The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Vernon Lee

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      CHAPTER III

      ASPECTS VERSUS THINGS

      HAVING settled upon a particular point of view as the one he liked best, he remained there in contemplation of the aspect it afforded him. Had he descended another twenty minutes, or looked through powerful glasses, he would have seen the plain below as a juxtaposition of emerald green, raw Sienna, and pale yellow, whereas, at the distance where he chose to remain, its colours fused into indescribably lovely lilacs and russets. Had he moved freely about he would have become aware that a fanlike arrangement of sharply convergent lines, tempting his eye to run rapidly into their various angles, must be thought of as a chessboard of dikes, hedges, and roads, dull as if drawn with a ruler on a slate. Also that the foothills, instead of forming a monumental mass with the mountains behind them, lay in a totally different plane and distracted the attention by their aggressive projection. While, as if to spoil the aspect still more, he would have been forced to recognise (as Ruskin explains by his drawing of the cottage roof and the Matterhorn peak) that the exquisitely phrased skyline of the furthermost hills, picked up at rhythmical intervals into sharp crests, dropping down merely to rush up again in long concave curves, was merely an illusion of perspective, nearer lines seeming higher and further ones lower, let alone that from a balloon you would see only flattened mounds. But to how things might look from a balloon, or under a microscope, that man did not give one thought, any more than to how they might look after a hundred years of tramways and funiculars or how they had looked before thousands of years of volcanic and glacial action. He was satisfied with the wonderfully harmonised scheme of light and colour, the pattern (more and more detailed, more and more co-ordinated with every additional exploring glance) of keenly thrusting, delicately yielding lines, meeting as purposefully as if they had all been alive and executing some great, intricate dance. He did not concern himself whether what he was looking at was an aggregate of things; still less what might be these things' other properties. He was not concerned with things at all, but only with a particular appearance (he did not care whether it answered to reality), only with one (he did not want to know whether there might be any other) aspect.

      For, odd as it may sound, a Thing is both much more and much less than an Aspect. Much more, because a Thing really means not only qualities of its own and reactions of ours which are actual and present, but a far greater number and variety thereof which are potential. Much less, on the other hand, because of these potential qualities and reactions constituting a Thing only a minimum need be thought of at any given time; instead of which, an aspect is all there, its qualities closely interdependent, and our reactions entirely taken up in connecting them as whole and parts. A rose, for instance, is not merely a certain assemblage of curves and straight lines and colours, seen as the painter sees it, at a certain angle, petals masking part of stem, leaf protruding above bud: it is the possibility of other combinations of shapes, including those seen when the rose (or the person looking) is placed head downwards. Similarly it is the possibility of certain sensations of resistance, softness, moisture, pricking if we attempt to grasp it, of a certain fragrance if we breathe in the air. It is the possibility of turning into a particular fruit, with the possibility of our finding that fruit bitter and non-edible; of being developed from cuttings, pressed in a book, made a present of or cultivated for lucre. Only one of these groups of possibilities may occupy our thoughts, the rest not glanced at, or only glanced at subsequently; but if, on trial, any of these grouped possibilities disappoint us, we decide that this is not a real rose, but a paper rose, or a painted one, or no rose at all, but some other thing. For, so far as our consciousness is concerned, things are merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, trams and funiculars in the future, volcanoes and icecaps in the past, having entirely altered all that; only the material constituents and the geographical locality remaining as the unshifted item in those much pulled about bundles of thoughts of possibilities.