the right keys. The result was such jangling sounds from the grand piano that one could hardly believe they came from the instrument, but suspected that the stage hands were dropping scrap iron behind the scenes. The next day one of the best musical critics wrote an account of the performance, setting forth what seemed to be the performer's purpose, and stating that in the critic's opinion the interpretation was in many places incorrect, that it was entirely lacking in harmony or beauty, and that he found it very unenjoyable. Certainly one could not say that this expert critic failed to understand the performance (or to appreciate it, as far as an understanding of musical technique is what is meant by appreciation), but clearly he did not enjoy it. In view of these facts it seems desirable to use the terms enjoyment and understanding as an aid to clearness in our thinking, and to avoid the term appreciation. Understanding need not improve or intensify enjoyment. -This chapter is concerned primarily with enjoyment. It is concerned with understanding only to the extent that the latter contributes to enjoyment. It is obvious that much enjoyment is possible with relatively little understanding. Increased understanding may bring enjoyment of new features or aspects, but the new enjoyment need not be any better or any keener than the enjoyment with little understanding. For example, contrast the enjoyment of a football game by two spectators. The first knows nothing of the fine points of the game, but can follow roughly the general trend of events and feels enthusiastically happy when his team is winning. The second spectator sizes up each play from the standpoint of the technique involved. If the team works smoothly and plays are handled well, he is pleased; if poor judgment is shown or an unskilled performance given, he is disgusted. Evidently his enjoyment is no keener or better than that of the first spectator, who is loyally and wildly happy over the success of his home team. Confusing understanding and enjoyment common in teaching literature. In such simple cases as this the relation between enjoying and understanding gives us little trouble in our pedagogical considerations. In the ordinary discussions by musicians concerning musical training, however, there is widespread confusion; hence, in our brief summary of some of the problems of training for the enjoyment of music we simply quoted the statements of some of the authorities to the effect that considerable cultivated enjoyment is possible with relatively little understanding of theory or technique. In the next two sources of enjoyment which we shall consider, namely, literature and the drama, the question of the nature, possibilities, and value of the various forms of enjoyment in each case becomes so vital that we shall enter into a somewhat abstract psychological analysis and description in order to help us keep our bearings in the pedagogical considerations that are to follow. Inasmuch as there is very little reliable discussion in this field, I shall quote, with the author's permission, an entire five-page article published by E. L. Thorndike in the Teachers College Record in 1901. The paragraph headlines are not in the original article, and in a number of places I have substituted the word enjoyment in brackets for the word appreciation. THE ESTHETIC EMOTIONS Need a psychological analysis of æsthetic emotions and their effects. - If we are to know what we are about when we are teaching English literature to boys and girls, we must get some rational account of what the æsthetic emotions are and what they do to us. Knowledge abdicates and opinion reigns if we ask just what the so-called æsthetic effects are and what difference they make in one's general character. This is a psychological question, to be settled by psychological methods, and it is a shame that, at least since Aristotle, the best work and the bulk of the work should have been done by literary men who had the data but not the means of handling them or of understanding their significance. The equipment fit to solve the question is that of a gifted person acquainted with psychology and possessed of psychological insight, who has studied extensively the effects of literature on people, particularly on children, for the nature and functions of the æsthetic emotions will be clear only in the light of their origin and development. No such person has appeared with the answer, and we must be content with clearing a passage for him in so far as present data allow. - This is no occasion for a treatise on the æsthetic emotions from the standpoint of genetic psychology, and no such treatise will be attempted. Let us simply try to see clearly what facts we can state, as a supplement to the existing material on æsthetic and literary criticism, which may assist the intelligent teacher to an insight into what happens when students are led to read literature ostensibly for æsthetic enjoyment for fun. Three types of enjoyment: of technique, sensory pleasures, suggestiveness. First of all, with any given piece of literature, all sorts of different things happen in different people. Not only do many of them fail to get the aesthetic pleasure intended, but in those who do, it takes many forms. Of those who do not, some feel in its place bona fide feelings, actual attitudes toward the real world, real, not æsthetic, emotions. These may be to them desirable or the reverse. Of those who do [get æsthetic pleasure], some feel an enjoyment of the technical skill with which the writer has secured his effect; they enjoy the poem as the football expert enjoys watching a game, not caring which side advances, unmoved by the zeal of combat, influenced only by the skill of the plays, the adroitness of the generalship, the technical beauty of the way things are done. Some feel the sensory delights of rhythm or melody; they enjoy the poem as the artist might enjoy the proportions of the football player, the grace and ease of his movements (rare enough in a football player). The majority enjoy what is poorly called, for lack of a better word, the suggestiveness of the poem, the mood it arouses, the feelings of joy or sadness or pity or faith, that are not real joy or sadness but somehow are sweet. "It means so much; it made me feel the thing," they say. These are like the spectators who enjoy a football game because men may, and do, get hurt — because they feel, yet without results to their own profit or loss, the ambition for victory, the pluck and catastrophe and recovery. There are, of course, all sorts of combinations of these three types. Mental responses to literature: ideas, real emotions, enjoyment of workmanship, sensory pleasures, pseudo-emotions. It is obvious that what we would at first blush call æsthetic appreciation turns out to be now one thing, now another, now a complex. Indeed, many people, failing to experience any of these three mental conditions, take definite ideas or ordinary emotional feelings to be the æsthetic emotions of which they read. Many a one there is who reads his Browning in dead earnest as a sort of philosophy, - commentary on human nature and moral guide, — happy to get great ideas and feel new hatred of this and love of that, and thinks that he gets all there is in the poetry for anyone, and wonders how intelligent people can endure Keats. From this ambiguity of the words aesthetic appreciation and æsthetic emotions has arisen much confusion. Let us therefore use the terms ideas, real emotions, enjoyment of workmanship, sensory pleasures, and pseudoemotions to cover the main facts of the mental conditions aroused by literature. Of these terms we may further define real and pseudoemotions. Let us mean by real emotions such feelings as lead us to acts appropriate to the situation if real. The countryman at the theater who wants to climb on the stage and knock down the villain in the play offers an example. Let us mean by pseudo-emotions such feelings as do not [lead us to acts appropriate to the situation if real]. If we enjoy reading or seeing the last act of "Othello," it is because our emotions are not such as to lead us to shriek with horror or turn away our eyes from the awful sight. We may now secure some profit from the analysis and natural history of these various effects. Ideas. The ordinary laws of human nature account for the nature of the ideas aroused by works of art, and we have seen that in practice the service of literature in presenting ideas and arousing ideals has been recognized. Real emotions. The production of real emotions is of two sorts. The poem or story may arouse the emotion which the facts or events portrayed would if real, or it may arouse some different emotion. The example [of the countryman at the theater] already given is of the first sort. The arousal of a high flood of joyous excitement by the description of a double duel in the dark is of the second sort. The practical problem of when and where it is desirable to use literature to induce real emotions is not hard. We may merely repeat Professor James's warning against exciting them without providing some useful outlet in conduct. . . . We may also suggest that the rational man will regulate his emotional attitude toward the real world by the facts of that world itself rather than by second-hand and often distorted pictures of them, and that there is some danger in forever wheedling people into being wise or good or happy. However, as things go, most of us probably will have to be wheedled. Enjoyment of workmanship. The enjoyment of workmanship is so rare among young students that nothing need here be said of it. Sensory pleasures. The sensory pleasures are a far less important part of [enjoyment] in the case of literature than in the case of music, painting, or sculpture. Either because we are born with organizations which like certain combinations of sounds, lengths, stresses, and pauses, or because these combinations have gone with other desirable things, we come to like certain rhythms etc. The explanation of those due to our organization will undoubtedly turn out a purely psychological one. The explanation of the second sort is a matter of association. The sensory pleasures appear early in the child's love of rhythm. and are molded by precepts to some extent, still more by example. The æsthetic education of children in the purely sensory [enjoyment] of literature can thus begin early. Pseudo-emotions. — What, now, of the chief problem in the æsthetics of literature—the nature of these pseudo-emotions? What is the æsthetic pity that is not real pity, the sympathy with the hero which does not produce real pain or real tendencies to help him? They are not the real emotions in weaker intensity. On the contrary, they may be stronger. They are qualitatively different. This difference is not, as has been suggested by some writers, the absence of a personal element; we do not feel real emotions with a personal warmth and intimacy, and æsthetic, or, to use our word, pseudo-emotions, with the calm of an indifferent spectator. |