The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Vernon Lee

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      Vernon Lee

      Violet Paget—who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Vernon Lee’—was born at Château St Leonard, Boulogne, France in 1856.

      She spent most of her life in Continental Europe, although she published most of her work in Britain, and made many trips to London.

      Lee’s literary output was hugely varied; covering nearly forty volumes, it ranged from music criticism and travelogues to novels and academic essays.

      Her first major work was Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), and at her peak she was considered a major authority on the Italian Renaissance.

      She also contributed much to the philosophical study of aesthetics. However, she is probably best-remembered for her supernatural short fiction, most notably her 1890 collection Hauntings.

      Lee died in 1935.

      PREFACE

      AND APOLOGY

      I HAVE tried in this little volume to explain aesthetic preference, particularly as regards visible shapes, by the facts of mental science. But my explanation is addressed to readers in whom I have no right to expect a previous knowledge of psychology, particularly in its more modern developments. I have therefore based my explanation of the problems of aesthetics as much as possible upon mental facts familiar, or at all events easily intelligible, to the lay reader. Now mental facts thus available are by no means the elementary processes with which analytical and, especially experimental, psychology has dealings. They are, on the contrary, the everyday, superficial and often extremely confused views which practical life and its wholly unscientific vocabulary present of those ascertained or hypothetical scientific facts. I have indeed endeavoured (for instance in the analysis of perception as distinguished from sensation) to impart some rudiments of psychology in the course of my aesthetical explanation, and I have avoided, as much as possible, misleading the reader about such fearful complexes and cruxes as memory, association and imagination. But I have been obliged to speak in terms intelligible to the lay reader, and I am fully aware that these terms correspond only very approximately to what is, or at present passes as, psychological fact. I would therefore beg the psychologist (to whom I offer this little volume as a possible slight addition even to his stock of facts and hypotheses) to understand that in speaking, for instance, of Empathy as involving a thought of certain activities, I mean merely that whatever happens has the same result as if we thought; and that the processes, whatever they may be (also in the case of measuring, comparing and co-ordinating), translate themselves, when they are detected, into thoughts; but that I do not in the least pre-judge the question whether the processes, the "thoughts," the measuring, comparing etc. exist on subordinate planes of consciousness or whether they are mainly physiological and only occasionally abutting in conscious resultants. Similarly, lack of space and the need for clearness have obliged me to write as if shape-preference invariably necessitated the detailed process of ocular perception, instead of being due, as is doubtless most often the case, to every kind of associative abbreviation and equivalence of processes.

      Vernon Lee

       Maiano near Florence, Easter 1913.