The Experimental Psychology of Beauty

C.W. Valentine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317480372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Didattica in psicologia

Originally published in 1962, the experimental study of aesthetics was a field particularly associated with the name of C.W. Valentine, who in this book provided a critical review of research carried out since the end of the nineteenth century principally by British and American psychologists. The investigations described, many of them conducted by the author, are concerned with individual responses to what is commonly regarded as beautiful in painting, music, and poetry, an important distinction being made between the perception of objects as 'beautiful' as opposed to 'pleasing'. The reactions of children and adults, and of people having different ethnic and social backgrounds, are explored in a variety of experiments dealing with specific elements, including colour, form, and balance in painting; musical intervals, discord, harmony, melody, and tempo; and rhythm, metre, imagery, and associations in classical and romantic poetry. Other experiments seek to disclose the temperamental and attitudinal factors underlying individual differences in the judgement and appreciation of specific works of art. Of particular interest are the studies of responses to modern paintings, poems and musical compositions.

The findings throw light on the development of discrimination and taste and suggest the possibility of some common factor in the appreciation of these three arts. It was felt that critics as well as psychologists and aestheticians would find much to encourage reflection and to stimulate further research.

Chapter XIII
Experiments on the Appreciation of Poetry

In our previous chapters we have seen that a mark of true aesthetic enjoyment is the absorption of the looker in the picture he is looking at, or of the listener in the music he is listening to; and that ideas and thoughts suggested by the object attended to are apt to be interferences with full aesthetic enjoyment, however valuable such reflections may be in and for their own sakes. This particular aspect of the subject is specially prominent in the reading of poetry because of course we are there engaged as a rule in absorbing ideas as well as sounds, except of course when we may be listening to, and even enjoying, poems beautifully read in a foreign language which we do not understand, of which experience we shall see examples later.

Another new fact in connexion with poetry as compared at least with music is the smaller percentage of people who enjoy poetry sufficiently to read it often, as compared with the large number who listen at least to some kind of music. It is difficult to get precise evidence of the proportion who do, even when grown up, read poetry occasionally; but a consideration of the frequency of the borrowing of poetry from public libraries, as well as individual questions put to groups of workers and students, suggest that Wordsworth’s own estimate of its being an “awful truth” that there is no genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty people, is not very far wrong.

Reports both from university students, workers, school pupils and very young people recently left school, suggest that all of them had found some increase in the interest in poetry during the period of adolescence.¹ On the other hand there is some evidence that even during adolescence at about 14 or 15 the interest in early years may begin to decline.

Intelligence and the enjoyment of poetry

In view of the fact that the subject matter of poetry consists partly of ideas it is not surprising to find a higher connexion between enjoyment of poetry and general intelligence than was found in the appreciation of pictures and music. In particular the grasping of the relationship between ideas is as we know an important function and sign of general ability. In one inquiry with tests of the appreciation (liking) of good poetry (and good prose) the correlation of appreciation with general intelligence was as high as 0-63, whereas that between the appreciation of pictures and intelligence was only 0·31, and for music and intelligence 0·22.¹

In another inquiry dealing only with the appreciation of poetry a correlation with two combined tests of general intelligence only gave at first a correlation of 0·35, which as we know is low, but when the scores only for certain verbal tests were considered this correlation rose to 0-63. This implies that special verbal abilities are involved in the appreciation of poetry in addition to general intelligence.²

Quite new experiments are needed to test the relation of general intelligence to the appreciation of modern poetry, which some of the critics say can only be appreciated properly by a select few on a higher mental level.

Let us begin with some relatively simple early experiments. They will at least serve to introduce the reader to some elementary facts and to some important problems which will be more fully exemplified and discussed later.

These and indeed all the experiments with poetry reported in this chapter were carried out with poems of the recognized “conventional” types, chiefly by nineteenth-century poets. To the extreme modernist I would quote as a warning from one of the leading authorities on and exponents of modern poetry, David Daiches, who writes that the twentieth-century revolution in poetry “was bound to bring with it an underestimation of romantic poetry”. (See his book The Present Age (1958), p. 23.)

Individual differences in the appreciation of poetry

With a group of seventy-two University graduates I carried out in 1932-3 an experiment by reading parts of five poems and asking the students to report as to each one; (a) whether they found it very pleasing (+3), pleasing (+2), slightly pleasing (+1), indifferent (0), slightly displeasing (-1), and so on; and (b) whether they found it very beautiful (+3), beautiful (+2), and so on. They were also invited to add reasons and comments. One of my objects was to exemplify individual differences in attitudes to the same poem; another aim was to discover how far “pleasingness” and “beauty” were regarded as identical; and another to make a rough test of “taste” in poetry among a group of educated persons. For this last purpose I deliberately included, among the poems read, one which I considered a very bad poem. First the poems were all read by me aloud once each; then each was read a second time, and only then were the judgements to be recorded. The poems were as follow:

1. Byron, The Ocean – first stanza.
2. A highly sentimental and moralizing sonnet by a then popular writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
3. Shelley, A Lament.
4. Rupert Brooke, Sonnet, The Soldier.
5. De la Mare, Epitaph.

My group of subjects included forty-two men and thirty women. About half the men and one-third of the women were graduates in Science; the rest in Arts.

Let us first consider the questions of “taste” and individual differences. The bad poem, B (as I considered it) came decidedly last in the average scores, which are given in the table below:

Average Scores for All Persons

Poem	Pleasingness	Beauty
A	+ 1.87	+ 1.75
B	–0.15	–0.60
C	+ 0.72	+ 1.10
D	+ 1.50	+ 1.63
E	+0.59	0.0

It will be seen that B is the only poem with a negative average score. It was described as ‘trite’, ‘moral tripe’, ‘Sunday School verse’, ‘not poetry’, ‘jingling’, ‘smug’. Nevertheless, it was given a + 2 mark (pleasing) by ten graduates, and a +2 for “beauty” by five (including two with honours in English Literature).

In itself that is a clear indication that good intelligence and education are not a guarantee of good taste in the judgement of poetry. I imagine that in the case at least of the two honours English students who thought this poem beautiful, they had been carried away by an extreme degree of enthusiasm for the sentiments and morals expressed in the poem. We shall discuss this question of the relative importance of the subject-matter and the form of a poem in connexion with later experiments.

It is not only in reference to Poem B that great individual differences appear. Thus as to E, pleasingness is given + 3 by ten students, but – 3 by six. Beauty is given + 3 by three, and + 2 by ten, but – 3 by seven, and −2 by nine.¹ As to C, pleasingness is given +3 by twenty-four students, −3 by one, and −2 by five; but for beauty only one gives it less than – 1.

On the whole the results demonstrate clearly the great differences in individual preferences. Only A (Byron) wins almost universal approval. Rupert Brooke’s sonnet, If I should die, scores more + 3s for beauty and for pleasingness than did Byron’s stanza, but it also roused more antagonism largely among the men. One (Honours in English) thinks of “cheap sentimentality”. Another also with Honours in English says the opposite – “At last”, he writes, “we have feeling instead of sentiment”. One man who gives it +2 for beauty but −3 for pleasingness wrote: “This poem has lost its former appeal. I saw the graves of Austrian soldiers blasted in the rocks in the Dolomites – after seeing the British graves in Belgium.” He admitted he could not judge the poem without prejudice. “It is jingoistic”, he adds.

Acceptance or rejection of ideas expressed

Clearly some students recognize a marked distinction between a poem as a work of art and the ideas expressed. As to B, several say the thoughts give great pleasure, but there is no beauty in it; others say D would please, but that their convictions repudiate the attitude expressed. We shall touch on this problem of content and form in a later paragraph.

If, however, expressions in poetry of views – religious, social, or political – had all to be accepted before we could enjoy the poetry, our range would be greatly restricted. To some persons at least it is possible to enjoy poems of even contradictory views on life: for example, in my own case the pessimistic Rubaiyat of Omar Khayy&m, the cautious yet hopeful “Say not the struggle naught availeth” of Clough, and some of the triumphant and confident lines of Browning.

But if there is to be genuine aesthetic enjoyment, there must not be actual mental conflict. When a poet philosophizes – as is done even in some of the finest passages – the reader, if he is to enjoy it aesthetically as literature, must accept, if only for the moment, the poet’s point of view, so that he can simply apprehend or contemplate the philosophy and submit himself to the hypnotic influence of the poet. After all, we effect as great an act of imagination in submitting ourselves to the illusion of reality in watching a play. We may even respond as though we “believed” in fairies for a time in watching Peter Pan. Nevertheless, if the play of a supposedly realistic type outrages our sense of probability the illusion is lost. So there may be a limit to the views which we can accept even temporarily. T. S. Eliot reports that he cannot enjoy Shelley partly because of his repellent ideas.¹

Coleridge referred to “the willing suspensions of belief in the enjoyment of poetry expressing ideas with which we disagree”. I agree with I. A. Richards that the process is less conscious than is suggested by that phrase of Coleridge: and of course such suspension is dependent largely on the extent to which the beauty of the poem carries us along with it. We shall refer again to this topic later.

Beauty and Pleasingness

It was clear that my students were far from identifying these. I am not saying that they were always right in their distinction. One or two explicitly stated they could not separate the two: some that a poem might be pleasing without being beautiful, but not vice versa. The facts simply show that among a group of university graduates the two are not regarded as the same. With the seven point scale (3 to −3) the extreme possible divergence of a mark for beauty and that same poem’s mark by the same person for pleasingness, namely 7 points, never occurred. But a difference of three, four or five points was shown in nine judgements, and a difference of two in thirty-eight out of 335 judgements.

Comparing the average scores, we find that each poem comes in the same order for pleasingness, as it does for beauty: and the correlation between beauty and “pleasingness” was 0·77.

In some cases students clearly recognized that their own personal, perhaps peculiar experiences or attitudes prevented the poem from being pleasing, while recognizing also that the poem should be regarded as beautiful.¹ On the whole the attitudes of these people fit in with the assertions of some of our great poets as to the “essential connexion of poetry with pleasingness”. “Poetry is ever accompanied by pleasure”, wrote Shelley (A Defence of Poetry): and Matthew Arnold quotes approvingly Schiller’s assertion that “The right art is that alone which creates the highest enjoyment.”

A further experiment on taste, pleasingness, and beauty

I did another brief experiment on the appreciation of poetry with a class of students at the Birmingham School of Music very similar in qualifications to that which I used for experiments with modern painting. Though it was done many years later than the previous experiment it is convenient to take it here as it touches on similar points. These students were not university graduates, and only of the ages of about 18 to 21, but they had all had a good grammar school education and nearly all had completed their G.C.E. entrance examination qualifications. As they were hoping to be teachers of music and would almost certainly be expected to teach singing, I thought it not irrelevant to see what their reactions were to a few poems. The four poetry selections I used were as follows:

A. Wordsworth, Lines composed above Tintern Abbey, eight lines beginning “How oft in darkness and amid the many shapes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• TABLES
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• I INTRODUCTION
• II COLOUR AND COLOUR PREFERENCES
• III ATTITUDES TO COLOURS AND COMBINATIONS OF COLOURS
• IV FORM: LINES, SHAPES AND SUGGESTED MOVEMENT
• V BALANCE AND SYMMETRY
• VI THE APPEARANCE OF AESTHETIC APPRECIATION IN YOUNG CHILDREN
• VII EXPERIMENTS WITH PICTURES
• VIII FURTHER EXPERIMENTS WITH PICTURES AND WITH PHOTOGRAPHS OF OBJETS D’ART
• IX SOME REACTIONS TO MODERN ART
• X MUSICAL INTERVALS AND ATTITUDES TO MUSIC
• XI SOME SPECIAL ASPECTS OF AND FACTORS IN LISTENING TO MUSIC
• XII MUSIC AND THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS OR “MEANING”
• XIII EXPERIMENTS ON THE APPRECIATION OF POETRY
• XIV EXPERIMENTS WITH MODERN POETRY
• XV CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX-CORRELATIONS
• INDEX OF NAMES
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS