THE DIAL
FEBRUARY 1924
SOME POPULAR FALLACIES IN AESTHETICS
THE articles entitled The Progress of Painting published in recent numbers of The Dial furnish an excellent example of the importance of psychological considerations in aesthetics. The author of those articles, Mr Thomas Craven, offers views similar to those so brilliantly presented by Mr Roger Fry in his well-known book Vision and Design. Both writers avow a very great admiration for the Renaissance; they share a tendency, unavowed but clearly apparent, to judge all art since the Renaissance by the standards of that time. They are alike in making "form" the touchstone of the value of a painting and in repudiating the importance of a picture's subject-matter. Finally, both draw extensively upon psychology for the foundations on which the structure of their aesthetics is built. The contention of this paper is that these psychological foundations are, in important particulars, seriously unsound, and that in consequence the aesthetic principles dependent upon them are ambiguous and, in application, misleading. This ambiguity and confusion relate chiefly to the conception of form; but additional points in which defective psychology is employed will be indicated, as illustrative of the distorting effect of invalid fundamental principles upon aesthetic criticism otherwise of a high order.
It will be convenient to start with Mr Fry's views, as both more general and more obviously related to psychology. To much in them no exception can be taken; nevertheless a complete summary will facilitate discussion of the points that are controversial. The thesis of Mr Fry's An Essay in Aesthetics as set forth in his book Vision and Design, may be summarized as follows:
