Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics and Embodied Music Cognition (Part I)

Mariusz S. Kozak

“Musical aesthetics ought to be the clue to the study of all other branches of art” (Vernon Lee, Music and Its Lovers, p. 23)

The writings of Vernon Lee—the pen name of Violet Paget[i] (1856–1935), an English Victorian novelist, art critic, philosopher, and amateur psychologist—are enjoying something of a revival in music studies.[ii] Most of her thoughts on music are scattered throughout myriad novels and essays she penned as a public intellectual, but two publications dealt with it at length: “The Riddle of Music,” an essay from 1906, and a monograph Music and Its Lovers from 1932. Together these two texts express one of the earliest theories of music aesthetics grounded in then-latest psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, a closer look at the “Riddle” essay in particular reveals an attempt at articulating what today we might call an embodied approach to cognition.

Born in France to English parents, and after moving around Europe for most of her childhood, Lee spent the vast majority of her adult life in Florence. There, she studied and wrote mainly about the visual arts and their effects on individual experience. A voracious reader of psychology (her copy of Wilhelm Wundt’s Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology is filled to the brim with marginalia accrued over years of re-reading), neurology, and Darwinian evolutionary science, she denounced the doctrine of “art for art’s sake”—a maxim ferried by her contemporary aestheticians, including Lee’s mentor Walter Pater (famous, among other things, for his claim that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music”). Instead, Lee was compelled by art’s capacity to have real, physical effects on the viewer or listener.

Art for Lee was founded on an aesthetic of empathy. Aesthetic experience began with careful attunement to one’s own bodily and affective responses, changes in breathing, tension in the muscles, feeling of movement. Lee was admittedly inspired by her longtime partner and occasional co-author, Clementina “Kit” Anstruther-Thomson (1857–1921), with whom she spent countless hours in Florentine museums and galleries. Their excursions served as testing ground for a psychological theory of aesthetics. Kit, who was trained as a painter, and Lee focused on the interaction of formal elements—lines, curves, shapes—with the body, and argued that this interaction constituted the initial, primary moment of aesthetic experience. It was this embodied experience that gave rise to mental impressions of beauty or feelings of pleasure. Emotions were the effects of bodily sensations, not the other way around. 

This might sound familiar to students of the history of psychology, because it crystallizes ideas put forth by William James and Carl Lange.[iii] These two psychologists, working independently of each other, famously proposed that physiological expressions are not the effects of emotions, but rather their precursors. In a oft-recited example of an unexpected encounter with a wild bear, James claimed that we don’t run away from the animal because we’re afraid, but rather it’s the act of running away that causes us to feel fear. Similarly, for Lee beauty was not the cause of bodily responses, but the other way around: bodily responses constituted beauty.

Lee’s “Riddle” essay can be read as an early—if not the earliest—formulation of what we would now call embodied music cognition. I outline the basic idea in the first part of this post. In the second part, I’ll show how Lee drew on this embodied understanding of music to create a psychological theory of aesthetics.

The “riddle” for Lee was that music has the capacity to elicit two kinds of emotions. On the one hand, it can arouse “dramatic” feelings similar to those experienced in real life. On the other hand, it can engender “aesthetic” emotions through “the musical quality of its sound-patterns” (“Riddle,” p. 209).

To account for this duality, Lee began by noting that musical sounds are different from natural sounds insofar as they are rare, exhibit complex organization, and have intense effects on the listener. As such, they’re able to directly elicit dramatic emotions, bypassing any association with non-musical phenomena. Rhythm plays a pivotal role in this process, “awakening, fulfilling, or baffling our expectant attention, and in so far exciting emotion” (“Riddle,” p. 212). Central to this arousal is the moving body: “all organic life is accompanied by rhythm, and all movement implies it. The functions of the heart and lungs, so obviously connected with what we call emotion, are typically rhythmical” (“Riddle,” p. 212). Musical attributes like pitch, loudness, or timbre merely “stimulate” the nervous system and elicit passive reactions. By contrast, rhythm and pace command our active obedience, “forcing our limbs, our feelings, our thoughts, our whole consciousness into their modes, because being is movement, and rhythm and pace are two chief modes in which all movement is felt; in fact, it is measure and pattern” (“Riddle,” p. 213).

Lee’s thinking here was influenced by Thèodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916), the founder of scientific psychology in France. Ribot believed that emotions could leave lingering traces, which he termed “emotional memories.” As Lee wrote, “we can remember the feeling of love, hatred, expectation, fear, or disappointment, apart from the recollection of the things that, on any particular occasion, we happen to love, hate, expect, fear, or be disappointed about” (“Riddle,” p. 214). Bringing in an embodied perspective, she continued: “we can understand and accept emotional memory if we thus conceive it as being the memory of alterations in our bodily conditions,” including changes in pulse, blood pressure, visceral states, as well as all kinds of diffuse tensions and relaxations (“Riddle,” p. 214). Patterns of movement associated with our responses to the contingencies of the ever-changing world create emotional memories as they become schematized and abstracted. Rhythm and pace, as physical applications of movement,

without any intervention of images of things, persons, places, or any qualities thereof, awaken a condition of emotional memory which may occasionally transform itself into an actual, that is to say, a dominating emotion; occasionally … music seems to deal rather with the dreamy recollections of feelings than with their sharp and overpowering reality. It is in this fashion that musical pace and rhythm can make us expect and be disappointed, advance, cling, or withdraw, be elated or depressed, merely as we keep step to a drum or revolve to a dance measure, without there being any reality or any thought which should make us do these things (“Riddle,” p. 215).

Music in this account evokes and reinforces emotional memories associated with real-life conditions, in turn bringing up ideas and images related to the situations in which these memories were initially aroused. Music thus becomes a confidant of sorts, awash with our own secret joys, desires, delights, needs, and sufferings.

Ribot’s theory helped Lee explain “dramatic” emotions, but to elucidate the arousal of “aesthetic” emotions she turned to the work of Lionel Dauriac (1847–1923), a French educator who, having been sent to Germany by the French Ministry of Public Instruction, became a huge devotee of Hanslick’s and the entire German “music science.” In his monograph titled Essai sur l’esprit musical (1904), Dauriac drew on psychological evidence to make a distinction between musical sensations and musical intelligence. Musical sensations concern the direct effects of sounds on the body. By contrast, musical intelligence refers to the capacity to comprehend how these sounds are organized. In other words, musical intelligence entails attending to musical form.

For Lee, this attention to form was the source of “aesthetic” emotions.  Before looking at music, it might be helpful to first examine how Lee associated them with visual experience. Visual form, she argued, is not an attribute of the objects we encounter, but rather a product of the quality that our minds ascribe to the spatial relations among lines and planes. This ascription involves “acts of measurement, comparison, and judgment (expressed in the terms of height, length, depth, direction, accent, symmetry, unity)” that use our own movement through space as reference (“Riddle,” p. 219). We perceive visual forms in terms of our experience of space and the associated “modes of various expenditures of energy” (“Riddle,” p. 219). In consequence, the visual forms of these objects become imbued with our own energies and the feeling of our own locomotion. Through the process of “inner mimicry”—an idea Lee borrowed from Theodor Lipps (1951–1914), the German philosopher of aesthetics who developed the concept of “empathy” (Einfühlung) as “inner imitation”—we perceive these forms by sensing ourselves reflected in them (“it is our life which is being summoned up to explain the existence of the form,” p. 220). We feel “the efforts and resistances, the tensions and relaxations, the pushing, pulling, and yielding, the lifting and pressing, the dividing and uniting, the balancing and the toppling, the starting and the stopping; in fact, the modes of being, various, complex, unified or separated, languid or vivacious, easy or effortful, smooth or jerky, fitful or continuous, which we have thus evoked” (“Riddle,” p. 220). In turn, external forms either corroborate or contradict the “paces and rhythms of our existence” (“Riddle,” p. 220).

For Lee, the arousal of aesthetic emotions in music works analogously to visual forms. The process starts with music directly affecting large areas of the nervous system and internal organs associated with emotional responses (Lee adapts this from James and Lange). The resulting physiological and kinesthetic feedback, in turn, allows us to associate the qualities of musical sounds with specific emotional experiences by mapping, as it were, our imagined movements onto their structure, onto their “paces and rhythms.” These emotions are reinforced and defined by the activation of our emotional memory, such that we can feel joy, sadness, or tenderness solely through the formal relations among musical elements.

In this post I laid out the basic form and background of Lee’s embodied theory of musical emotions. In Part 2 we’ll see how this theory connected with her larger aesthetic project.

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[i] Rather than reclaiming Paget’s legal name, it’s common in scholarship to refer to her by her pseudonym, because she not only used it as a pen name, but also among her friends. Following this tradition, I will refer to her as Vernon Lee.

[ii] See, for example, Franseen (2023), Peritz (2022), Riddell (2022), Peak (2016), Towheed (2010). Slightly older, but no less valuable, is Caballero (1992).

[iii] Lee was a close friend of William’s brother, the acclaimed author Henry. At one point William contemplated visiting Lee in Italy. Henry, feeling aggrieved that Lee had satirized him in one of her stories, tried to dissuade him by writing that “she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent, which is saying a great deal. her vigor and sweep of intellect are most rare and her talk superior altogether.” Against his brother’s advice William did meet Lee in 1892 and the two remained in contact.

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[…] Continuation: Part II […]