Salomon, of the quais along the Seine
with their second-hand bookstalls, of the Boulevard St. Michel and the cafés
and bistros in old mean streets. I
daresay that from the standpoint of aesthetic appreciation, which should be
occupied only with aesthetic values, this is reprehensible. Why should I care?
My delight in the picture is enormously increased. Is it possible that a
picture which gives one so much can have been painted, as the distinguished
critic, Camille Mauclair,
says it was, because Degas was fascinated by the paradoxical perspective of the
marble-topped tables in the foreground?
But now I must break off to make a confession to the
reader. I have glibly used the word Beauty
as though I knew just what it meant. I’m not at all sure that I do. It
obviously means something, but exactly what? When we say that something is
beautiful can we really say why we say it? Do we mean anything more than that
it happens to give us a peculiar feeling? I have noticed that the word has
bothered the writers on aesthetics not a little; some indeed have sought to
avoid it altogether. Some have claimed that it resides in harmony, symmetry and
formal relations. Others have identified it with truth and goodness; others
again have held that it is merely that which is pleasant. Kant has given
several definitions of it, but they all tend to substantiate his claim that the
pleasure which beauty affords us is a pleasure of reflection. For all I have
been able to discover to the contrary he seems to have believed that beauty was
immutable, a belief, I think, generally shared by the writers on aesthetics.
Keats expressed the same idea in the first line of Endymion:
‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ By this he may have meant one of two things:
one, that so long as an object retains its beauty it is a pleasure; but that is
what I believe philosophers call an analytical proposition, and tells us
nothing that we didn’t know before, since the characteristic of beauty is that
it affords pleasure. Keats was too intelligent to make a statement so trite and
I can only think he meant that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever because it
retains its beauty for ever. And there he was wrong. For beauty is as
transitory as all other things in this world. Sometimes it has a long life, as
Greek sculpture has had owing to the prestige of Greek culture and owing to its
representations of the human form which have provided us with an ideal of human
beauty; but even Greek sculpture, owing to the acquaintance we have now made
with Chinese and Negro art, has with the artists themselves lost much of its
appeal. It is no longer a source of inspiration. Its beauty is dying. An
indication of this may be seen in the movies. Directors no longer choose their
heroes as they did twenty years ago for their classical beauty, but for their
expression and such evidence as their outward seeming offers of character and
personality. They would not do this unless they had discovered that classical
beauty had lost its allure. Sometimes the life of beauty is short. We can all
remember pictures and poems which gave us the authentic thrill of beauty in our
youth, but from which beauty has now seeped out as water seeps out of a porous
jar. Beauty depends on the climate of sensibility and this changes with the
passing years. A different generation has different needs and demands a
different satisfaction. We grow tired of something we know too well and ask for
something new. The eighteenth century saw nothing in the paintings of the Italian
primitives but the fumblings of immature, unskilful artists. Were those
pictures beautiful then? No. It is we who have given them their beauty and it
is likely enough that the qualities we find in them are not the qualities which
appealed to the lovers of art, long since dead, who saw them when they were
first painted. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Second Discourse,
recommended Ludovico Caracci as a model for style in painting, in which he thought he approached
the nearest to perfection. ‘His unaffected breadth of light and shadow,’ he
said, ‘the simplicity of colouring, which, holding its proper rank, does not
draw aside the least part of the attention from the subject, and the solemn
effect of that twilight which seems diffused over his pictures, appear to me to
correspond with grave and dignified subjects, better than the more artificial
brilliancy of sunshine which enlightens the pictures of Titian.’ Hazlitt was a
great critic and enough of a painter to paint a tolerable portrait of Charles
Lamb. Of Correggio
he wrote that he ‘possessed a greater variety of excellence in the different
departments of his art than any other painter.’ ‘Who can think of him,’ he asks
rhetorically, ‘without a swimming of the head?’[2]
We can. Hazlitt considered Guercino’s Endymion one of the finest pictures
in Florence
V
I have suggested that there is between the creation
of beauty and the appreciation of it a disjunction which no bridge can span,
and from what I have said the reader will have gathered that I think the
appreciation is enhanced by, if not actually dependent upon, the culture of the
individual. That is what the connoisseurs of art and the lovers of beauty
claim, and they claim also that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a rare
one. If they are right it demolishes Tolstoi’s contention that real beauty is
accessible to everyone. Perhaps the most interesting part of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is the
long section he devotes to the sublime. I need only trouble the reader with his
conclusions. He points out that the peasant who lives among mountains merely
looks upon them as horrible and dangerous (as we know the ancient travellers
did) and the sea-faring man looks upon the sea as a treacherous and uncertain
element which it is his business to contend with. To receive from the snow-clad
mountains and the stormtossed sea the specific pleasure which we call the
sublime demands a susceptibility to ideas and a certain degree of culture. That
has an air of truth. Is the farmer conscious of the beauty of the landscape in
the sight of which he earns his daily bread? I should say not; and that is
natural, for the appreciation of beauty, it is agreed, must not be affected by
practical considerations, and he is concerned to plough a field or to dig a
ditch. The appreciation of the beauty of nature is a recent acquisition of the
human race. It was created by the painters and writers of the Romantic Era. It
needs leisure and sophistication. In order to appreciate it, then, not only
disinterestedness is needed, but culture and a susceptibility to ideas.
Unwelcome as the idea may be, I don’t see how one can escape admitting that
beauty is accessible but to the chosen few.
But to admit that excites in me a feeling of deep
discomfort. More than twenty-five years ago I bought an abstract picture by Fernand
Léger. It was an arrangement of squares, oblongs and spheres in black, white,
grey and red, and for some reason he had called it Les Toits de Paris. I did not think it beautiful, but I found it ingenious
and decorative. I had a cook then, a bad-tempered and quarrelsome woman, who
would stand looking at this picture for quite long periods in a state of
something that looked very like rapture. I asked her what she saw in it. ‘I
don’t know,’ she answered, ‘mais ça me plait, ça me dit quelque chose.’ It
seemed to me that she was receiving as genuine an aesthetic emotion as I
flattered myself I received from El Greco's Crucifixion in the Louvre. I am led by this (a
single instance, of course) to suggest that it is a very narrow point of view
which claims that the specific pleasure of artistic appreciation can only be
felt by the privileged few. It may well be that the pleasure is subtler, richer
and more discriminating in someone whose personality is cultivated, whose
experience is wide, but why should we suppose that someone else, less
fortunately circumstanced, cannot feel a pleasure as intense and as fruitful?
The object that in the latter gives rise to the pleasure may be what the
aesthete considers no great shakes. Does that matter? It appears that the urn
that inspired Keats to write his great ode was a mediocre piece of Greco-Roman
sculpture, yet it gave him the aesthetic thrill which, being what he was,
occasioned one of the most beautiful poems in the English language. Kant put the
matter succinctly when he said that beauty does not reside in the object. It is
the name we give to the specific pleasure which the object gives us. Pleasure
is a feeling I can see no reason why there should not be as many people capable
of enjoying the specific pleasure of beauty as there are who are capable of
feeling grief or joy, love, tenderness and compassion. I am inclined to say
that Tolstoi was right when he said that real beauty is accessible to everyone
if you leave out the word real. There
is no such thing as real beauty. Beauty is what gives you and me and everyone
else that sense of exultation and liberation which I have already spoken of.
But in discourse it is more convenient to use the word as if it were a material
entity, like a chair or a table, existing in its own right, independent of the
observer, and that I shall continue to do.
VI
Now, after this long digression from my subject,
which is Kant’s aesthetic ideas, I must attempt to cope with what I have found
the most difficult part of his treatise, and that is his discussion of
purposiveness and purpose in relation to beauty. And what makes it more
difficult is that he seems sometimes to use the words as though they were
synonymous. (The German words are Zweck
and Zweckmässigkeit.) In this essay,
designed to interest the general reader, I have been at pains to avoid the
technical terms of philosophy, but now I must ask his indulgence while I give
him Kant’s definition of purpose and purposiveness. It runs as follows:
‘Purpose is the object of a concept in so far as this concept is regarded as
the cause of the object, that is to say as the real ground of its possibility. The
causality of a concept in respect of its object is its purposiveness.’ Kant
gives an illustration which makes the matter clear: a man builds a house in
order to rent it. That is his purpose in building it. But the house would not
have been built at all unless he had conceived that he would receive rent from
it. This concept is the purposiveness of building the house. There is a certain
humour, probably unconscious, in one example which our philosopher gives of
purposiveness in nature: ‘The vermin that torment men in their clothes, their
hair, or their bed may be according to a wise appointment of nature a motive of
cleanliness which is in itself an important means for the preservation of
health.’ But that these vermin have been created for this purpose cannot be a
conviction, but at most a persuasion. It may be no more than a wholesome
illusion. The purposiveness which we seem to find in nature may be occasioned
only by the peculiar constitution of our cognitive faculties. It is a principle
we make use of to provide ourselves with concepts in the vast multiplicity of
nature, so that we may take our bearings in it and enable our understanding to
feel itself at home in it.
Fortunately for myself I am concerned with this
principle in so far as it is related to Kant’s aesthetic ideas. Beauty, he
states, is the form of purposiveness in an object so far as it is perceived in it
apart from the representation of a purpose. This purposiveness, however, is not
real; we are forced by the subjective needs of our nature to ascribe it to the
object which we call beautiful. Since I am more at ease with the concrete than
with the abstract I have tried to think of an object of beauty which has
purposiveness apart from purpose, and that is not so easy since the simplest
definition of purposiveness is that it is characterised by purpose. I offer an
illustration with diffidence. A rice bowl of the Yung Lo period, of the
porcelain known as eggshell, is so wafer-thin, so fragile, so delicate in
texture that its purpose is evidently not to contain rice. Such a purpose would
be of practical interest and the appreciation of beauty is essentially disinterested.
Furthermore, there is an admirably drawn design under the glaze which can only
be seen when you hold the bowl, empty, up to the light. What other
purposiveness can it have but to please the eye? But if by the purposiveness of
an object of beauty Kant had merely meant that it affords pleasure he would
surely have said so. I have an inkling that at the back of his great mind was a
disinclination to admit that pleasure was the only effect to be obtained from
the consideration of a great work of art.
Pleasure has always had a bad name. Philosophers and
moralists have been unwilling to own that it is good and only to be eschewed
when its consequences are harmful. Plato, as we know, condemned art unless it
led to right action. Christianity with its contempt of the body and its
obsession with sin viewed pleasure with apprehension and its pursuit unworthy
of a human being with an immortal soul. I suppose that the disapproval with
which pleasure is regarded arises from the fact that when people think of it,
it is in connection with the pleasures of the body. That is not fair. There are
spiritual pleasures as well as physical pleasures, and if we must allow that
sexual intercourse, as St. Augustine
Kant says that the artist produces a work of art with
no other purpose than to make it beautiful. I do not believe that is so; I
believe that the artist produces a work of art to exercise his creative
faculty, and whether what he creates is beautiful is a fortuitous result in
which he may well be uninterested. We know from Vasari that Titian was a
fashionable and prolific portrait painter. His experience was wide and he knew
his business, so that when he came to paint the Man with a Glove it is probable enough that he was concerned only
to get a good likeness and satisfy his client. It was a happy accident that,
owing to his own great gifts and the natural grace of his sitter, he achieved
beauty. Milton
I have not thought it necessary in this discourse to
touch upon Kant’s discussion of the sublime, though, as he insists, our
judgments about the beautiful and the sublime are akin, since both are
aesthetic judgments. The purposiveness we are obliged to ascribe to both
(unfortunately Kant does not tell us why) is entirely subjective. ‘We call
things sublime,’ he says ‘on the ground that they make us feel the sublimity of
our own minds.’ Our imagination cannot cope with the feeling that arises in us
when we contemplate the raging, storm-tossed sea and the massed immensities of
the Himalayas , with their eternal snows. We
are made to feel our insignificance, but at the same time we are exalted,
since, awe-struck as we may be, we are conscious that we are not limited to the
world of sense, but can raise ourselves above it. ‘Nature may deprive us of
everything, but it has no power over our moral personality.’ So Pascal said: ‘L’homme n’est qu’un roseau ,
le plus foible de le nature, mais c’est un roseau
Kant, as we know, was a moralist. ‘Reason,’ he says,
‘can never be persuaded that the existence of a man who merely lives for
enjoyment has worth in itself.’ That we may all agree to. Then he says: ‘If the
beautiful arts are not brought into more or less combination with moral ideas…
they serve only as a distraction, of which we are the more in need the more we
avail ourselves of them to disperse the discontent of the mind with itself, so
that we render ourselves even more useless and more discontented.’ He goes even
further when at the very end of his treatise he says that the true introduction
to the appreciation of beauty is the development of the moral ideas and the
culture of moral feeling. It is not for me who am no philosopher to suggest
that by his difficult proposition that beauty is the form of the purposiveness of
an object so far as this is perceived without any presentation of purpose, Kant
may have meant something other than what he said, but, I must confess, it seems
to me that if the purposiveness which we are apparently forced to ascribe to
the work of art lies only in the artist’s intention these scattered
observations of his are somewhat pointless; for what has the artist’s intention
to do with us? We, I repeat, are only concerned with what he has done.
Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by
stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal
there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now
know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one
player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds
and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to
lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. When I was a
small boy at a preparatory school we used to play with steel nibs till the
headmaster discovered that we had somehow turned it into a gambling game,
whereupon he forbade us to play it, and when he caught still doing so, soundly
beat us. The indignant retort to Bentham’s statement was that spiritual
pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those
who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they
acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very
rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and
choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material.
They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is
why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means
merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show
that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose
between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its
pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular
game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and judgement, a
good eye and a cool head. If I get the same amount of pleasure out of playing
it as you get by looking at Titian’s Entombment of Christ in the Louvre, by listening to Beethoven’s Eroica or by reading Eliot’s Ash Wednesday,
how are you going to prove that your pleasure is better and more refined than
mine? Only, I should say, by manifesting that this gift you have of aesthetic
appreciation has a moral effect on your character.
In one place Kant makes the significant remark that ‘connoisseurs
in taste, not only often, but generally are given up to idle, capricious and
mischievous passions’ and that ‘they could perhaps make less claims than the
others to any superiority of attachment to moral principles.’ This was
doubtless true then: it is true now. Human nature changes little. No one can
have lived much in the society of those whom Kant calls connoisseurs of taste,
and whom we may more conveniently call aesthetes, without noticing how seldom
it is that you find in them the modesty, the tolerance, the loving-kindness and
liberality, in short the goodness with which you might have expected their
addiction to spiritual pleasures to inform them. If the delight in aesthetic
appreciation is no more than opium of an intelligentsia it is no more than, as
Kant says, a mischievous distraction. If it is more it should enable its
possessor to acquire virtue. Kant finely says that beauty is the symbol of
morality. Unless the love of beauty ennobles the character, and that is the
only purposiveness of beauty that seems, as far as I can see, important enough
to give it value, then I can’t tell how we can escape from Bentham's
affirmation that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is
nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin.
[1] W. Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood, Vintage Classics, 2001, pp. 131-159; “æ” is replaced with
“ae”, otherwise the text is faithfully reproduced. The collection was first published by William
Heinemann in 1952. The essay was first delivered as a lecture under the title
“Beauty and the Professor” at the Columbia University, New York City, on 2
November 1950. It was rewritten for its publication in book form.
It
is posted here complete as a riposte to the preposterous claims of Anthony
Curtis (“It is not often that we watch Maugham tying himself up into knots and
failing to extricate himself, but the latter part of this essay is one of those
strange occasions.”) and Samuel Rogal (“Essentially, the piece is heavily
biographical; Maugham appears more interested in Kant the eighteenth-century
man than in his philosophy.”); see The Pattern of Maugham (1974) and A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia (1997), respectively.
Cf.
Maugham’s reflections on beauty and artistic communication in chapter 11 of Cake sand Ale (1930), chapter 9 of Don Fernando (1935, rev. 1950), and chapter 76 of The Summing Up (1938)
[2] These quotes – both of them slightly
misquoted! – come from two different and rather obscure essays by Hazlitt.
The first quote – “Correggio,
indeed, possessed a greater variety of excellences
[my italics] in the different departments of his art, than any other painter” – is from Hazlitt’s article on the fine arts
written for Encyclopedia Britannica, or rather for the 1824 supplement to its 4th,
5th and 6th editions; later it was incorporated in the 7th
edition (1842). The piece was based on articles that had appeared in The Champion in 1814 under the title
“Fine Arts. Whether they are promoted by academies and public institutions.”
See The Collected Works of William
Hazlitt, eds. by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, London :
J. M. Dent & Co. / McClure Phillips & Co.: New York
The
second quote – “Who can think of Correggio
[my italics] without a swimming of the head…” – comes from the essay “Originality”. This was first published in The Atlas, 3 January 1830, under the
collective title “Specimens of a Dictionary of Definitions”. See The
Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ibid., pp. 427 & 484. The piece is
reprinted in Essays on Fine Arts, London
Another Hazlittean rave
about Correggio can be found in his essay “Whether Genius is Conscious of Its
Powers” (The Plain Speaker, 1826,
vol. 1, XII).
[3] This is accurately quoted from Hazlitt’s Notes on a Journey through France and Italy
(1826), chapter XVII. See The Collected
Works of William Hazlitt, ibid., p. 224.
[4] “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing
in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself
to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the
universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which
killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe
has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.” (Pascal, Pensées,
VI, 347.)
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