BOOKS.

PROFESSOR KNIGHT ON /ESTHETICS.*

PROFESSOR KNIGHT has written a very original and. able book on the philosophy of the beautiful. Especially the chapter on "Suggestions towards a more complete Theory of Beauty," and the chapter on "Poetry," seem to am con- siderable additions to English philosophy. Professor Knight has studied carefully almost all the fine arts ; and the present writer must confess that he is entirely unable to follow the chapter on "Music," which probably, however, to the true musician, would seem as instructive and interesting as any other. But we feel very little doubt that there is not a single chapter in this thoughtful and tersely written volume which is not a genuine contribution to the study of testheties. We will confine ourselves, however, to what the present writer, who is by no *means welbversed in all the fine arts, best appreciates and understands,—namely, the general theory of • Trio _Ph/P.-merlin tho IlaautifiLt being et Contribution to it Theory, aq a to a Disoolo'oa OJ th u 4th. By William Knight. Professor of Plailosophy in the EridsurfAyof St. Andrew3. Londou: Julan Murray. 1893.

beauty, and its application to poetry ; and we hope to show our readers that on both these subjects Professor Knight has something to say which is quite beyond the vague and inadequate dissertations of most English essayists on these subjects. On one point we think we may, perhaps, be able to add something to what Professor Knight has said, some- thing which is entirely in keeping with his view, and yet ex- tends it so as to include a further portion of his subject. What is the first occasion of the perception of charm and beauty in an infant ? We should say, anything which stimu- lates one or more of the senses without over-stimulating it. Robert Browning as a baby is said, to have sacrificed a beautiful Brussels lace veil of hie mother's on the fire in order to enjoy what he called the pretty blaze. The child's obseiving faculty evidently was not sufficiently awake to enjoy the delicate tissue of the lace, but it was sufficiently awake to enjoy the brilliancy of the flame. He at once chose the word

" pretty " to apply to the latter, but did not recognise its application to the former. As a child grows, almost every- bright colour pleases him in its turn, and the dull colours. fail to please him, or, as his eye gets more cultivated, please-

him only by their effective contrast with the bright. A rain- bow will delight him, and delight him all the more for the black cloud behind it. But the black cloud alone would impress him only as threatening and ugly. Its associations.

with rain and darkness would suggest to him all that repressed and limited the life of his senses, instead of all that vivified and elicited his own perceptive powers. Anything, on the con- trary, which fills the child's mind with the sense of what is too strong and menacing for its life, is not thought beautiful, but ugly. He dreads a great conflagration. He dreads an over- powering sound like a clap of thunder just over his head. He dreads a mighty crowd, or a dark and turbid river. All these• things over-stimulate his faculties instead of rousing them into joyful activity, and he calls them ugly. Why does he shrink from a dirty, or apparently dirty, face as ugly, and admire a fresh and rosy one as pretty ? No doubt because the soiled face has something of a mask on, something which conceals its true expression, and which therefore foils the child in its effort to interpret what the face says ; while the fresh and rosy face is not only much easier to interpret, but also stimu- lates the eye by a bright colour. In other words, that is beautiful to the child which elicits its own powers, and that ugly which gives it a sense of helplessness and inadequacy. It will cry at perceiving a frown, which brings to its mind a sense of its weakness, while it is de- lighted with a smile, which encourages it to be itself. What we arrive at, then, is this, that whatever elicits life and

energy gently and harmoniously, is thought beautiful ; while that which disturbs or overwhelms or forbids the natural evolution of life and perception and energy, is thought ugly. It is not till we see that the external world is in some sense- a reflection, and in some sense a larger and brighter and mightier reflection, of the life in ourselves, that we feel the-

true beauties, and also the true deformities, of our own life. We find the smile in ourselves reflected in the greater world, and our own mind is glorified in that perception. We find the frown and anger in ourselves reflected in the greater world, and our own mind is clouded and benumbed by that perception. Now let us take a passage from Professor Knight :—

" We not only see that Nature reflects, as in a mirror, our own humanity ; we also see in the external world signs of effort on the part of Nature to realise itself in ways that are constantly thwarted. Its intentions are met by hindrance, and are inter- rupted, if not actually marred. Beauty strives, as it were, to realise itself in matter, but it cannot always succeed, because of the medium through which it works; and therefore it is only in rare moments of apocalypse that the ideal is disclosed through the actual. Nature is seen, as it were, working up to, and yet falling short of its own ideal. The beauty, temporarily disclosed, can only now and then be described as approximating to the ideal; and here the supremo function of the landscape-artist comes in, It is his vocation to seize, and to reproduce for us,. those supreme moments of apocalypse—those transient disclosures- ofthe beautiful—in the outer world of sense. We have already seen that sense is the channel through which Beauty makes its first appeal to us. It is through form and colour, through motion and sound, that it speaks to us ; and on this first contact and appeal of sense to sense, pleasure ensues. But this is not all,. When the Beautiful is discerned by the intellect, as well as felt by sense, when it is grasped by the understanding, insight imme- diately follows; and the result of the insight is that Beauty is recognised as intrinsically belonging to the object. The impres- sions made by a single object in Nature may awaken this feeling

and judgment of the Beautiful ; but, as already stated, we soon discover that no natural object possesses Beauty except in frag- ■ nt ; and in consequence of this the mind is sent onward in qaest of the ideal. (In this connection it is worthy of remem- brance that both Raphael and Beethoven tell us that, as they could not find perfect beauty in the realm of the actual, they fell back upon the ideal world within themselves.)"

In other words, it is the expressive power of the external world which both delights and repels us. It delights us when it elicits our brightest and best energies, and then we have the full sense of beauty. It repels us when it either depresses and withers our best and brightest selves, or elicits our worst and most disordered selves, and then we have the sense of ugliness and deformity. It is in the power of external phenomena to elicit the harmonious development of our nature, or to dis- turb that development and distort it, that the sense of beauty and ugliness is keenly felt. If a factory belching forth hideous smoke which falls like a cloud over the beauty of a fair land- scape, crowns the distant hill, we are revolted and shocked. Why ? Because the harmony of the curving lines of the hills, and the brightness of the turf, and the purity of the air are all disfigured by the smoke; because the stiff lines of the tall chimney disturb the feeling of happy natural growth and development which the fair lines of the landscape had given us ; because the feeling of wide liberty, and proportioned energy, and inward harmony which the landscape itself had given us is abruptly broken in upon by the wen which the factory makes upon the bill, and the soot which it spreads abroad through the atmosphere. We feel as if, in the midst of elevated hopes and exhilarated life, we had suddenly encountered the dreariness of our own most mechanical efforts and the thick smoke of our own selfish discontents. But if, instead of the factory with its vulgar lines and grimy smoke, we see a hill crowned by a noble cathedral, we are delighted, and think that Art has given a new beauty to Nature.

The grandeur both of the architecture and of the religious associations of the building, instead of inflicting a rude shock on the expressiveness of the scene, completes and even exalts all that reflected best our own "vital feelings of delight." Beauty and sublimity outside us is found in that which not only reflects but transfigures and exalts the sense of life and power and harmony within us.

Now, let us quote Mr. Knight's analysis of the true function • of poetry. He holds that the poet would never be found in a world of perfect and uniform loveliness any more than in a world of perfect and uniform ugliness. It is his function to Ahrow off the burden of what depresses and suffocates us, and to introduce us into a region where the spirit rises with more freedom and elasticity than it does in the real world in which we live :—

"In seeking a solution of the problem from a fresh point of view, we find two laws governing all our intellectual processes, which may perhaps help us in finding a key to the nature of Poetry. The first is that all knowledge is a knowledge of differences and contrasts. We neither know nor can know any- thing except in its contrast with something unlike it. We are conscious of self only as distinguished from what is not-self, of matter in opposition to mind, of good as opposed to evil, of Beauty as contrasted with ugliness, of the Infinite in its antithesis to the finite, and so on. The element of opposition, difference, or con- trariety, conditions all our knowledge. The second law is that in the free and unimpeded energy of our faculties, apprehending the objects to which they stand related, there is always an attendant joy. Taking these two simple laws with us, let us realise our position in the surrounding universe. With both the outward and the inward eye, with the senses and the intellect (the passive and the active elements combined), we apprehend a multitude of objects, which at once engross and stimulate the action of our facul- ties. There are lights, colours, forms, motions, sounds, &C.; and objects in Nature external to us are seen clothed with the raiment • of the Beautiful. In the apprehension of this, if the energy of our faculties is free and unimpeded, there is pleasure. But asso- ciated with the Beautiful we discern the presence of a counter element, that, viz, of the ugly or deformed. The presence of this alien element arrests the freedom of the imaginative faculty; and in proportion to the pleasure which arises from unimpeded action Lis the pain which springs from the arrest. The spirit of man tends instinctively towards the Beautiful. It has a natural .aillnity with it, and its perception awakens a joyous activity of the powers ; but the deformed or the inharmonious also surrounds it, hindering the freedom and repressing the action of the faculties. Our yearning for the Beautiful is keen in proportion to our expe- rience of its opposite. The presence of the inharmonious and the artificial quickens the perception of natural harmony, but the enjoyment of the latter is never unalloyed. We always feel that the beauty we behold in Nature, or in our own Humanity, might be more perfect than it is. We invariably detect some discord in the midst of harmony, -which betrays the presence of its opposite. The typo of perfect in the mind In Nature we can nowhere find: The uneasiness which this creates originates both a desire and an effort to escape from the presence of the inharmonious, and to got into the presence and under the influence of the Beautiful. We desire to subdue deformity by Beauty. Instinctively—with- out ever thinking of the rationale of our act—we strive to rid ourselves of the uneasiness, produced by those elements with which the human spirit is in natural conflict, and which arrests its freedom ; and in this effort to reach the Beautiful, through all conscious or unconscious hindrance, Poetry has its birth. In the mingled phenomena of the universe we perceive Beauty marred by deformity. Instinctively we rise towards the Beautiful, urged on by the stimulus of its opposite, with its uncongeniality, and hindrance to the free action of our nature ; and the effort thus to rise is the very spring of the poetic impulse. Suppose that we in- habited a world of beauty all compact,' a world from which every discordant element was absent, we might rest in the passive contemplation of its loveliness, but we would be without Poetry. There is truth in the extreme position taken up by Vinet that Poetry is due to our present imperfection. When inno- cence,' he says, retreated tearfully from our earth, she met Poetry on the threshold. They passed close by, looked at each other, and each went her way—the one to heaven, and the other to the dwellings of men.' Translated from the language of allegory into that of fact, this sentence means that Poetry— being the outcome and expression of our yearning for perfection —would not exist in a perfect world. If every object in Nature, every fact, occurrence, or element in life, presented us with an absolute harmony, the Poet's vocation would cease."

What we would add to these striking remarks is this, that there is something of the essence of beauty or sublimity in the powerful and accurate delineation even of the worst and most hideous passions. Thus, when Lady Macbeth says :—

"I have given suck; and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me : I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn, As you have done to this,"— no one with any true sense of the idealisation of expression could avoid saying that, horrible as is the passion expressed, the expression itself is one of surpassing excellence and ideal power. Again, in one of the most remarkable tales of the present generation, Colonel Enderby's Wife, we have the passion for beauty itself made hideous by the selfish deter- mination of the heroine to avoid the encounter with anything that is superficially ugly, even though the very love she has felt and expressed would require it of her on grounds involving a much nobler kind of beauty that is very far from superficial. Now, in that story the very love of superficial beauty is made hideous by the contrast that it presents to beauty of a higher and nobler kind; so that here again we see that, as Professor Knight maintains, the real essence of beauty or deformity

depends on the correspondence, or absence of correspondence, between the ideal for which the mind is craving, and the adequacy or inadequacy of the expression which it finds for that ideal. Beauty or sublimity is felt in the perfection of that correspondence ; ugliness is the jar which we feel when that correspondence fails. And yet we may admire, and admire profoundly, the literary adequacy with which even the failure of that correspondence is brought out and made to live vividly in the imagination of the spectator. The expression of a very ugly passion may, as an expression of that passion, be almost sublime.