artists. An example of the former is Greek vase-painting; of the latter, the straight brush strokes of Van Gogh or the heavy black contour line of Daumier. How far into matters of this sort ought the aesthetician to go? If he wishes to avoid mere generalities, he must follow art into much of its articulated and individualized life; but he ought not to become involved in the endless detail of endless distinctions. His main purpose is, after all, a series of generalizations revolving about the problem of beauty; and to him each work of art is the fragmentary embodiment of a narrowly circumscribed artistic purpose one item in a column of beauty.

The policy of the open door seems to be the right one for aesthetics in its relations with philosophy, the social sciences, psychology, and criticism with their medley of facts and problems. It is like a port of entry in which, for lack of a system of imports, stores accumulate in confusion. It is best to have the brisk intellectual traffic, and to chance reducing it to some sort of order. This may be done most easily by taking beauty as the central problem and grouping as many problems as we can about our interest in beauty. But this interest must be a specialized and not a vague or general one.

THE TWOFOLD MEANING OF BEAUTY

Aesthetics concerns itself mainly with the problem of beauty.1 Little is gained, however, if the loose popular use of the term "beautiful" remains unchallenged. Its causes lie deeper than the youthful lack of discrimination which was shown in a college girl's copy of the Odyssey with its comment "beautiful" or "pretty" on passage after passage,

1 This seems to be recognized by the choice of such titles as Das Schöne und die Kunst by Vischer; The Sense of Beauty by Santayana; The Psychology of Beauty by Puffer; The Beautiful by Vernon Lee; An Introduction to the Experimental Psychology of Beauty by Valentine.

from the picture of the garden of Calypso to those of storms at sea and the grotesque, horrible blinding of Polyphemus. It is a disconcerting fact that artists and critics alike use the term in a very free and ambiguous way. When Rodin insists that beauty is not the highest law of sculpture and then contends that to the great artist everything in nature is beautiful, he is not contradicting himself—he is simply helpless before an ambiguity of language. He uses beauty first in the narrow sense of what is regular, harmonious, directly and wholly pleasing, and then in the broad sense of what is artistically effective. His Thinker and Balzac are not beautiful in the sense in which the Hermes of Praxiteles is beautiful. Daring marks subject and technique. In its search for the stimulating and the significant this strong, nervous, imaginative art is constantly overstepping the bounds of formal beauty. At its best it is satisfying; and it is this quality Rodin has in mind when he uses "beautiful" in the broad sense. Aesthetics would be the gainer, and much narrowing and stretching could be avoided if the use could be limited to what is formally beautiful in contrast to what is sublime or graceful or picturesque or expressive. Beauty then would be but one category among

many.

A very simple system of aesthetics could be gained at a stroke if beauty in the narrow sense were the only thing artistically effective. But this is not true. Neither the social nor the personal forms and aims of art can be set within formal beauty. How little of the effectiveness of a tragedy by Shakespeare, a dramatic soliloquy by Browning, a landscape by Turner, a music drama by Wagner is to be traced to such beauty! The Oedipus may be well-nigh perfect in the smooth interplay of its parts and the grace and music of its language, but much of its meaning as a work of art lies in its rendering of the dark and chaotic forces of life. Bold enterprise may be seen in the forceful

art of a Maillol, a Mestrovic, or a Van Gogh; in the distortions of a Matisse; in the perverse drawings of a Beardsley; and in the macabre etchings of a Rops or a Klinger. Complex and mixed as is the appeal of such art, it is nevertheless not to be neglected. No aesthetician has the right to turn away from the constant experimentation that is going on in modern art, and frown upon the search for an ever increasing range of expressiveness. If he can feel the sheer beauty of Sappho's verse

Προς ἄγγελος ἱμερόφωνος ἀήδων

Spring's messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale

and enjoy the homely lines of Whitman and the strident notes of Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay, he will not attempt to limit aesthetic theory to an analysis of the qualities and conditions of formal beauty.

NATURE AND ART

Ought aesthetics to limit itself to beauty in art or ought it to include beauty in nature? Usually beauty in nature is excluded. There are some notable exceptions. Hegel attempts an analysis of animal forms; Ruskin in his Modern Painters gives an aesthetics of soil and cloud, of rivercourses, of striated rocks-finding in all these a neglected expressiveness; Volkelt illustrates his theories of the characteristic and the sublime, and Lipps his theory of empathy, by constant references to nature.

It is difficult to see how on principle natural beauty can be excluded. There is iridescence in a soap bubble as well as in a Tiffany vase. Sunsets or light on water or the note of a bird are a challenge to art in their aesthetic appeal. The "dynamism" of the Futurists is but a poor thing in comparison with tumultuous seas, a volcanic upheaval, or the throbbing life of some wild animal snared. All the

elements of strength and beauty-lines, masses, colors—are found in nature; and they are there in startling combination. The sweep of curves, the thrust of jagged or straight lines, the tilting of planes, and the banking of masses are all to be had in a single tree; and that tree may call forth discriminating and relational activities as readily as does a landscape painting. The beauty of nature may be used as the substructure of aesthetics and yields many hints as to what is pleasing and what is not. Greek sculptors sought to deduce canons from the study of human proportions; Zeising discovered in the proportions of the arm and elsewhere in nature the Golden Section Ratio and applied it widely and rather uncritically to the whole field of art. Patterns owe many of their motifs to animal forms and colors.

From a practical point of view, however, it is expedient to limit aesthetics to beauty as it is revealed in art. There the field is narrower and more definitely marked. What in nature exists in conglomerate mass, incidentally, transiently, appears in art isolated and pure, willed as such, and permanently organized. There is in nature a bewildering variety of color schemes and light and shade effects; the simplest woodland scene offers a confused medley of impressions to all the senses. Beauty in the narrow sense is incidental. The color display of birds and their song during the mating season are incidents in sex rivalry and sexual selection; perfect symmetry is rare; there are constant, artistically purposeless intrusions of the ugly and the repulsive; the complexity and irregularity of nature disturb at every step. Nor are the difficulties lessened if beauty is taken in the broad sense. However infrequent and incidental formal beauty may be in the mass of natural effects, force and significance are strongly marked. Is God then an artist in the characteristic? If he is, he is an artist on a very large scale: a scale, in fact, which taxes the

imagination, for the meaning of a tree, a flower, a form of animal life is read in the context of a cosmic drama, wasteful, bewildering, utterly lacking the regularity of an English manor or an old fashioned garden. It matters little whether our reading of the universe is after the manner of Darwin or St. Augustine, the fact remains that the influence of scientific or religious ideas is against the isolation of the artistic in nature. If these influences are cast aside, the conglomerate of practical associations still remains. A field suggests tilling or pasturing; the ocean, seafaring; a grove, holiday making; the gnarled appearance of a tree, the unsuitableness of its timber; the sharply angled tumbling lines of a peak invite thought on whether it can be climbed. If all such responses are suppressed, what remains but the painful picking of bits of significant line or color from a wide and distressingly complex display of materials? In art we face an isolation and purification already accomplished. We are in the presence, too, of willed beauty: of the work of an artist whose selective skill may be responded to, and whose purposes, while a challenge, are a challenge that can be met. What is thus created is given permanence, and offers itself again and again to immediate and discriminating enjoyment.

Aesthetics, then, concerns itself mainly with what is beautiful, in the sense of what is effective in art. In order to discover the sources of such effectiveness it traces the processes by which art is produced and enjoyed. It is interested in the origins and the development of art. Stronger still is its interest in the part played by art in life, in its general aims, and in the highly specialized aims of the several arts. The latter it sees cooperating or interfering; and it follows them some distance, at least, into their technique and their types. It concerns itself with a morphology of general aesthetic types, such as the beautiful, the characteristic, the sublime, the tragic, the comic. In doing