The æsthetic experience perhaps furnishes the best illustration of such a concrete absolute. The ideal of all art, says Pater, is the "perfect identity of form and matter, this strange chemistry, uniting in the integrity of pure light, contrasted elements. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other."[1] Æsthetic appreciation tends toward a state of absorption in which the æsthetic image and its emotional content fall together into one indescribable experience which has its only analogy in the trance of the mystic, the reverie of the seer, or the play of the child. The æsthetic attitude represents the stage of the appropriation or realization of values as contrasted with the stage of tension or reconstruction in which they are worked out. But here likewise the state of saturation is absolute only in a functional sense. Value while it is appreciated in a relatively immediate way is nevertheless the product of reflection. It is sometimes said that "to feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it."[2] But this sets up a false antithesis between reflection and appreciation. Reflection and description are necessary processes in progressive appreciation. Pure appreciation would be a speechless, contentless attitude. It is through description that we enhance our appreciation, and it is the failure to realize the fullest appreciation that stimulates fresh description. It is only when we fail to appreciate that we begin to reflect, and that we set up the distinction between the world of description and the world of appreciation. Describing is trying to appreciate.
| H. Heath Bawden |
| Vassar College.. |
