son; in the dignity and depth of some of his religious utterances; in the allusion to our common mortality; in the imagery of midwife, priest, and burial.14 The phrase "poor Gargantua" is the key to another secret of comedy; the use of sympathetic laughter. There is an echoing sympathy-we are forced to share the exuberance of Gargantua's hilarity and grief,—and there is an interpretative and responsive sympathy. But this response is not allowed to develop fully; Gargantua cries, but he cries "like a cow"; our feelings are dashed as quickly as they are aroused; there is a turn to deeper meanings and then a sheering off. It is the incomplete and somewhat uncritical nature of this sympathy which allows comedy to treat vice as a source of entertainment and to set human folly within the text of a kindly, superficially thoughtful, clever, and stimulating, but fragmentary reading of life. 14 There is a parallel in the playlet inserted into Chapter xvi of Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay. There is ghastly humor in the situation-woman dead in childbirth and in the switching back and forth between the tubercular cow, Short-i'-the-horn and such phrases as:-"Her milk is cold in her breasts"- "All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts." MINOR TYPES There are aesthetic types which have neither the range nor the importance of the beautiful, the characteristic, the sublime, the comic, and the tragic. Theirs is a minor part in what nature and art have to offer in material and form, and in aesthetic appeal. Still, it is a part worth something, for all its lightness and slenderness of emotional and imaginative resources. These minor types: the graceful, the charming, the pretty, the picturesque, the idyllic, and the pathetic repay analyzing. THE GRACEFUL Nature offers many examples of the graceful: the swallow, the fawn, the tiger; the pepper tree and the mimosa; the poppy and the columbine. We speak of the graceful lines of a yacht, of the graceful movements and figures in a dance. In art slender columns, arabesques delicately rolling and flowing in their curves, the lyrics of Sappho, the Fauns of Praxiteles, the paintings of Raphael, the landscapes of Corot are marked by grace. Grace has been defined as beauty in motion. This may be taken as a starting-point. The graceful shares with the beautiful certain qualities: a direct and pure sensuous pleasingness, with no distracting or disturbing admixture; complete harmony of color and lines; an easy selfcompleteness. But there is something else: movement either present or suggested. In this sense we go beyond the form that confronts us, and through it to a spirit and a life which takes ever new forms, one and all of which reveal that spirit in its ease, delicacy, and smoothness of transformation. Thus we see the yacht as sailing swiftly and with a quick responsiveness to what the wind requires, the tiger changing the lines of his body with full control of its bulk and strength, the mimosa swaying to the breeze, the dancer creating new patterns, the lyric moving about in a play of images and cadences. Wherever we are confronted with a form in which we sense inertness or lack of easy, quick, and adaptable movement, we withhold the adjective graceful. The graceful, then, is in part a motor concept. But not all movement lends itself to its purposes. There may be tremendous motor suggestiveness in the description of a storm, as in the cataclysmic passage at the end of Prometheus Bound, and the effect may be meant to be sublime. The tense restlessness of Michelangelo and Rodin, the broken lines and sharp irregular motor rhythms of Van Gogh or Kokoschka, and the rough energy of much of Browning's verse are equally remote from the graceful. If grace is to be had, the movement must be light and delicate, and must show neither abruptness nor lack of control. We are asked to share in and enjoy movement in its lighter, smoother, livingly restful forms and traditions; our motor impulses must not be too deeply stirred nor too widely engaged. Nor must the movement be felt as something cumulative or destructive. To us it must mean the promise of new and pleasing forms. There is about the motor quality of the graceful something of the superficial and the soothing; it skims along the placid surfaces of life, innocent of storms and upheavals. The appeal it makes to the senses and the imagination reveals a like lightness of touch and of heart. It is sensuously satisfying in the changes it hints at or carries out, but falls short, even here, of the profounder needs and satisfactions of aesthetic experience. To call a work of art graceful is a gesture of social amenity—a gracious rather than a whole souled recognition of worth. Nor does the graceful stir deeply the imagination which it enlists; it is persuasive patterning rather than a bold artistic venture. It lacks the complexity and reach of the characteristic, the imaginative stretch of the sublime, the intensity and emotional vibrancy of the tragic. THE CHARMING Slighter and more inconsequential still is the charming. Of all aesthetic types it is the vaguest and has least to do with art. It has come to mean an indefinable attractiveness which while felt to be subtle is not held to be deep. The term is most commonly used with reference to women; when they are said to be charming it is either in a compensatory way-in default of beauty or dignity—or because they have about them an indescribable attractiveness which holds even while it baffles. In any case, in nature and in art charm bears little relation to beauty. It lacks the rounded and articulated completeness of the beautiful, as it is without its depth. It has little of the motor life of the graceful, and none of its anticipated series of pleasing forms. So strong is its emphasis on the us in the attractiveness that it threatens to break through the circle of aesthetic experience. Even when it is applied to art there is this subjective personal note. In a picture or a poem we call charming it is what attracts us that counts. To speak of something as charming, then, is to confess to the personally colored attractiveness-vague, complex, subtle, superficial, elusive of something slight, pleasingly animated, and not necessarily beautiful. THE PRETTY The pretty has less of the subjectively personal than the charming. It may, like the latter, be used sloppily of all sort of aesthetic responses. But it has a legitimate use as one of the minor types. As such it has none of the elusiveness and vagueness of the charming. When we call a thing pretty we not only claim an impression that is perfectly definite, but we are ready with chapter and verse to justify it. This is true of a pretty face, true also of a pretty china cup. The beautiful arrests and satisfies deeply; the sublime and the tragic move us; there is intriguing curiosity in the picturesque; promise in the charming; rough shouldering in the characteristic. Prettiness is a compliment gladly and lightly given, and forgotten as soon as given. Dainty and little objects call forth the compliment. The place of the pretty in art is very limited. In gemcutting, silver-smith work, embroidery, and painting on china or silk it is often met with. Poetry in its relaxed and trifling But art stretched to the full stature moments may aim at it. of its ambition will have none of the pretty. THE PICTURESQUE The word picturesque and its German equivalent malerisch were much used during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. It was applied to landscape, and its use meant that a particular scene was fit to be put on canvas-had the qualities of a picture. But the qualities of much of the landscape painting of that time are not at all those of modern painting. We do not look for rounded pictorial arrangements in nature to be given as a painting, but are willing to paint landscape as fragment; we accept as material her quiet and common as well as her striking and unusual appearances. We take her on her own terms-as uninterested in history and the emotions of man. older painting and helps picturesque. What we shun is what marks this explain the use of the term |