Beauty, Life and Death

Pleasure and pain form a part of everybody's earliest and most primitive experience; no doubt or mistake about these sensations seems possible. But whereas pain always remains the same stern chastiser, who can be recognized at once in every new form and under any disguise whatever, some forms of pleasure become more elusive when the expanding mind has reached a fuller state of development. Pleasure enters as one of the elements into strange mixtures and intricate compositions. Some of them, like the masochistic pleasure, — by no means confined to the sexual perversion of this name — borrow even the mask of the antagonist: pain. In this way it becomes at times a difficult problem to find out if an element of pleasure is present in a certain psychic phenomenon, and still more what the origin and peculiar structure of this element is.

Beauty is one of these compositions the formula of which we do not possess. There is pleasure among the gifts of beauty — but it is pleasure of some very particular sort and certainly not only pleasure. What are these other constituents and what is their relation to the pleasure principle? Is beauty always the same thing? Certainly not if we look at the conditions under which different individuals are able to experience it: one by a sequence of sounds, another by the arrangement of colors and forms; a third may even find it in abstract thoughts. It comes to some suddenly as a joyous surprise, to others as a result of long training and arduous preparation. Yet, in spite of these differences everyone seems to agree that the personal experience called “beauty” is identical whatever may be the cause or condition which brought it about and that it is something apart which can be easily distinguished from other sensations.

It seems that the problem of beauty is one of those which are apt to become more obscure by explanations. The countless theories which have been created around it are mountains of bootless endeavour, monuments of th