This
serves to explain another aspect of what is called aesthetic ugliness.
He who has nothing definite to express may try to hide his internal
emptiness with a flood of words, with sounding verse, with deafening
polyphony, with painting that dazzles the eye, or by collocating great
architectonic masses, which arrest and disturb, although, at bottom,
they convey nothing. Ugliness, then, is the arbitrary, the
charlatanesque; and, in reality, if the practical will do not intervene
in the theoretic function, there may be absence of beauty, but never
effective presence of the ugly.
[Sidenote] _Natural and artificial beauty._
Physical beauty is wont to be divided into _natural_ and _artificial_
beauty. Thus we reach one of the facts, which has given great labour to
thinkers: _the beautiful in nature_. These words often designate simply
facts of practical pleasure. He alludes to nothing aesthetic who calls a
landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where bodily
motion is easy, and where the warm sun-ray envelops and caresses the
limbs. But it is nevertheless indubitable, that on other occasions the
adjective "beautiful," applied to objects and scenes existing in nature,
has a completely aesthetic signification.
It has been observed, that in order to enjoy natural objects
aesthetically, we should withdraw them from their external and
historical reality, and separate their simple appearance or origin from
existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our
legs, in such a way as to remove ourselves from our wonted relations
with it, the landscape appears as an ideal spectacle; that nature is
beautiful only for him who contemplates her _with the eye of the
artist_; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful
animals and flowers; that natural beauty is _discovered_ (and examples
of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and
imagination, and to which more or less aesthetic travellers and
excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a more or
less collective _suggestion_); that, _without the aid of the
imagination_, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the
same natural object or fact is now expressive, according to the
disposition of the soul, now insignificant, now expressive of one
definite thing, now of another, sad or glad, sublime or ridiculous,
sweet or laughable; finally, that _natural beauty_, which an artist
would not _to some extent correct, does not exist_.
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