Edward Bullough

Early life to "Psychical Distance," 1880–1914

Edward Bullough was born in Thun, Switzerland, on 28 March 1880, to John Bullough and Bertha Schmidlein. As a child he lived mostly in Germany, and was educated at Vitzthum Gymnasium, Dresden. At seventeen Bullough moved to England, and in 1899 matriculated from Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, where he studied Medieval and Modern Languages. He graduated BA (Class I) in 1902, MA in 1906, after which he taught French and German at Cambridge colleges and lectured in the university.

At this time Bullough became interested in aesthetics, and "prepared himself to deal with [its] problems … by a study of physiology and general psychology". In 1907 Bullough gave a course of lectures in aesthetics, the first such at Cambridge, privately printed as The Modern Conception of Aesthetics. He repeated the course annually "until shortly before his death". Bullough conducted experimental work on the perception of colours in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory, the basis for a series of three papers in the British Journal of Psychology: "The Apparent Heaviness of Colours" (1907), "The 'Perceptive Problem' in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Single Colours" (1908), and "The 'Perceptive Problem' in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Simple Colour-Combinations" (1910). Bullough also had an interest in parapsychology, and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

In 1908 Bullough married Enrichetta Angelica Marchetti (daughter of the actor Eleonora Duse), with whom he would have a son and a daughter. He was elected to a Drosier Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College in 1912, and in the same year published his noted theoretical paper, "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle". Psychical distance (Bullough capitalises the words) is that which, in certain situations, "appears to lie between our own self and its affections, using the latter term in its broadest sense as anything which affects our being". Artistic production and appreciation are two such situations.

[Psychical Distance] has a negative, inhibitory aspect—the cutting-out of the practical sides of things and of our practical attitude to them—and a positive side—the elaboration of the experience on the new basis created by the inhibitory action of Distance.

The relation between self and object remains a personal one (it is not like the impersonal relation in scientific observation, for example) and Bullough thinks that a "concordance" between them is necessary for aesthetic appreciation. However this must not be such that psychical distance is lost: Bullough imagines a jealous husband watching a performance of Othello, who "will probably do anything but appreciate the play". This "antinomy of Distance" leads Bullough to say that what is desirable in art, "both in appreciation and production", is "the utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance".

War service to death, 1915–1934

In the First World War, Bullough was recruited as a civilian in the summer of 1915 to the Admiralty's cryptoanalysis section, Room 40. He served for four years, finally as a Lieutenant of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. After the war he returned to Caius, where he had been re-elected to a fellowship in January 1915. He published in the British Journal of Psychology two more papers on aesthetic theory, "The Relation of Aesthetics to Psychology" (1919) and "Mind and Medium in Art" (1920), and a review of experimental work (1921). In 1920, he was appointed College Lecturer in modern languages and University Lecturer in German, and he edited the anthology Cambridge Readings in Italian Literature.

In 1923 Bullough resigned his university post, wishing to concentrate instead on Italian. The same year, he joined the Roman Catholic Church as a Dominican Tertiary, and afterwards was active in the Cambridge University Catholic Association. In the following decade he published translations of Étienne Gilson, Karl Adam, and Achille Ratti (by then Pope Pius XI), and gave three papers on Dante at Catholic summer schools in Cambridge and Salzburg. A colleague believed that his work in Italian studies "all went into his lectures and teaching", rather than research for publication. He was appointed University Lecturer in Italian in 1926.

Bullough was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in March 1933. In his printed inaugural lecture, titled Italian Perspectives, he claims that the Italian "perspective" is one of "continuity of classical with medieval and modern times", so that tradition is treated "with the easy familiarity of a family possession". He argues that because the European classical tradition is also, for the Italian, the native tradition, "the 'national' inheritance of Italy lies at the same time embedded in the foundations of Europe". In illustration, Bullough proposes Roman law, the Renaissance, and the Romantic movement as "three contributions made by Italy to the patrimony of the civilised world". He offers the contemporary fascist movement as a tentative fourth: a successor to the chair, Uberto Limentani, believed there was "no doubt" that Bullough sympathised with fascism.

After a short illness resulting from an internal operation, Bullough died in a nursing home in Bath on 17 September 1934. He was buried at Woodchester Priory in Stroud. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a colleague at Caius, wrote Bullough's obituary for their college record.