BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 8)

The Theory of the Modifications of Beauty. From antiquity to the eighteenth century.

As regards the Modifications of Beauty, it should be remembered that the ancient manuals of Poetics, and more frequently those of Rhetoric, contained more or less scientific definitions of psychological states and facts; Aristotle attempted in his Poetics to determine the nature of a tragic action or personality, and sketched a definition of the comic; in his Rhetoric he writes at considerable length of wit;[33] sections of the De oratore of Cicero and the Institutions of Quintilian[34] are devoted to wit and the comic; the lofty style was the subject of a lost treatise of Cæcilius, which anticipated that attributed to Longinus, whose title was translated in modern times as De sublimitate or On the Sublime. Following the example of the ancients, this kind of medley was perpetuated by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; whole treatises on the comic are incorporated in, for instance, the Argutezza of Matteo Pellegrini (1639) and the Cannochiale of Tesauro. La Bruyère treated of the sublime[35] and Boileau by his translation gave a fresh vogue to Longinus: the following century saw Burke inquiring into the origin of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, and deriving the former from the instinct for sociability, the latter from that of self-preservation; he also tried to define ugliness, grace, elegance and extraordinary beauty; Home, in his celebrated Elements of Criticism, discussed grandeur, sublimity, the ridiculous, wit, dignity and grace: Mendelssohn discussed sublimity, dignity and grace in fine art, and described some of these facts as due to mixed feelings, in which he was followed by Lessing[36] and others: Sulzer welcomed all these various concepts into his æsthetic encyclopædia and collected round them an elaborate bibliography. A new and curious meaning of the word humour reached the continent from England at this time. Its original meaning was simply "temperament," and sometimes "spirit," or "wit" ("belli umori" in Italy; in the seventeenth century there was in Rome an Academy of Umoristi). Voltaire introduced it into France and wrote in 1761, "Les Anglais ont un terme pour signifier cette plaisanterie, ce vrai comique, cette gaieté, cette urbanité, ces saillies, qui échappent à un homme sans qu'il s'en doute; et ils rendent cette idée par le mot humour ...";[37] in 1767 Lessing distinguishes humour from the German Laune (caprice, whim),[38] a distinction maintained by Herder in 1769 in opposition to Riedel who had confused the terms.[39]

Kant and the post-Kantians.

Accustomed to find all these subjects treated in the same book, philosophers at first theorized about them all without attempting to link them up together by introducing an artificial logical connexion. Kant, who had already in imitation of Burke written in 1764 a dissertation on the beautiful and the sublime, ingenuously remarked in the course of his lectures on Logic in 1771 that the beautiful and the æsthetic are not identical, because "the sublime also belongs to Æsthetic";[40] and in his Critique of Judgment, while treating of the comic in a mere digression (a magnificent piece of psychological analysis)[41] places side by side with and as if on an equality with the "Analytic of Beauty," an "Analytic of the Sublime."[42] We may note in passing that, before the publication of the third Critique, Heydenreich arrived at the same doctrine of the sublime which is contained in Kant's book.[43] Did Kant ever think of uniting the beautiful and the sublime and deducing them from a single concept? Apparently not. By his declaration that the principle of beauty must be sought outside ourselves, and that of the sublime within us, he tacitly assumes that the two objects are wholly disparate. In 1805 Ast, a follower of Schelling, declared the necessity of overcoming what he called the Kantian dualism of the beautiful and the sublime:[44] others reproached Kant with having treated the comic by the psychological, not the metaphysical, method. Schiller wrote a series of dissertations on the tragic, the sentimental, the ingenuous, the sublime, the pathetic, the trivial, the low, the dignified and the graceful, and their varieties, the fascinating, the majestic, the grave, and the solemn. Another artist, Jean Paul Richter, discoursed at great length on wit and humour, described by him as the romantic comic, or the sublime reversed (umgekehrte Erhabene).[45]

Herbart, in virtue of his formalistic principle, asserts that all these concepts are irrelevant to Æsthetic; he attributes them to the work of art, not to pure beauty;[46] Schleiermacher comes to the same conclusion, but for much better reasons, as a result of his sane conception of art. Amongst other things he observes: "It is usual to describe the beautiful and the sublime as two kinds of artistic perfection; and so accustomed have we grown to the union of these two concepts that we must make an effort to convince ourselves how very far they are from being co-ordinate or from together exhausting the concept of artistic perfection"; he regrets that even the best æstheticians should give rhetorical descriptions of them instead of demonstrating them. "The thing," says he, "is not right and just" (hat keine Richtigkeit), and he proceeds to exclude the whole subject from his Æsthetic,[47] as he had done previously in the case of natural beauty. Other philosophers, however, clung persistently to their search for a connexion between these various concepts, and called in dialectic to help them. The habit of applying dialectic to empirical concepts affected everybody at that time; even the great enemy of dialectic, Herbart, showed the cloven hoof, when in order to explain the union of different æsthetic ideas in the beautiful he appealed to the formula "they lose regularity in order to regain it."[48] Schelling asserted that the sublime is the infinite in the finite, and the beautiful the finite in the infinite, adding that the absolutely sublime includes the beautiful, and the beautiful the sublime;[49] and Ast, whom we have mentioned already, spoke of a masculine, positive element, which is the sublime, and a feminine, negative element which is the graceful and pleasing: between which there is a contrast and a struggle.

Culmination of the development.

These exercises in dialectical system-building developed and increased till about the middle of the nineteenth century they assumed two distinct forms whose history must here be shortly outlined.

Double form of the theory. The overcoming of the ugly. Solger, Weisse and others.

The first form may be called the Overcoming of the Ugly. This theory conceives the comic, the sublime, the tragic, the humorous, and so forth, as so many engagements in the war between the Ugly and the Beautiful, wherein the latter was invariably victorious, and arose by means of this war to more and more lofty and complex manifestations. The second form of the theory may be described as the Passage from Abstract to Concrete; it held that Beauty cannot emerge from the abstract, cannot become this or that concrete beauty, except by particularizing itself in the comic, tragic, sublime, humorous, or some other modification. The first form was already well developed in Solgei, an adherent of the romantic theory of Irony: but historically it presupposes the æsthetic theory of the Ugly, first sketched by Friedrich Schlegel in 1797. We have already noted that Schlegel considered the characteristic or interesting, not the beautiful, to be the principle of modern art; hence the importance attached by him to the piquant, the striking (frappant), the daring, the cruel, the ugly.[50] Solger found here the basis for his dialectic; amongst other things he maintains that the finite, earthly element may be dissolved and absorbed in the divine, which constitutes the tragic: or else the divine element may be entirely corrupted by the earthly, producing the comic.[51] These methods of Solger were followed by Weisse (1830), and by Ruge (1837); for the former, ugliness is "the immediate existence of beauty" which is overcome in the sublime and the comic; for the latter, the effort to achieve the Idea, or the Idea searching for itself, generates the sublime; when the Idea loses instead of discovering itself, ugliness is produced; when the Idea rediscovers itself and rises out of ugliness to new life, the comic.[52] A whole treatise entitled The Æsthetic of the Ugly[53] was published by Rosenkranz in 1853, presenting this concept as intermediate between the beautiful and the comic, and tracing it from its first origin to that "sort of perfection" it attains in the satanic. Passing from the common (Gemeine) which is the petty, the weak, the low, and the sub-species of the low, viz. the usual, the casual, the arbitrary and the crude, Rosenkranz goes on to describe the repugnant, trisected into the awkward, the dead and empty, and the horrible: thus he proceeds from tripartition to tripartition, dividing the horrible into the absurd, the nauseating and the wicked: the wicked into criminal, spectral and diabolical: the diabolical into demoniac, magical and satanic. He opposes the childish notion that ugliness acts as a foil to beauty in art, and justifies its introduction by the necessity for art to represent the entire appearance of the Idea; on the other hand he admits that the ugly is not on the same level as the beautiful, for, if the beautiful can stand by itself alone, the other cannot do so and must always be reflected by and in the beautiful.[54]

Passage from abstract to concrete: Vischer.

The second form prevailed with Vischer. The following extract will serve as an illustration of his manner: "The Idea arouses itself from the tranquil unity in which it was fused with the appearance and pushes onward, affirming, in face of its own finitude, its infinity"; this rebellion and transcendence is the sublime. "But Beauty demands full satisfaction for this disruption of its harmony: the violated right of the image must be reasserted: this can be accomplished only by means of a fresh contradiction, that is to say by the negative position now taken up by the image towards the Idea by rejecting all interpenetration with it and by affirming its own separate existence as the whole"; this second moment is the comic, negation of a negation.[55] The same process is further enriched and complicated by Zeising, who compares the modifications of Beauty to the refraction of colours: the three primary modifications, the sublime, the attractive and the humorous, correspond with the primary colours violet, orange and green; the three secondary, pure beauty, comic and tragic, to the colours red, yellow and blue. Each of these six modifications (exactly like the degrees of the Ugly in Rosenkranz) branches out, like fireworks, into three rays: pure beauty into the decorous, noble and pleasing: the attractive into graceful, interesting and piquant: the comic into buffoonery, the diverting and burlesque: the humorous into the quaint, capricious and melancholy: the tragic into the moving, pathetic and demoniac: the sublime into the glorious, majestic and imposing.[56]

The Legend of Sir Purebeauty.

All the works of this period on Æsthetic are filled in this way with the gest, chanson or romaunt of the knight Sir Purebeauty (Reinschon) and his extraordinary adventures, recounted in two conflicting versions. According to one story, Sir Purebeauty is constrained to abandon his beloved leisure by the Mephistophelean devices of the temptress Ugliness, who leads him into countless dangers from which he invariably emerges victorious; his victories and successes (his Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena) are called the Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous and so forth. The other story tells how the knight, bored by his life of loneliness, sallies forth purposely to seek adversaries and occasions for fighting; he is always vanquished, but even in his overthrow ferum victorem capit, he transforms and irradiates the enemy. Beyond this artificial mythology, this legend composed without the least imagination or literary skill, this miserably dull tale, it is vain to look for anything whatever in the much elaborated theory of German æstheticians known as the Modifications of Beauty.

XIV

ÆSTHETIC IN FRANCE, ENGLAND AND ITALY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Æsthetic movement in France: Cousin, Jouffroy.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century German thought, notwithstanding the glaring errors which vitiated it, and were soon to bring about a violent and indeed exaggerated reaction, must on the whole be awarded the foremost place in the general history of European thought as well as in the individual study of Æsthetic, the contemporary philosophy of other countries standing on an inferior level of the second and third degree. France still lay under the dominion of the sensationalism of Condillac and, at the opening of the century, was quite incapable of grasping the spiritual activity of art. A faint gleam of Winckelmann's abstract spiritualism just appears in the theories of Quatremère de Quincy, who, in criticism of Émeric-David (in his turn a critic of ideal beauty and an adherent of the imitation of nature),[1] maintained that the arts of design have pure beauty, devoid of individual character, as their objective; they depict man and not; men.[2] Some sensationalists, such as Bonstetten, vainly endeavoured to trace the peculiar processes of imagination in life and in art.[3] Followers of the orthodox spiritualism of the French universities date the beginning of a new era, and the foundation of Æsthetic in France, to 1818, the year when Victor Cousin first delivered at the Sorbonne his lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, which later formed his book with the same name, frequently reprinted.[4] These lectures of Cousin are but poor stuff, although some scraps of Kant are to be found in them here and there; he denies the identity of the beautiful with the pleasant or useful, and substitutes the affirmation of a threefold beauty, physical, intellectual and moral, the last being the true ideal beauty, having its foundations in God; he says that art expresses ideal Beauty, the infinite, God, that genius is the power of creation, and that taste is a mixture of fancy, sentiment and reason.[5] Academic phrases all of them; pompous and void and, for that very reason, well received. Of much greater value were the lectures on Æsthetic delivered by Théodore Jouffroy in 1822, before a small audience, and published posthumously in 1843.[6] Jouffroy allowed a beauty of expression, to be found alike in art and nature: a beauty of imitation, consisting in the perfect accuracy with which a model is reproduced: a beauty of idealisation, which reproduces the model, accentuating a particular quality in order to give it greater significance: and, finally, a beauty of the invisible or of content, reducible to force (physical, sensible, intellectual, moral), which, as force, awakens sympathy. Ugliness is the negation of this sympathetic beauty; its species or modifications are the sublime and the graceful. One sees that Jouffroy did not succeed in isolating the strictly æsthetic fact in his analysis and gave, instead of a scientific system, little beyond explanations of the use of words. He could not see or understand that expression, imitation and idealization are identical with each other and with artistic activity. Moreover he had many curious ideas, chiefly concerning expression. He said that if we were to see a drunkard with all the most disgusting symptoms of intoxication on a road where there was also an unhewn rock, we should be pleased by the drunken man, since he had expression, and not by the rock, since it had none. Beside Jouffroy, whose theories, crude and immature though they be, reveal an inquiring mind, it is hardly worth while to cite Lamennais,[7] who like Cousin regarded art as the manifestation of the infinite through the finite, of the absolute through the relative. French Romanticism in de Bonald, de Barante and Mme. de Staël had defined literature as "the expression of society," had honoured, under German influence, the characteristic and the grotesque,[8] and had proclaimed the independence of art by means of the formula "art for art's sake"; but these vague affirmations or aphorisms did not supersede, philosophically speaking, the old doctrine of the "imitation of nature."

English Æsthetic.

In England associationistic psychology still flourished (and has continued to flourish uninterruptedly), unable to emancipate itself wholly from sensationalism or to understand imagination. Dugald Stewart[9] had recourse to the wretched expedient of establishing two forms of association: one of accidental associations, the other of associations innate in human nature and therefore common to all mankind. England did not escape German influence, as appears, for example, in Coleridge, to whom we owe a saner concept of poetry and the difference between it and science[10] (in collaboration with the poet Wordsworth), and in Carlyle, who placed intellect lower than imagination, "organ of the Divine." The most noteworthy English æsthetic essay of this period is the Defence of Poetry by Shelley (1821),[11] containing profound, if not very systematic, views on the distinctions between reason and imagination, prose and poetry; on primitive language and the faculty of poetic objectification which enshrines and preserves "the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

Italian Æsthetic.

In Italy, where neither Parini nor Foscolo[12] had been able to shake off the fetters of the old doctrines (although the latter, in his later writings, was in several ways an innovator in literary criticism), many treatises and essays on Æsthetic were published during the earlier decades of the century, the greater part showing the influence of Condillac's sensationalism, which had a great vogue in Italy. Such authors as Delfico, Malaspina, Cicognara, Talia, Pasquali, Visconti and Bonacci belong more exclusively to the special, or rather, the anecdotal, history of Italian philosophy. Now and then, however, one comes across remarks that are not wholly contemptible, as in Melchiorre Delfico (1818) who, after wandering aimlessly hither and thither, fixes on the principle of expression, observing, "If it were possible to establish that expression is always an element in the beautiful, it would be a legitimate inference to regard it as the real characteristic of beauty, i.e. a condition without which the beautiful could not exist, and the pleasing modification which arouses the sentiment of beauty could not take place in us"; he tries to develop this principle by asserting that all other characters (order, harmony, proportion, symmetry, simplicity, unity and variety) have significance only by their subordination to the principle of expression.[13] In opposition to Malaspina's definition of beauty as "pleasure born of a representation"; and in opposition to the then fashionable threefold division of beauty into sensible, moral and intellectual, a critic of Malaspina observed that if beauty be representation, it is inconceivable that there should be intellectual beauty, which would be intelligible but not presentable.[14] Nor must Pasquale Balestrieri be forgotten; he was a student of medicine who in 1847 tried to construct an Æsthetic of an exact or mathematical kind, with neither better nor worse result than many famous authors in other countries. He noticed, while turning his algebraical expressions into numerals, that such general formulæ "fulfil their object with an infinite number of systems of different ciphers"; and that in art there is an element "not arbitrary, but unknown."[15] Works by German authors were frequently translated at this time, some of them, for example the writings of the two Schlegels, being reprinted several times; the Æsthetic of Bouterweck, deriving from Kant and Schiller,[16] was read and discussed; Colecchi gave an excellent statement of the æsthetic doctrines of Kant;[17] and in 1831 a certain Lichtenthal adapted the Æsthetic of Franz Ficker[18] to the use of Italian readers; later the same book was fully translated by another hand; some of Schelling's writings were translated, e.g. his discourses on the relation between figurative art and nature.

Rosmini and Gioberti.

It must be admitted that in Italy Æsthetic received but inadequate treatment in the revival of philosophical speculation effected by the work of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. It is treated in a merely incidental and popular manner by the first named.[19] Rosmini devotes a section of his philosophical system to the deontological sciences, which "treat of the perfection of being, and the method of acquiring or producing such perfection or losing it"; among these sciences is that of "beauty in the universal" under the name of Callology, of which a special part is Æsthetic, the science of "beauty in the sensible," establishing the "archetypes of beings."[20] In his longest literary work, considered by him as his Æsthetic,[21] his essay on The Idyl,[22] Rosmini declares the aim of art to be neither imitation of nature nor direct intuition of the archetypes, but the reduction of natural things to their archetypes, which are arranged in a hierarchy of three ideals, natural, intellectual and moral. Gioberti[23] is clearly under the influence of German idealism, especially of Schelling's; for him the beautiful is "the individual union of an intelligible type with an imaginative element called into being by fancy"; the phantasm gives material, while the intelligible type (concept) gives form, in the Aristotelian sense,[24] and since the ideal element predominates over the sensible or fantastic, art is a propædeutic to the true and the good. Gioberti is of opinion that Hegel was wrong in detaching natural beauty from Æsthetic, for perfect beauty of nature is "the full correspondence of sensible reality with the Idea which informs and represents it," and as such "makes its appearance in the sensible universe during the second period of the primordial age described in detail by Moses in the six days of creation"; it is only through original sin that imperfection and ugliness arose in nature.[25] Art is nothing but a supplement to natural beauty, whose decadence it presupposes, and thus art is at once record and prophecy, referring to the first and last ages of the world. The Last Judgement will reintroduce perfect beauty: "organic restitution, by empowering the faculties to contemplate the intelligible in the sensible, and by refining their capabilities, will greatly intensify and purify æsthetic enjoyment. The contemplation of perfect beauty will be the beatitude of imagination, of which Christ gave an ineffable foretaste by appearing to his disciples visibly transfigured and shining with celestial radiance."[26] Gioberti agrees with Schelling's division of art into pagan and Christian, a "heterodox beauty" (Oriental and Græco-Italian art), imperfect when compared with "orthodox beauty"; and between the two, a "semi-orthodox" beauty,[27] transitional to Christian art; he also attempted a doctrine of modifications of the beautiful, wherein he held the sublime to be creator of the beautiful. Beauty is the relative intelligibility of created things apprehended by fancy: the sublime is the absolute intelligibility of time, space and infinite power as presented to itself by the faculty of imagination: "The ideal formula: the Being creates the Existing, translated into æsthetic language, gives the following formula: by means of the dynamical sublime Being creates the beautiful; and by means of the mathematical sublime contains it: this shows the ontological and psychological connexions of Æsthetic in First Science." Ugliness enters into the beautiful either as relief and counterpoise, or to open a way to the comic, or to depict the struggle between good and evil. The Christian ideal of artistic beauty is the figure of the God-Man, absolute union of the two forms of beauty, the sublime and the beautiful, a transfigured and divinely illuminated expression of man.[28] However carefully we sift the thoughts of Gioberti from their mythological Judaico-Christian husk, we find nothing of the least value to science.

Italian Romantics. Dependence of Art.

On the other hand, if Italian literature of the day chose to revive and refurbish certain antiquated critical ideas, a much wider field was opened by social and political upheavals which tended to make use of literature as a practical instrument for spreading abroad the truths of history, science, religion and morality. In 1816 Giovanni Berchet wrote that "poetry ... is intended to improve the habits of man and satisfy the cravings of his imagination and heart, since the tendency towards poetry, like every other desire, awakens in us moral needs";[29] and Ermes Visconti in his Conciliatore of 1818 says that æsthetic aims must be subordinated "to the improvement of mankind and public and private weal, the eminent aim of all studies." Manzoni, who subsequently took to philosophizing on art on the principles of Rosmini, declared in his letter on Romanticism (1823) that "poetry or literature in general should have utility as its objective, truth as its subject and interest as its means";[30] and though noticing the vagueness of the concept of truth in poetry, he inclined always (as is seen also in his discourse on the historical novel) to its identification with historical and scientific truth.[31] Pietro Maroncelli proposed as a substitute for the classic formula of art, "founded on imitation of the real and having pleasure as its object," a formula of art as "founded on inspiration, having the beautiful as means and good as end"; this doctrine he baptized "cormentalism," contrasting it with the doctrine of art for art's sake found in the writings of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Victor Hugo.[32] Tommaseo defined beauty as "the union of many truths in one concept" effected by the power of feeling.[33] Giuseppe Mazzini, too, always conceived literature as the mediator of the universal idea or intellectual concept.[34] Attempting to restore serious content to a literature grown weak and frivolous, the Italian Romantics found themselves forced on the theoretical side, by a natural reaction, into constant and perpetual opposition to every tendency of thought likely to affirm the independence of art.

XV

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS

F. de Sanctis: development of his thought.

On the other hand, the autonomy of art found a strong supporter in Italy in the critical work of Francesco de Sanctis, who held private classes in literature at Naples from 1838 to 1848, taught at Turin and Zürich from 1852 to 1860 and in 1870 became professor in the University of Naples. He expressed his doctrines in critical essays, in monographs on Italian writers and in his classic History of Italian Literature. Receiving his first elements of old Italian culture in Puoti's school, his natural bent! towards speculation led him to investigate grammatical and rhetorical doctrines with the view of reducing them to a system; but he soon began to criticize and to grow out of this phase. He pronounced Fortunio, Alunno, Accarisio and Corso "empirics"; he had a slightly better opinion of Bembo, Varchi, Castelvetro and Salviati, who introduced "method" into grammar, a process completed subsequently by Buonmattei, Corticelli and Bartoli; and he proclaimed Francisco Sanchez, author of the Minerva, "the Descartes of grammarians." From these his admiration spread to the French writers of the eighteenth century and the philosophical grammars of; Du Marsais, Beauzée, Condillac and Gérard; following in their wake and pursuing the ideal of Leibniz, he conceived a "logical grammar"; in this effort, however, he soon began to recognize the impossibility of reducing the differences of languages to fixed logical principles., If he found the French theorists admirable in their ability to reconstitute the simple and primitive forms; from "I love" to "I am loving," something disquieted him; "Such decomposition of 'I love' into 'I am loving'" (said he) "deadens the word by depriving it of the movement proceeding from active will."[1] In the same way he read and criticized the writers of treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics from sixteenth-century men such as Castelvetro and Torquato Tasso (whom he dared to describe as an "indifferent critic," to the great scandal of Neapolitan men of letters) to Muratori and Gravina, "more acute than accurate"; and eighteenth-century Italians, Bettinelli, Algarotti and Cesarotti. Coldly rational rules found no favour with him: he urged the young to confront literary works boldly and freely absorb impressions, the only possible foundation for taste.[2]

Influence of Hegelism.

Philosophical study had not been abandoned and had not even fallen into entire decadence in Southern Italy; in these days of renewed interest in philosophy the theories on Beauty from over the Alps and the new ideas of Gioberti and other Italians[3] aroused enthusiastic discussion. Vico was read again, and Bénard's French translation of Hegel's Æsthetic appeared and was canvassed in Naples volume by volume (the first in 1840, the second in 1843, and the rest between 1848 and 1852). In its desire for new intellectual food Italian youth set itself to learn German: De Sanctis himself had to translate the greater Logic of Hegel and Rosenkranz's History of Literature in the dungeon of the Bourbon prison where he was incarcerated on account of his liberal opinions. The new critical tendency was named "philosophism" to distinguish it from the old grammatical criticism and from the vague, incoherent, exaggerated Romanticism. Philosophism attracted De Sanctis; to show how deeply he was imbued with the Hegelian spirit a tale was told that, having devoured the first volumes of Bénard's translation, he guessed the contents of the remaining volumes and, before they could appear, was expounding them publicly in his classroom.[4]

His first writings show traces of metaphysical idealism and Hegelism; and they still linger here and there in the terminology of his later works. In a lecture prior to 1848 he placed the safety of criticism in the philosophic school which, in works of literature, fixed its eyes upon "that absolute part ... that uncertain idea which moves within the mind of great writers, till it appears abroad clothed in fine raiment only less beautiful than itself."[5] In a preface to Schiller's plays (1850) he wrote, "The Idea is not thought, nor is poetry reason in song, as a poet of our time is pleased to assert; the idea is at once necessity and freedom, reason and passion, and its perfect form in drama is action."[6] Elsewhere he calls attention to the death of faith and poetry, absorbed by the development of philosophy: a thesis, he remarked some years later, "imposed on our generation by Hegel with his omnipotent thought."[7] In 1856 he attempted a definition of humour as "an artistic form having for signification the destruction of limit, with consciousness of such destruction."[8] Not to dwell too long on other particulars, in the distinction to which De Sanctis always held firm throughout his critical work, that between Fancy and Imagination, the latter considered as the true and only faculty of poetry, arises undoubtedly from suggestions of Schelling and Hegel (Einbildungskraft, Phantasie); from the same philosophers come the phrases "prosaic content," "prosaic world," sometimes used by him.

Unconscious criticism of Hegelism.

For De Sanctis the Hegelian Æsthetic was but a lever wherewith to lift himself clear of the discussions and views of the old Italian schools. A fresh, clear spirit such as his could not escape the arbitrary shackles of grammarians and rhetoricians only to fall into those of metaphysicians, the torturers of art. He absorbed the vital part of Hegel's teaching and re-expressed the Hegelian theories in correct or somewhat attenuated interpretations; but he only maintained with hesitation, and in the end openly rebelled against, all that was artificial, formalistic and pedantic in Hegel.

The following examples of such reductions and attenuations show how substantial and radical was the change he effected. "Faith has vanished and poetry is dead" (he wrote in 1856, echoing Hegel); "or it were better to say" (here is De Sanctis' own correction) "faith and poetry are immortal: what has disappeared is but one particular mode of their being. To-day faith springs from conviction and poetry is the spark struck from meditation; they are not dead, they are transformed."[9] Certainly he distinguished between imagination and fancy; but for him imagination was never the mystic faculty of transcendental apperception, the intellectual intuition of German metaphysicians, but simply the poet's faculty of synthesis and creation, contrasting with fancy as the faculty of collecting particulars and materials in a somewhat mechanical fashion.[10] When students of Vico and Hegel understood and expounded their master's theories as emphasizing the importance of concepts in art, De Sanctis replied, "The concept does not exist in art, nature or history: the poet works unconsciously and sees no concept but only form, in which he is involved and well-nigh lost. If the philosopher, by means of abstraction, can extract the concept thence and contemplate it in all its purity, he acts in a way entirely contrary to that of art, nature and history." He warned his hearers not to misunderstand Vico, who, when he extracts concepts and exemplary types from the Homeric poems, is not writing as an art critic but as a historian of civilization: Achilles is artistically Achilles, not strength or any other abstraction.[11] Thus his polemic is directed in the first instance against misunderstanding what he called the true Hegelian thought, which was in fact usually a correction made upon Hegel more or less consciously by himself. He was able to boast in his latter years that even at the time when all Naples went wild over Hegel, "at the time when Hegel was master of the field," he had always "made certain reservations and refused to accept his apriorism, his triad or his formulæ."[12]

Criticisms of German Æsthetic.

De Sanctis also took up an independent attitude towards the other German æstheticians. The views of Wilhelm Schlegel, very advanced for the day in which they had been promulgated, seemed to him to have been already superseded. In 1856 he wrote that Schlegel strives to "transcend ordinary criticism, which leads a humdrum existence among phraseology, versification and elocution, but loses its way and never comes face to face with art: whereas Schlegel throws himself headlong into the probable, the decorous and the moral; into everything save art."[13] Thrown by the hazards of life into German territory, he found himself at the Zürich Polytechnic, and found among his colleagues (only imagine such a thing!) Theodor Vischer. What opinion can he have formed of the ponderous Hegelian scholastic who emerged dusty and panting from the systematic labours so well known to us, and smiled disdainfully at the poetry and music of the decadent Italian race? De Sanctis writes, "I went there with my opinions and my prejudices and ridiculed their ridicule. Richard Wagner seemed to me a corrupter of music, and nothing could be more inæsthetic than the Æsthetic of Vischer."[14] His desire to correct the distorted views of Vischer, Adolf Wagner, Valentin Schmidt and other German critics and philosophers led him to undertake in 1858-59 a course of lectures before an international audience at Zürich upon Ariosto and Petrarch, the two Italian poets worst maltreated by these judges because hardest to reduce to philosophical allegory. He sketched a typical German critic and contrasted him with a French one, each with his own characteristic defects. "The Frenchman does not indulge in theories; he goes straight to the subject: his argument palpitates with warmth of impression and sagacity of observation: he never leaves the concrete: he estimates the quality of the talent and the work, studying the man in order to understand the writer." He makes the mistake of substituting reflexion on the psychology of the author and history of his time for reflexion upon art. "Quite otherwise is your German: be a thing never so plain, he makes it his business to manipulate, distort and embroil: he accumulates a mass of darkness from whose centre rays of dazzling light now and again shoot forth: truth is there at bottom, in grievous pangs of parturition. Confronted with a work of art, he labours to fasten down and fix the quality which is most evanescent and impalpable. While nobody is more given to talk of life and the world of the living, nobody on earth takes more pains to decompose and disembody it in generalities: as consequence of this last process (last in appearance, that is to say; in reality preconceived and a priori), he is able to fit you the same boot on every foot and the same coat on every back." "The German school is dominated by metaphysic, the French by history."[15] About this time (1858) a Piedmontese review published his exhaustive critical survey of the philosophy of Schopenhauer,[16] which was then beginning to attract disciples among his friends and companions in exile in Switzerland; the criticism provoked the philosopher himself to confess that "this Italian" had "absorbed him in succum et sanguinem."[17] What value did De Sanctis attach to all Schopenhauer's subtleties concerning art? Having fully stated his doctrine of ideas, he contents himself with the merest reference to the third book "wherein is found an exaggerated theory of Æsthetic."[18]

Final rebellion against metaphysical Æsthetic.

This moderate resistance and opposition to the partisans of the concept and to the romantic Italian mystics and moralists (he directed criticisms equally against Manzoni, Mazzini, Tommaseo and Cantù[19]) turned to open rebellion in one of his critical writings on Petrarch (1868) in which this false tendency is characterized with biting sarcasm. "According to this school" (he says, meaning the school of Hegel and Gioberti), "according to this school the real and living is art only in so far as it surpasses its form and reveals its concept or the pure idea. The beautiful is the manifestation of the idea. Art is the ideal, a particular idea. Under the gaze of the artist the body becomes subtilized until it is nothing but the shadow of the soul, a beautiful veil. The world of poetry is peopled with phantasms; and the poet, eternal dreamer, with the eyes of one slightly intoxicated sees bodies float unsteadily around him and change their shapes. Nor do bodies merely become attenuated into forms and phantasms; these forms and phantasms themselves become free manifestations of every idea and every concept. The theory of the ideal has been driven to its last victorious limit, to the destruction of the very phantasms themselves, to concept as concept, form becoming a mere accessory." "Thus the vague, the undecided, the undulating, the vaporous, the celestial, the ærial, the veiled, the angelic, have now a high position among artistic forms: whilst criticism revels in the beautiful, the ideal, the infinite, genius, the concept, the idea, truth, the superintelligible, the supersensible, the being and the existent, and many more generalities cast into barbarous formulæ just like those of the scholastics from whose influence we had so much difficulty in escaping." All these things, instead of determining the character of art, do nothing; save illustrate the contrary of art: its feebleness and impotence, preventing it from slaying abstractions and laying hold of life. If beauty and the ideal have actually the meaning given them by these philosophers "the essence of art is neither the beautiful nor the ideal, but the living, the form; the ugly too belongs to art since ugliness lives also in nature; outside the domain of art lies nothing but the formless and the deformed. Thais in Malebolge is more living and poetical than Beatrice, who is pure allegory representing abstract combinations. The Beautiful? Tell me of anything as beautiful as Iago, a form uprisen from the profundity of real life; so rich, so concrete; in every part, in each finest gradation, one of the most beautiful creations in the world of poetry." If in the course of "wrangling about the idea or the concept or real, moral, or intellectual beauty, and confusing philosophical or moral truths with æsthetic" you choose to call "a great part of the poetic world ugly, granting it a permit merely that it may act as contrast, antagonist or foil to beauty, accepting Mephistopheles as a foil to Faust, or Iago as foil to Othello," you are imitating "those good folk who thought, in illo tempore, that the stars shone in the firmament in order to give light to this earth."[20]

De Sanctis own theory

The æsthetic theory of De Sanctis himself arises entirely from the criticism of the highest manifestations of European æsthetic as known to him. Its nature is revealed by the contrast. "If you desire a statue in the vestibule of art," says he, "let it be that of Form; gaze upon this, question this, begin with this. Before form is attained, that exists which existed before the creation: chaos. Chaos is no doubt a respectable thing, with a most interesting history: science has not yet uttered its last word about this pre-world of fermenting elements. Art also has its pre-world: art also has its geology, born but yesterday and as yet scarcely stretched, a science sui generis, which is neither Criticism nor Æsthetic. Æsthetic appears when form appears, in which this pre-world is sunk, fused, forgotten and lost. Form is itself as the individual is himself; and no theory is so destructive to art as the continual harping upon the beautiful as manifestation, clothing, light, or veil of truth or the idea. The æsthetic world is not appearance, it is substance; to it indeed belongs everything substantial and living: its criterion, its raison d'être, lies nowhere save in this motto: I live."[21]

The concept of form.

For De Sanctis, form did not mean form "in the pedantic sense attached to it until the end of the eighteenth century," that is to say, that which first strikes a superficial observer, the words, the period, the sense, the individual image;[22] or form in the Herbartian sense, the metaphysical hypostatization of the former. "Form is not a Priori, it is not something existing of itself and distinct from the content as though it were a kind of ornament or vesture or appearance or adjunct of the content: it is generated by the content acting in the mind of the artist: such as the content is, such is the form."[23] Between form and content there is at the same time identity and diversity. In a work of art the content, which had been lying in a chaotic state in the mind of the artist, appears "not as it was originally, but as it has become; the whole of it, with its own value, its own importance, its own natural beauty enriched, not weakened, by the process." Therefore content is essential for the production of concrete form; but the abstract quality of the content does not determine that of artistic form." If the content, though beautiful and important, remain inoperative or lifeless or waste within the mind of the artist, if it have not sufficient generative power and reveal itself in the form as weak or false or vitiated, why trouble to sing its praises? In such cases the content may be important in itself, but as literature or art it is worthless. On the other hand the content may be immoral, absurd, false or frivolous: but if at certain times or in certain circumstances it has worked powerfully on in the brain of the artist, and taken form, such content is immortal. The gods of Homer are dead; the Iliad remains. Italy may die and, with her, every memory of Guelf and Ghibelline; the Divina Commedia will remain. The content is subject to all the hazards of history; it is born and it dies; the form is immortal."[24] He held firmly to the independence of art, without which there can be no Æsthetic; but he objected to the exaggeration of the formula of art for art's sake in that it tended to the separation of the artist from life, to the mutilation of the content and to the conversion of art into a proof of mere cleverness.[25]

De Sanctis as art-critic.

For De Sanctis, the concept of form was identical with that of imagination, the faculty of expression or representation, artistic vision. So much must be said by any one anxious to express clearly the direction which his thought was taking. But De Sanctis himself never succeeded in defining his own theory with scientific exactitude; and his æsthetic ideas remained the mere sketch of a system never properly interrelated and deduced. The speculative tendency shared his attention with many other lively interests, the desire to understand the concrete, to enjoy art and rewrite its actual history, to plunge into practical and political life; so that by turns he was professor, conspirator, journalist and statesman. "My mind inclines to the concrete," he was wont to say. He philosophized just so much as was necessary to the acquisition of a point of view in problems of art, history and life; and, having procured light for his intellect, found his bearings, derived some satisfaction from the consciousness of his own activity, he plunged as quickly as possible into the particular and the determinate. To immense power of seizing the truth in the highest general principles was joined a no less intense abhorrence for the pale region of ideas in which the philosopher takes an almost ascetic delight. As critic and historian of literature he is unrivalled. Those who have compared him with Lessing, Macaulay, Sainte-Beuve or Taine are making rhetorical comparisons.

Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: "In your last letter you speak of criticism, and say you expect it soon to disappear. I think, on the contrary, that it is just appearing over the horizon. Criticism to-day is the exact opposite of what it was, but that is all. In the days of Laharpe the critic was a grammarian; to-day he is a historian like Sainte-Beuve and Taine. When will he be an artist, a mere artist, but a real artist? Do you know a critic who interests himself whole-heartedly in the work itself? They analyse with the greatest delicacy the historical surroundings of the work and the causes which produced it: but the underlying poetry and its causes? the composition? the style? the author's own point of view? Never. Such a critic must have great imagination and a great goodness of heart; I mean an ever-ready faculty of enthusiasm; and then, taste; but this last is so rare, even among the best, that it is never mentioned nowadays."[26] Flaubert's ideal has been worthily reached by one critic only (that is to say, amongst critics who have given themselves to the interpretation of great writers and entire periods of literature) and that one is De Sanctis.[27] No literature of any country possesses so perfect a mirror as that possessed by Italy in the History and the other critical essays of Francesco de Sanctis.

De Sanctis as philosopher.

But the philosopher of art, the æsthetician in De Sanctis is less great than the critic and historian of literature. The critic is primary, the philosopher a mere accessory. The æsthetic observations scattered in aphorisms up and down his essays and monographs take various colours from various occasions, and are expressed in uncertain and often metaphorical language; this has led to his being accused of contradictions and inexactitudes which had no existence in his inmost thought and whose very appearance vanishes as soon as one takes into account the particular cases with which he was dealing. But form, forms, content, the living, the beautiful, natural beauty, ugliness, fancy, feeling, imagination, the real, the ideal, and all the other terms which he used with varying signification, demand a science both on which to rest and from which to derive. Meditation on these words stirs up doubts and problems on every side and reveals everywhere gaps and discontinuities. Compared with the few philosophical æstheticians, De Sanctis seems wanting in analysis, in order and in system, and vague in his definitions. But these defects are outweighed by the contact he establishes between the reader and real concrete works of art, and by the feeling for truth which never leaves him. He has, too, the attraction possessed by those writers who lead one on to suspect and to divine new treasures in store beyond what they themselves reveal—living thought, which stimulates living men to pursue and prolong it.

XVI

ÆSTHETIC OF THE EPIGONI

Revival of Herbartian Æsthetic.

When the cry "Away with metaphysic!" was raised in Germany, and a furious reaction began against the kind of Walpurgis-night to which the later Hegelians had reduced the life of science and history, the disciples of Herbart came to the front and seemed to ask, with an insinuating air: "What is all this? a rebellion against Idealism and Metaphysic? why, it is exactly what Herbart wished and undertook all by himself half a century ago! Here we stand, his legitimate descendants, and we offer you our services as allies. We shall not find it hard to agree. Our Metaphysic accords with the atomic theory, our Psychology with mechanism, and our Ethics and Æsthetic with hedonism." Herbart himself (had he not died in 1841) would most likely have spumed these disciples of his who pandered to popularity, cheapened metaphysics and gave naturalistic interpretations to his reals, his representations, his ideas, and all his highest conceptions.

With the school thus coming into fashion, the Herbartian Æsthetic too tried to put on flesh and acquire a pleasing plumpness so as not to cut too miserable a figure beside the well-nourished corpora of science launched upon the world by idealists. The feeding-up process was accomplished by Robert Zimmermann, professor of philosophy at Prague and later at Vienna, who, after years of laborious effort and an introductory sample in the shape of an ample history of Æsthetic (1858), at length produced his General Æsthetic as Science of Form in 1865.[1]

Robert Zimmermann.

This formalistic Æsthetic, born under bad auspices, is a curious example of servile fidelity in externals combined with internal infidelity. Starting from unity, or rather from subordination of Ethics and Æsthetic to a general Æsthetic defined as "a science which treats of the modes by which any given content may acquire the right to arouse approval or disapproval" (thereby differing from Metaphysic, science of the real, and from Logic, science of right thinking), Zimmermann places such modes in form, that is to say, in the reciprocal relation of elements. A simple mathematical point in space, a simple impression of hearing or sight, a simple note, is in fact neither pleasing nor displeasing: music shows that the judgement of beauty or ugliness always depends on the relation between two notes at least. Now these relations, i.e. forms universally pleasing, cannot be empirically collected by induction; they must be developed by deduction. By the deductive method it can be demonstrated that the elements of an image, which in themselves are representations, may enter into relations either according to their force (quantity), or according to their nature (quality); whence we have two groups—æsthetic forms of quantity, and æsthetic forms of quality. According to the first, the strong (large) is pleasing in comparison with the weak (small), and these latter are displeasing when set beside the former; according to the other form, that pleases which is substantially identical in quality (the harmonious), and that displeases which is on the whole diverse (the discordant).

But the substantial identity must not be pushed to the point of absolute identity, for in that case the harmony itself would cease to be. From harmonious form is deduced the pleasure of the characteristic or expression; for what is the characteristic but a relation of prevalent identity between the thing itself and its model? But while similarity prevailing in the distinction produces accord (Einklang), qualitative disharmony is as such disagreeable, and demands a resolution. (It is easy to detect the sleight of hand with which Zimmermann first slips the characteristic into the relations of pure form, thereby entirely altering Herbart's original thought; and how, by a second trick, he here introduces into pure beauty the variations and modifications of the beautiful, by the help of the despised Hegelian dialectic.) If such resolution is effected by the skilful substitution of something other than the unpleasant image, we shall certainly have removed the cause of offence and established quietude (not accord: Eintracht, nicht Einklang), but we shall have gained the mere form of correctness: it is better, then, to supersede this by means of the true image so as to reach the form of compensation (Ausgleichung); and, when the true image is also pleasing in itself, the final form of definitive compensation (abschliessende Ausgleich,) with which we exhaust the series of possible forms. And, in conclusion, what is Beauty? It is a conjunction of all these forms: a model (Vorbild) which has grandeur, plenitude, order, accord, correctness, definitive compensation; all this appears in a copy (Nachbild) in the form of the characteristic.

Putting on one side the artificial connexion Zimmermann makes between the sublime, the comic, the tragic, the ironic, the humorous and the æsthetic forms, notice must be taken (so that we may recognize into which of the seven heavens he is wafting us) that these general æsthetic forms concern art equally with nature and morality, whose individual spheres are differentiated solely by the application of the general æsthetic forms to particular contents. These forms, applied to nature, give us natural beauty, the cosmos; applied to representation, beauty of wit (Schöngeist) or imagination; applied to feeling, the beautiful soul (schöne Seele) or taste; applied to the will, character or virtue. On one side, then, is natural beauty, on the other human beauty, in which (latter), on one hand, we have the beauty of representation, that is to say æsthetic fact in the strict sense (art); on the other, we have the beauty of will, or morality; and between the two, lastly, we have taste, common to Ethics and Æsthetic. Æsthetic in the narrow sense, as the theory of beautiful representation, determines the beauty of representations, divided into the three classes of the beauty of temporal and spatial connexion (figurative arts); the beauty of sensitive representation (music); and the beauty of thoughts (poetry). This tripartition of beauty into figurative, musical and poetical brings to a conclusion theoretical Æsthetic, the only section developed by Zimmermann.

Vischer versus Zimmermann.

Zimmermann's work was a polemic against the principal representative of Hegelian Æsthetic, Vischer, who had little difficulty in defending his own position and counter-attacking that of his assailant. He held Zimmermann up to ridicule, for example, in connexion with his view of symbolism. Zimmermann defined a symbol as the object "round which beautiful forms adhere." A painter depicts a fox simply for the sake of painting a part of animal nature. Nothing of the sort: this is a symbol, because the painter "makes use of fines and colours to express things other than fines and colours." "You think I'm a fox," says the animal in the picture, "but you make a great mistake: I'm a clothes-peg: I'm an appearance created by the painter with gradations of grey, white, yellow and red." Even easier was it to make game of Zimmermann's enthusiastic praises of the æsthetic quality of the sense of touch. It was a pity, the latter had written, that the pleasures of this sense were so difficult to attain; since "to touch the back of the Resting Hercules and the sinuous limbs of the Venus of Melos or the Barberini Faun would give to the hand a delight comparable only with that felt by the ear when listening to the majestic fugues of Bach or the suave melodies of Mozart." Vischer does not seem to be far wrong in declaring formalistic Æsthetic to be "a grotesque union of mysticism and mathematics."[2]

Hermann Lotze.

The works of Zimmermann seem to have given satisfaction to nobody save himself. Even Lotze, by no means an adversary of Herbartianism, blames him severely in his History of Æsthetic in Germany (1868) and other writings. Still, Lotze was unable to offer any better substitute for æsthetic formalism than of a variant of the old idealism. "Can any one persuade us," he wrote in criticism of the formalists, "that a spiritual discord expressed by a corresponding discord in external appearances may have a value equal to that of the harmonious expression of a harmonious content solely because, in both cases, the formal relation of accord is respected? Can any one persuade us that the human form is pleasing solely for its formal stereometric relations, irrespective of the spiritual life by which it is animated? In empirical reality the three domains of laws, facts and values invariably appear as divided; and although they are united in the Highest Good, in Goodness in itself, in the living Love of a Personal God, in the Ought which is the basis of Being, our reason is unable to attain or to know such union. Beauty alone can reveal it to us: it is in close connexion with the Good and the Holy and reproduces the rhythm of the divine ordinance and the moral government of the universe. Æsthetic fact is neither intuition nor concept; it is idea, which presents the essential of an object in the form of an end referred to the ultimate end. Art, like beauty, must include the world of values in the world of forms."[3] The war between the Æsthetic of content and that of form, having Zimmermann, Vischer and Lotze as protagonists, reached its culminating point between 1860 and 1870.

Efforts to reconcile Æsthetic of form and Æsthetic of content.

Several people were in favour of a reconciliation. But the reconciliations they offered were not the right one, which was at least glimpsed by a certain young Johann Schmidt, who in his thesis for doctorate observed (1875) that, with all respect for Zimmermann and Lotze, it seemed to him they were both wrong in confusing the various meanings of the word "beauty," and discussed such an absurdity as a beauty or ugliness of natural objects, that is to say, of things external to the spirit; that Lotze, following Hegel, added the second absurdity of an intuitive concept or conceptual intuition: lastly, that neither of them grasped the fact that the æsthetic problem does not turn upon the beauty or ugliness of the abstract content or of form understood as a system of mathematical relations, but with the beauty or ugliness of representation. Form undoubtedly must exist, but "concrete form, full of content."[4] These utterances of Schmidt met with a hostile reception: it is easy (he was told in reply) to identify beauty with artistic perfection, but the whole crux of the matter lies in finding whether, beside this perfection, there exists another beauty dependent on a supreme cosmic or metaphysical principle: otherwise one is guilty of a naïve petitio principii.[5] It was thought better, therefore, to seek other modes of reconciliation, which consisted in cooking up an appetizing dish in which a little formalism and a little contentism were mixed to taste, the latter as a rule giving the predominant flavour.

Some Herbartians were found in the ranks of the mediating or conciliatory party. Hardly had Zimmermann's rigid formalism appeared, when Nahlowsky jumped up to protest that it had never entered the master's head to exclude content from Æsthetic;[6] but even the ablest of the school, men such as Volkmann and Lazarus, chose a middle course.[7] In the opposite camp Carrière,[8] and even Vischer himself (in a criticism of his own old Æsthetic), began to concede a larger part to the consideration of form; thus for Vischer beauty became "life appearing harmoniously," which when it appears in space is called form, and must always possess form, i.e. limitation (Begrenzung ) in space and time, measure, regularity, symmetry, proportion, propriety (these characters constituting its quantitative moments) and harmony (qualitative moment), which includes variety and contrast and is therefore the most important characteristic.[9]

K. Köstlin.

A conciliatory Æsthetic in which formalism prevailed was attempted by Karl Köstlin, a professor at Tübingen and formerly collaborator in the musical section of the works of Vischer. Köstlin[10] had been influenced by Schleiermacher, Hegel, Vischer and Herbart, but, truth to tell, does not seem to have perfectly understood the teaching of any one of his predecessors. According to him, the æsthetic object presented three requirements: richness and variety of imagery (anregende Gestaltenfülle), interesting content and beautiful form. Under the first we recognize, with no little difficulty, a distorted reflexion of Schleiermacher's "inspiration" (Begeisterung). Interesting content he defined as that which concerns man; that which he knows or does not know; that which he loves or hates (it is thus always relative to the individual and the conditions in which he exists); and he asserted that interest of content is joined to value of form, that is, he conceived content as a second value, the same of which we have heard Herbart speak. He also agreed with Herbart that form is absolute, and that its general character is determined as being easily perceptible by intuition (anschaulich), and by its power of giving satisfaction, pleasure and delight, in fact, as being beautiful. Its particular characteristics for Köstlin were, according to quantity, circumscription, simplicity (Einheitlichkeit), extensive and intensive size, and equilibrium (Gleichmass); according to quality, determination (Bestimmtheit), unity (Einheit), importance (Bedeutung) extensive and intensive, and harmony. But when Köstlin sets himself to the empirical verification of his categories, he falls into hopeless confusion. Greatness is pleasing, but so is smallness; unity is pleasing, but so is variety; regularity is pleasing, but so, confound it, is irregularity: uncertainties and contradictions at every step; he was aware of them and made no effort to conceal them; but they should have convinced him that the abstraction of "beautiful form," whose qualities and quantities he had so laboriously collected, is a ghostly shape without body, since that alone gives æsthetic pleasure which fulfils an expressive function. But having illustrated the three demands of the æsthetic object, Köstlin wasted all his remaining breath in constructing a kingdom of intuitive imagination in the manner of Vischer, i.e. beauty of organic and inorganic nature; of civil life; of morality; of religion; of science; of games; of conversations; of feasts and banquets; and lastly of history, reviewing and passing æsthetic comment on its three periods, patriarchal, heroic and historical.

Æsthetic of content. M. Schasler.

Schasler, who had written as vast a history on Æsthetic as Zimmermann's own, found a starting-point for a movement toward formalism in absolute idealism, or realism-idealism, as he called it. He began by defining Æsthetic as "the science of the beautiful and of art" (a single science ill defined as having two different objects), and proceeded to justify his unmethodical definition by saying that beauty does not exist in art alone, nor does art concern itself solely with beauty. The sphere of Æsthetic he defines as that of intuition (Anschauung) in which knowledge assumes a practical character and will a theoretical: the sphere of indivisible unity and absolute reconciliation of the theoretical and practical spirit, in which in a certain sense the highest human activities are developed. Beauty is the ideal, but the concrete ideal; this is why there is no ideal of a human body in abstraction from sex, no ideal of a mammal in general, but only of such and such species, as of horse or dog, and then only of determinate kind of horse or dog. Thus by descending from the more to the less abstract genus Schasler vainly attempted to reach the concrete, which inevitably escaped his grasp. In art we pass from the typical, which is natural beauty, to the characteristic, which is the typical of human feeling; hence we can frame the ideal of an old woman, a beggar or a ruffian. The characteristic of art is in closer relationship to the ugly than to the beautiful in nature. On this head (passing over the remainder, which is on familiar lines) it is well to notice that Schasler has a bias towards that version of the romaunt of Sir Purebeauty which ascribes the birth of the "modifications of Beauty" to the influence of the Ugly.[11] "Although," he writes, "the thought may disturb our minds, it must not be forgotten that were there no world of ugliness there could be no world of beauty; for it is only when the Ugly stirs up empty abstract Beauty, that it begins to combat the enemy and thus to produce concrete Beauty."[12] He even succeeded in converting Vischer himself, the chief supporter of the other version: "Formerly I had been accustomed to think in the old-fashioned Hegelian style," Vischer confesses, "that unrest, fermentation and strife dwelt in the essence of Beauty; that the Idea prevails and thrusts the image forth into the infinite; so arises the Sublime; that the image, offended in its finitude, makes war on the Idea; whence arises the Comic; this finished the struggle; Beauty returned to itself from the conflict of the two moments, and was created." But now, he continues, "I must acknowledge that Schasler is right, and so are his predecessors Weisse and Ruge: the Ugly has a hand in the matter; this is the principle of movement, the ferment of differentiation: without such leaven we never reach the special forms of Beauty, for each single one presupposes' the Ugly."[13]

Ed. von Hartmann.

Closely allied to that of Schasler is the Æsthetic of Eduard von Hartmann (1890), preceded by a historical treatise on German Æsthetic since Kant[14] wherein with meticulous, critical and polemical study he upholds the definition of Beauty as "the appearance of the Idea" (das Scheinen der Idee). Inasmuch as he insisted on appearance (Schein) as the necessary characteristic of Beauty, Hartmann held himself justified in naming his Æsthetic the "Æsthetic of Concrete Idealism," and in ranging himself alongside Hegel, Trahndorff, Schleiermacher, Deutinger, Oersted, Vischer, Meising, Carrière and Schasler, against the abstract idealism of Schelling, Solger, Schopenhauer, Krause, Weisse and Lotze, all of whom, by placing beauty in the supersensible idea, overlooked the sensory element and reduced it to the rank of a mere accessory.[15] By his insistence on the idea as the other indispensable and determining element, Hartmann proclaimed himself as opposed to the Herbartian formalism. Beauty is truth; neither historical, scientific nor reflective, but metaphysical or idealistic, the very truth of Philosophy: "in proportion as Beauty is in opposition to every science and to realistic truth, so much nearer is it to Philosophy and metaphysical truth": "Beauty, with its own peculiar efficacy, remains the prophet of idealistic truth in an unbelieving age that abhors Metaphysic and recognizes no value in anything but realistic truth." Æsthetic truth, which leaps immediately from subjective appearance to ideal essence, is lacking in the control and method possessed by philosophical truth; in compensation, however, she possesses the fascinating power of conviction, the sole property of sensible intuition, and unattainable by gradual or reflected mediation. The higher Philosophy soars, the less does it need the gradual passage through the world of the senses and of science, and the slighter becomes the distance separating Philosophy and Art. The latter, for its part, will be well advised to start on its journey towards the ideal world as Bædeker's handbooks counsel the intending traveller, "with as little luggage as possible"; "not overloading herself with a weight which paralyses the wings and is made up of unnecessary and indifferent trifles,"[16] Logical character, the microcosmic idea, the unconscious are immanent in beauty; by means of the unconscious, intellectual intuition operates in it,[17] and, from its being rooted in the unconscious, it is a Mystery.[18]

Hartmann and the theory of Modifications.

In his employment of the exciting or reactionary influence of the Ugly, Hartmann exceeded Schasler himself. Lowest among the degrees of Beauty, indeed forming the lower limit of æsthetic fact, lies sensuous pleasure, which is unconscious formal beauty; its first true degree is formal beauty of the first order, or the mathematically pleasing (unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, the golden section, etc.); its second degree is formal beauty of the second order, the dynamically pleasing; its third is formal beauty of the third order, the passive teleological, as in the case of utensils or machinery. Indeed it may here be noted that among machines and utensils, on a level with jars, plates and cups, Hartmann placed language: it is a dead thing, said he; receiving the appearances of life (Scheinleben)[19] only at the very instant of utterance. Language a "dead thing," an "utensil" for the philosopher of the Unconscious, in the land of Humboldt, with a Steinthal still living! There follow, as formal beauty of the fourth order, the active teleological or living, and as formal beauty of the fifth order, conformity to species (das Gattungsmässige): lastly and above all, since the individual idea is superior to the specific, is beauty concrete beauty or the microcosmic individual, which is no longer formal, but beauty of content. As is to be expected, the passage from lower to Higher degrees is made by means of the Ugly: nobody has laboured like Hartmann to recount in detail the services rendered by Ugliness to Beauty. From ugliness, in the form of the destruction of the beauty of equality, arises symmetry: from ugliness in the case of the circle arises the ellipse; the beauty of a waterfall tumbling over rocks is caused by the mathematically ugly; destruction, that is to say, of a fall in a parabolic curve; beauty of spiritual expression is achieved through the introduction of an ugliness relative to fleshly perfection. Beauty of a higher degree is founded on ugliness at a lower degree. When the highest degree is reached, that of individual beauty beyond which there can be nothing, even then elemental ugliness continues its work of beneficent irritation. The later phases thus produced are well known to us as the famous Modifications of the Beautiful: in this section also, nobody is so copious or detailed as Hartmann. He certainly does admit, side by side with simple or pure beauty, certain modifications free from conflict, such as the sublime or graceful; but the more important modifications can arise only through conflict. There are four cases, because the resolution must be either immanent, logical, transcendent or combined: immanent in the idyllic, the melancholy, the sad, the cheerful, the moving, the elegiac; logical in the comic in all its varieties; transcendent in the tragic; combined in the humorous with the tragi-comic and its other varieties. When none of these resolutions is possible, there arises ugliness; when an ugliness of content is expressed by an ugliness of form, we have the maximum of ugliness, the real æsthetic devil.

Metaphysical Æsthetic in France. C. Levêque.

Hartmann is the last considerable representative of the old æsthetic school in Germany; he inspires terror by the mass of his literary production, like many others of the school, who seem to accept it as a dogma that art cannot be dealt with except in several volumes a thousand pages long. Those who are not afraid of giants and are able to attack this sort of Æsthetic, will find it a fat good-humoured Magog full of vulgar prejudices, and so constituted that, despite his apparent strength, a little blow will kill him.

In other countries metaphysical Æsthetic had few followers. In France the celebrated competition of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1857 crowned with their approval and presented to the world the Science of Beauty by Levêque;[20] of which nobody now thinks or speaks, only remembering the author (who attitudinized as a disciple of Plato) by his eight characteristics of Beauty, derived by him from examination of a lily. The eight characteristics were as follows:—sufficient size of form, unity, variety, harmony, proportion, normal vivacity of colour, grace and propriety; ultimately reducible to two, size and order. As supplementary proof of the truth of his theory, Levêque applied it to three beautiful things: a child playing with its mother, a symphony of Beethoven and the life of a philosopher (Socrates). Really, it is somewhat difficult (says one of his fellow-spiritualists, venturing to comment on this doctrine though speaking with the utmost deference) to imagine what may be the normal vivacity of colour in the life of a philosopher.[21] Translations and explanatory articles by Charles Bénard[22] and books by various writers belonging to French Switzerland (Töpffer, Pictet, Cherbuliez) were not successful in popularizing the German systems of Æsthetic in France.

In England. J. Ruskin.

England showed even less disposition to interest herself, although John Ruskin may have some claim to be considered a metaphysical æsthetician with a distinctive national stamp. But it is difficult to treat of Ruskin in a history of science, for his temperament was wholly opposed to the scientific. His disposition was that of the artist, impressionable, excitable, voluble, rich in feeling; a dogmatic tone and the appearance of theoretical form veil, in his exquisite and enthusiastic pages, a texture of dreams and fancies. The reader who recalls those pages will regard as irreverent any detailed and prosaic review of Ruskin's æsthetic thought, which must inevitably reveal its poverty and incoherence. Suffice it to say that, following a finalistic, mystical intuition of nature, he considered beauty as a revelation of divine intentions, the seal "God sets on his works, even upon the smallest." For him the faculty which perceives the beautiful is neither intellect nor sensibility, but a particular feeling which he names the theoretic faculty. Natural beauty, which reveals itself to a pure heart when contemplating any object untouched and unspoiled by the hand of man, asserts itself for this reason as immeasurably superior to any work of art. Ruskin was too hasty in analysis to understand the complicated psychological and æsthetic process which went on in his mind when he was moved to an artist's ecstasy by contemplating some humble natural object such as a bird's nest or a flowing rivulet.[23]

Æsthetic in Italy.

In Italy the Abate Tornasi wrote a half-Hegelian, half-Catholic Æsthetic, wherein the beautiful is identified with the second person of the Trinity, the Word made man;[24] by this means he hoped to raise a bank of opposition against the liberal criticism of De Sanctis, whom he considered, from the sublime height of his own philosophy, as "a subtle grammarian." Combined Giobertian and German, especially Hegelian, influence produced several works of secondary importance; De Meis developed at length the thesis of the death of Art in the historical world.[25] Somewhat later Gallo also treated Æsthetic from the Hegelian point of view,[26] and others repeated, nearly word for word, the doctrines of Schasler and Hartmann on the overcoming of the Ugly.[27]

Antonio Tari and his lectures.

The only genuine Italian teacher of metaphysical Æsthetic according to the Germans was Antonio Tari, who lectured on this very subject in Naples University from 1861 to 1884. He had a meticulous and superstitiously minute knowledge of everything that issued from German printing-presses, and was the author of an Ideal Æsthetic as well as essays on style, taste, serious work and play (Spiel,) music and architecture, wherein he tried to keep the mean between the idealism of Hegel and the formalism of Herbart:[28] his lectures on Æsthetic attracted huge throngs and were one of the regular sights in the noisy, crowded Neapolitan university. Tari divided his treatment under three heads, Æsthesinomy, Æsthesigraphy and Æsthesipraxis, corresponding to the Metaphysic of the beautiful, to the doctrine of beauty in nature, and to that of beauty in art; like the German idealists, he defined the æsthetic sphere as intermediate between the theoretical and practical: he says emphatically that "in the world of spirit the temperate zone is equidistant from the glacial, peopled by the Esquimaux of thought, and from the torrid, peopled by the giants of action." He pulled Beauty from her throne, substituting in her stead the Æsthetic, of which Beauty is but an initial moment, the simple "beginning of æsthetic life, eternal mortality, flower and fruit in one," whose successive moments are represented by the Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous, and the Dramatic.

Æsthesigraphy.

But the most attractive part of Tari's lectures was that devoted to Æsthesigraphy, subdivided into Cosmography, Physiography and Psychography, in the course of which he frequently quoted Vischer with great devotion; "the great Vischer" as he called him, in imitation of whom he constructed his own "æsthetic physics," brightening it with much varied erudition and enlivening it with quaint comparisons. Is he speaking of beauty in inorganic nature—water, for example? He says in his fanciful manner, "When water ripples in the sunshine, in that act it has its smile; it has its frown in the breaking wave, its caprice in the fountain, its majestic fury in the foam." Is he speaking of geological configuration? "The vale, cradle perchance of the human race, is idyllic; the plain, monotonous but fat, is didactic." Of metals? "Gold is born great; iron, the apotheosis of human toil, achieves greatness; the former boasts of its cradle when it does not bring it to dishonour; the latter causes it to be forgotten." He looked on vegetable life as a dream, repeating Herder's fine saying that the plant is "the new-born babe that hangs sucking upon the breast of mother nature." He divided vegetables into three types: foliaceous, ramified and umbelliferous: "the foliaceous type," he says, "attains gigantic proportions in the tropics, where the queen of monocotyledons, the Palm-tree, represents despotism, the human scourge of those desert regions. Of that solitary pinnacle, all crown, the negro may well be identified as the reptile that crawls round its base." Amongst flowers, the carnation is "symbol of betrayal, by reason of the variegation of its colours and its deeply-dissected petals"; the celebrated comparison by Ariosto of a rose with a young girl is permissible only when the flower is still in bud, because "when it has unfolded its petals, disdaining the protection of thorns, displaying itself in all the pomp of its full colour, and boldly asking to be plucked by any hand, then it is woman, all woman, to call it by no harsher name, giving pleasure without feeling it, simulating love by its perfume and modesty by the crimson of its petals." He searches for and comments upon analogies between certain fruits and certain flowers; between the strawberry, for instance, and the violet; between the orange and the rose; he admired "the luxuriant spirals and the delicate architecture of a bunch of grapes": the mandarin-orange reminded him of the nobleman qui s'est donné la peine de naître; the fig, on the contrary, was the great country bumpkin, "rough, rude, but profitable." In the animal kingdom, the spider symbolized primitive isolation; the bee, monasticism; the ant, republicanism. He noted, with Michelet, that the spider is a living paralogism; it cannot feed itself without its web, and it cannot spin its web without feeding. Fish he condemns as un-æsthetic: "they are of stupid appearance with their wide—open eyes and incessant gaping, which makes them look voraciously gluttonous." Not so with amphibians, for which he entertains a sympathy: the frog and the crocodile, "alpha and omega of the family, start from the comical, or even the scurrilous, and attain the sublimity of the horrid." Birds are especially æsthetic by nature, "possessing the three most genial attributes of a living being: love, song, and flight"; moreover, they present contrasts and antitheses: "opposite to the eagle, queen of the skies, stands the swan, the mild king of the marshes; the libertine vainglorious cock has its contrast in the humble uxorious turtle-dove; the magnificent peacock is balanced by the rude and rustic turkey." Amongst mammals, nature compensates for defects of pure beauty by dramatic value; if they cannot throw their song into the air, they have the rudiments of speech; if they have no variegated, myriad-hued plumage, they have dark, heavily-marked colouring, instinct with life; if they cannot fly, they have many other modes of powerful progression; and, the higher they go, the more do they attain individuality in appearance and life. "The epic of animal life is comedy in the donkey, iniquae mentis asellus; idyl in the great wild beasts; downright tragedy in the Kaffir bull, that cloven-hoofed Codrus, who gives himself voluntarily to the lion in order to save the herd." As amongst birds, so amongst beasts attractive contrasts are to be made:—the lamb and the kid seem to typify Jesus and the devil; dog and cat, abnegation and egoism; hare and fox, the foolish simpleton and crafty villain. Many quaint and subtle observations does Tari let fall on human beauty and the relative beauty of the sexes, allowing the female to have charm, not beauty: "bodily beauty is poise, and woman's body is so ill-poised that she falls easily when running; made for child-bearing, she has knock-kneed legs, adapted to support the large pelvis; her shoulders have a curve compensating the convexity of the chest." He describes the various parts of the body: "curly hair expresses physical force; straight hair, moral"; "blue, napoleonic eyes have sometimes a depth like the sea; green eyes have a melancholy fascination; grey eyes are wanting in individuality; black eyes are the most intensely individual"; "a lovely mouth has been best described by Heine; two lips evenly matched; to lovers the mouth will rather seem a shell whose pearl is the kiss."[29]

How could we better take a smiling leave of metaphysical Æsthetic in the German manner than by recording this quaint vernacular version of it made by Tari, that kindly little old man, "the last jovial high-priest of an arbitrary and confused Æsthetic"?[30]

XVII

ÆSTHETIC POSITIVISM AND NATURALISM

Positivism and Evolutionism.

The ground lost by idealistic metaphysic was conquered in the latter half of the nineteenth century by positivistic and evolutionary metaphysic, a confused substitution of natural for philosophical sciences, and a hotch-potch of materialistic and idealistic, mechanical and theological theories, the whole crowned with scepticism and agnosticism. Characteristic of this trend of opinion was its contempt of history, especially the history of philosophy; which prevented its ever making that contact with the unbroken and age-long efforts of thinkers without which it is idle to hope for fertile work and true progress.

[SidenoteÆsthetic of H. Spencer.]

Spencer (the greatest positivist of his day), whilst discussing Æsthetic, actually did not know that he was dealing with problems for all, or almost all, of which solutions had been already proposed and discussed. At the beginning of his essay on the Philosophy of Style, he remarks innocently: "I believe nobody has ever sketched a general theory of the art of writing" (in 1852!); and in his Principles of Psychology (1855), touching the æsthetic feelings he remarks that he has some recollection of observations concerning the relation of art and play made "by some German author whose name I cannot recall" (Schiller!). Had his pages on Æsthetic been written in the seventeenth century, they would have won a low position amongst the early crude attempts at æsthetic speculation; in the nineteenth century, one knows not how to judge them. In his essay on The Useful and the Beautiful (1852-1854), he shows how the useful becomes beautiful when it ceases to be useful, illustrating this by a ruined castle useless for the purposes of modern life, but a suitable scene for picnic parties and a good subject for a picture to hang on a parlour wall; which leads him to identify the principle of evolution from the useful to the beautiful as contrast. In another essay on the Beauty of the Human Face (1852) he explains this beauty as a sign and effect of moral goodness; in that on Grace (1852) he considers the sentiment of the graceful as sympathy for power in conjunction with agility. In the Origin of Architectural Styles (1852-1854) he discovers the beauty of architecture as consisting in uniformity and symmetry, an idea which is aroused in a man looking at the bodily equilibrium of the higher animals or, as in Gothic architecture, by analogy with the vegetable kingdom; in his essay on Style, he places the cause of stylistic beauty in economy of effort; in his Origin and Function of Music (1857) he theorizes on music as the natural language of the passions, adapted to increase sympathy between men.[1] In his Principles of Psychology, he maintains that the æsthetic feelings arise from the overflow of exuberant energy in the organism, and distinguishes various degrees of them, from simple sensation to that accompanied by representative elements, and so on until perception is reached, with more complex elements of representation, then emotion, and, last of all, that state of consciousness which transcends sensation and perception. The most perfect form of æsthetic feeling is attained by the coincidence of the three orders of pleasures, a coincidence produced by the full action of their respective faculties with the least possible subtraction due to the painful effect of excessive activity. But it is very rarely that we experience æsthetic excitement of this kind and strength; almost all works of art are imperfect because they contain a mixture of artistic with anti-artistic effects; now the technique is unsatisfactory, now the emotion is of a low order. These works of art which are universally admired, are found when measured by this criterion to deserve a lower place than that accorded them by popular taste. "Beginning with the Greek epic and the representations of analogous legends given by their sculptors, tending to excite egoistic or ego-altruistic sentiments, and passing through the literature of the Middle Ages, equally impregnated with inferior sentiments, then through the works of the old masters, whose ideas and sentiments seldom compensate for the displeasing effect they inflict on our senses overrefined in study of appearances; and coming at last to the vaunted works of modern art, excellent for technical execution in many cases but deplorable for the emotions they arouse and express, such as Gérôme's battle-pieces, alternately sensual and sanguinary;—they are all far off indeed from the qualities deemed desirable, from the artistic forms corresponding to the highest forms of æsthetic feeling."[2] These last critical denunciations, like the theories noticed above, are mere substitutions of one word for another; "facility" for "grace"; "economy" for "beauty," and so on. Indeed, when one tries to define the exact philosophical position of Spencer, one can only possibly say that he wavers between sensationalism and moralism, and is never for a moment conscious of art as art.

Physiologists of Æsthetic. Grant Allen, Helmholtz, and others.

The same oscillation is noticeable in other English writers such as Sully and Bain, in whom, however, we find more familiarity with works of art.[3] In his numerous essays and in Physiological Æsthetics (1877), Grant Allen collected a great many records of physiological experiments, all of which may be of supreme value to physiology, for aught we know to the contrary, but most assuredly are worthless from the point of view of Æsthetic. He keeps to the distinction between necessary or vital activity and the superfluous or that of play, and defines æsthetic pleasure as "the subjective concomitant of the normal sum of activity, not connected directly with the vital functions, in the terminal peripheric organs of the cerebrospinal nervous system."[4] Physiological processes considered as causes of pleasure in art are presented under other aspects by later investigators, who assert that such pleasure arises not only "from the activity of the visual organs and the muscular systems associated with them, but also from the participation of some of the more important functions of the organism, as for instance breathing, circulation of the blood, equilibrium and internal muscular accommodation." Art, then, indubitably originated in "a prehistoric man who was habitually a deep-breather, having no call to rearrange his natural habits when scratching lines on bones or in mud and taking pains to draw them regularly spaced."[5] Physical-Æsthetic researches were pursued in Germany by Helmholtz, Brücke and Stumpf,[6] who generally confined themselves to the narrower field of optics and acoustics, giving descriptions of the physical processes of artistic technique and the conditions to which pleasurable visual and auditive impressions must conform, without claiming to merge Æsthetic in Physics, but even pointing out the divergences between them. Degenerate Herbartians hastened to disguise in physiological terms the metaphysical forms and relations of which their master had spoken, and to coquet with the hedonism of the naturalists.

Method of the natural sciences in Æsthetic.

The superstitious cult of natural sciences was often accompanied (as is frequently the fate of superstition) by a sort of hypocrisy. Chemical, physical and physiological laboratories became Sybilline grottoes, resounding with the questions of credulous inquirers concerning the profoundest problems of the human spirit; and many of those who were really conducting their inquiries on inherently philosophic principles pretended or deluded themselves into believing that they followed the Method of Natural Science. A proof of this illusion or pretence is Hippolyte Taine's Philosophy of Art[7]

H. Taine's Æsthetic.

"If by studying the art of various peoples and various epochs," says Taine, "we could define the nature and establish the conditions of the existence of each art, we should have arrived at a complete explanation of the fine arts and of art in general, i.e. at what is called an Æsthetic." A historical Æsthetic, not a dogmatic, which fixes characters and indicates laws "like Botany, and studies with equal attention orange and ivy, pine and birch; indeed it is a sort of botanical science applied to the works of man instead of to plants"; an Æsthetic which shall follow "the general movement which tends daily more and more to join the moral to the natural sciences and by extending to the former the principles, the safeguards and the rules of the latter, enables both to attain the same security and maintain the same progress."[8] The naturalistic prelude is followed by definitions and doctrines indistinguishable from those offered by philosophers whose infallibility is not guaranteed by scientific methods, indeed, from those of the wildest of such philosophers. For, says Taine, art is imitation, an imitation so carried out as to render sensible the essential character of objects; the essential character being "a quality from which all other qualities, or many others, are derived and follow unalterably from it." The essential character of a lion, for example, is to be "a great carnivore"; this determines the formation of all its limbs; the essential character of Holland is to be "a country formed by alluvial soil." This is why art is not restricted to objects existing in reality, but is able, as in architecture or in music, to represent essential characters without natural objects to correspond.[9]

Taine's metaphysic and moralism.

Now, in what do these essential characters, this carnivorosity and this alluviality differ, save perhaps in extravagance of example, from the "types" and "ideas" which intellectualiste or metaphysical Æsthetic had always considered as the proper content of art? Taine himself clears away every doubt in the matter by explicitly stating that "this character is what philosophers call the 'essence of things,' in virtue of which they affirm that the aim and end of art is to make manifest the essence of things"; he adds that, for his part, he "refuses to make use of the word 'essence' as being a technical term":[10] of the word itself, maybe; not of the concept for which it stands. There are two ways (says Taine, for all the world as though he were a Schelling) leading to the higher life of man, to contemplation: the way of science and the way of art: "the former investigates the causes and fundamental laws of reality, and expresses them in exact formulæ and abstract terms: the latter makes manifest these causes and laws, not in dry definitions inaccessible to the vulgar, and intelligible only to the select few, but in a sensible manner, appealing not merely to the reason but to the heart and senses of the most commonplace man; it has the power of being both elevated and popular, of manifesting what is most noble and elevated, and of manifesting it to every one."[11]

For Taine, as for the Hegelian æstheticians, works of art are arranged in a scale of values; so that, having begun by condemning as absurd every judgement of taste (every one to his taste[12]), he ends by asserting that "personal taste has no value whatever," and that some common measure should be abstracted and set up as a standard of progress and retrogression, ornamentation and degeneracy; a standard by which to approve and disapprove, praise and blame.[13] The scale of values set up by him is twofold or threefold, in the first instance it turns on the degree of importance of the character, i.e. the greater or less generality in idea, and the degree of beneficent effect (degré de bienfaisance), i.e. the greater or less moral value of the representation (two grades which are aspects of one single quality, viz. power, considered first for its own sake and then in its connexion with others): in the second instance upon the degree of convergence of effects, i.e. the fulness of expression, the harmony between idea and form.[14] This intellectualistic, moralistic, rhetorical doctrine is interrupted now and then by the usual naturalistic protests: "We shall, according to our custom, study this question in the manner of the natural scientist; that is to say methodically, by analysis; hoping to raise not merely a song of praise, but a code of laws," etc.;[15] as though that sufficed to alter the substance of the method adopted and the doctrine expounded. Taine finally gave himself over to dialectical treatments and solutions, and asserted that in the primitive period of Italian art, in the pictures of Giotto, we have soul without body (thesis); under the Renaissance, in Verrocchio's pictures, body without soul (antithesis); in the sixteenth century, in Raphæl, there is harmony of expression and anatomy, soul and body (synthesis).[16]

G. T. Feckner. Inductive Æsthetic.

The same protests and similar methods are to be found in the works of Gustav Theodor Fechner. In his Introduction to Æsthetic (1876), Fechner claims to "abandon the attempt at conceptual determination of the objective essence of beauty," since he desires to compose not a metaphysical Æsthetic from above (von oben), but an inductive Æsthetic from below (von unten) and to achieve clearness, not sublimity; metaphysical Æsthetic should bear the same relation to inductive, as the Philosophy of Nature to Physics.[17] Proceeding on inductive lines, he discovers a long series of æsthetic laws or principles: the æsthetic threshold; assistance or increment; unity in variety; absence of contradictions; clarity; association; contrast; consequence; conciliation; the correct mean; economic use; persistency; change; measure; and so on without end. This chaos of concepts he expounds with a chapter apiece, pleased and proud to show himself so highly scientific and so wholly inconclusive.

Experiments.

Next he describes the experiments he can recommend to his readers. They are of this type. Take ten rectangular pieces of white cardboard of fairly equal area (say ten square inches), but with sides variously proportioned from a ratio of 1:1 to one of 2:5, including the ratio of the golden section, 21:34; mix all these together on a black table and collect persons of every kind and character, but all belonging to the educated classes, and applying the method of choice ask these people first to free their minds of all questions as to a particular use and then to pick out the pieces of cardboard which give them the highest sensation of pleasure and those which inspire them with the strongest feelings of disgust; the answers to be most carefully noted, keeping male and female subjects apart, and tabulated. Then see what follows. Fechner admits that the chosen cardboard-pickers often made reservations when questioned by himself, not knowing (very naturally) how to tell whether they liked a shape or disliked it without referring it to a definite use; sometimes they refused point-blank to make any selection at all; and they almost always seemed vague and perplexed in mind and generally, when submitted to a second test, answered in a way totally different from the first. Still, we all know that errors cancel out; and anyhow the tabulations showed that the highest sensations of delight were aroused not by the square, but by rectangular forms most nearly approaching the square, an enthusiastic rush being made for the proportion 21:34.[18] This method of selection received an extraordinarily felicitous definition; it was known as "an average of arbitrary judgements by an arbitrary number of persons arbitrarily selected."[19] Fechner also informs us (always in tabular form) of the result of a statistical inquiry of his own, by means of countless heaps of catalogues and gallery-guides, as to the dimensions and shapes of pictures in relation to the subjects they depict.[20]