A Review of “Aesthetic Criticism”

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Can every human being perceive beauty?

People’s readiness to relish beauty, or to perceive it, differs enormously. Some perceive of it only certain sensuous pleasures — the pleasure of taste or smell or touch — and are incapable of perceiving visual or auditory beauty; no setting sun arrests their gaze, no swaying of branches, no musical air. Others find in every kind of beauty, sensuous and non-sensuous alike, a lofty pleasure of the mind in which thought, feeling, and imagination all share. This difference among people in the relishing of beauty rests upon the disparity in the growth of their taste and their artistic sense; for the relish of the cultivated man is not that of the ordinary or untutored person. Two men stand before the columns of Baalbek: the one sees nothing but towering, ruined columns, while the other reads in them the signs of a vanished greatness; he pictures the temple in the days of its glory and all it symbolizes of the conquerors’ dominion and their passion for building, which they took to be the road to immortality; and he gazes, transported by the majesty of the columns that rise alone — impregnable, defying time; slender, rivaling the clouds; harmonious, delighting the eye — tracing on the horizon lines that open apart, then narrow until they almost meet, while the rays of the sun play upon them, so that now they are dazzling white, glittering in the lights of noon, and now they ripple with the fair gold of dawn or glow with the purple of sunset.

The greater a man’s capacity for thought, imagination, and feeling, the greater his capacity for the enjoyment of beauty. True wealth is the wealth of thought and mind, not the wealth of money.

Let us suppose that two persons, the one rich in his money and the other in his learning, go to visit a museum or an art exhibition. We see the first move among the works of art unable to appreciate them or relish them, because he does not understand them. He may pass by some of the paintings on display, and be stopped by a canvas with a beautiful head or attractive colors; he longs to possess it, and tosses the owner of the exhibition a purse of money that entitles him to obtain his wish. The other person, meanwhile, sinks into his artistic contemplations; his imagination and his thought take wing before the works displayed; he imagines the circumstances that brought them into being, studies their composition and their craftsmanship, discovers the artist’s idea, touches his personality reflected in his works, and accompanies him through his intellectual development. He feels a pure delight that turns his mind from any thought of possessing the things displayed before him; for the pleasure that the sight of beauty awakens in his soul is a complete pleasure, unclouded by the pain of desire, undisfigured by the sting of jealousy or the despair of privation. Such a man can relish beauty in reality and in imagination alike; it makes no difference whether that beauty is his own property or another’s.

I have set out above the substance of what the book contains on the definition of beauty and the relishing of it. It remains for me to point to two chapters that occupy an important place in it: the first on the subject of the functions of art, and the second on the personality of the artist.

In the chapter on the functions of art I tried to explain the theory called “the theory of art for art’s sake” — the theory that asserts art’s freedom from any edifying or preaching purpose. And I showed that art performs among men several functions, not one. It may be a source of delight, of release, of rapture and diversion — this is the art of fancy, which transports us to astonishing, unreal worlds. Or it may lift the soul and stir in it a longing for the highest ideals and the ideal life — this is idealist art. Or it may present a struggle between right and injustice, between good and evil, and so drive us to champion the right and detest injustice — this is realist art and whatever follows its course. And with all this it remains true to say that art is free, not necessarily bound to any one of these ends. All that it is bound to is to be art and nothing else —

that is, a personal expression marked by creativeness, stirring all manner of feelings and thoughts, imposing pleasure and admiration upon whoever relishes it; as for the edifying purpose, it may indeed be present in it, but positively and indirectly.

On the subject of the artist’s personality the question at once confronts us: is the artist a person different from other human beings? And does this difference extend to his mind and his morals together?

The artist’s intelligence is usually of the contemplative, inspirational, or intuitive kind, and it differs from the philosopher’s ratiocinative intelligence and the scientist’s analytical intelligence. Rarely do we find an artist like Michelangelo who unites several kinds of intelligence. For this reason it behooves the artist to keep away from subjects that do not concern art.

As for the artist’s character, it cannot but be affected by his art — unless he is one of the pretenders to art. The first aspect of this influence is his inclination to freedom and to social emancipation, under the effect of an art that obliges him to innovate, to bring out his own personality, and to recoil from imitation. Hence the quarrel that has existed since antiquity between art and morals; people have reproached artists for their moral eccentricity and their departure from the accepted traditions, and have alleged that their deeds contradict their words.

Nor is it strange that the artist’s deeds should contradict his words, for art is very often an ideal presentation, an aspiration toward a better reality to which nothing in ordinary life corresponds; and for this reason we do not always expect the artist to do what he says.

The artist’s personality is for the most part a mixture of balance and disturbance: at times the artistic influences prevail over him and he devotes all his powers to his art, and at times he surrenders to the influence of his surroundings and becomes an ordinary person again, exposed to relapse and decline.

This is what I have seen fit to set down of the book’s matter; time does not allow me to expound the elements of art and the elements of poetry, or the extent of aesthetic criticism among the Arabs and the place this criticism occupied in their books.

And were it given me to look over this work anew, I would enlarge upon the kinds of beauty, and upon the subject of suggestion and obscurity in art — that is, upon those subjects in which the sources of research failed me.