BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 9)

Trivial nature of his ideas on Beauty and Art.

Nevertheless, when he tries to tell us what beauty is, he falls back on using—whether well or ill—the old speculative method, which he prefaces with the remark that for him the concept of beauty is "merely an expedient in conformity with linguistic usage for indicating briefly the link which unites the prevailing conditions of immediate pleasure."[21] He distinguishes three meanings of the word "beauty": first, in a broad sense, the pleasing in general: secondly, in a narrow sense, a higher pleasure, but still sensuous: thirdly, in the narrowest sense, true beauty, which "not only pleases, but has the right of pleasing, possesses value in pleasing"; in it are united the concepts of beauty (the pleasing) and of goodness.[22] Beauty, in fact, is that which must please objectively and as such it corresponds with the good of action. "The Good," says Fechner, "is like a serious man, the capable organiser of his whole domestic life, sagaciously weighing the present and future, setting himself to extract the greatest benefit from both. Beauty is his florid spouse, careful of the present and mindful of her husband's wishes. The Pleasing is the baby, all senses and play: the Useful is the servant who puts his hands at his master's disposal and is given bread solely in accordance with his deserts. Truth, lastly, is the preacher and teacher to the household; preacher in matters of faith, teacher in those of learning: he gives an eye to the Good and a helping hand to the Useful, and holds up a looking-glass to Beauty."[23] When speaking of art, he sums up all essential laws or rules into the following: (1) art chooses a valuable or, at any rate, an interesting, idea for representation: (2) it expresses the idea in sensible material in the manner most suitable to its contents: (3) from amongst the various means at its disposal, it selects those which in themselves are more pleasing than the others: (4) the same procedure is observed in all particulars: (5) in the event of conflict between these rules, one is made to give way to another in such a way that the greatest possible pleasure and that of highest value is attained (das grösstmögliche und werthvollste Gefallen).[24] But why should Fechner, who had this eudemonistic theory of beauty and art (as he calls it) all ready made in advance,[25] take the trouble to enumerate principles and laws and conduct experiments and tabulate statistics wholly incapable of illustrating or proving it? One is tempted to believe that these pseudo-scientific operations were to him, and still are to his followers, a pastime or hobby neither more nor less important than playing Patience or collecting stamps.

Ernst Grosse. Speculative Æsthetic and the science of art.

Another example of the superstitious cult of the natural sciences is to be found in Professor Ernst Grosse's Origins of Art.[26] Contemner of all philosophical research into art, which he dismisses under the title of "Speculative Æsthetic," Grosse invokes a Science of art (Kunst wissenschaft) whose mission is to dig out all the laws lying hidden in the mass of historical facts collected to date. It is his opinion that all ethnographic and prehistoric material should be united to historical matter proper, there being no possibility, according to him, of framing general laws when study is restricted to the art of cultured peoples "just as a theory of generation must necessarily be imperfect if founded exclusively on the form of that function predominant among mammals."[27] But immediately after his declaration of abhorrence for philosophy, and of faith in scientific methods, Grosse finds himself in the same difficulty as Taine and Fechner. Indeed, there is no escape; in order to examine the artistic productions of primitive and savage peoples, a start must be made from some sort of concept of art. All the scientific metaphors, all the verbal emollients employed by Grosse cannot hide the nature of the plan he is forced to adopt, or its striking resemblance to the despised speculative Æsthetic. "As a traveller who desires to explore an unknown land must provide himself with a general outline of the country and have some knowledge of the direction in which his path should lie, if he does not wish to lose his way entirely; so we, before beginning our enquiry, need a general preliminary orientation concerning the essence of the phenomena (über das Wesen der Erscheinungen) about to engage our attention." Most certainly "we may count upon having an exact and exhaustive answer, at earliest, when our enquiry is finished; and it is not yet begun. That characteristic which we seek to determine at the outset ... may be most radically modified by the time we reach the end:" there is no question, fie on the suggestion! of imitating the old æstheticians: the only question is how "to give a definition which may serve as provisional scaffolding, to be broken away on completion of the edifice."[28] Words, words, words: the mite of general ideas and artistic laws to be found in his book has been quarried by Grosse not from study of the reports brought back by travellers in savage lands, but from speculation on the forms of the spirit; and (inevitably) his interpretation of the former is reached by the light thrown on it by the latter. In his final definition, Grosse concludes by considering art as an activity which in its development or as its result, possesses immediate feeling-value (Gefühlswerth), and is an end to itself; practical and æsthetic activity are in direct mutual opposition between which as a middle term lies the activity of play, which like the practical activity has its end outside itself, but, like the æsthetic, finds its enjoyment not in its external end, which is more or less insignificant, but in its own activity.[29] At the end of his book he remarks that the artistic activity of primitive peoples is hardly ever unaccompanied by the practical; and that art began by being social and became individual only in civilized times.[30]

The Æsthetics of Taine and Grosse have also been described by the epithet sociological.

Sociological Æsthetic.

But since no one knows what the science of Sociology is, we must deal with the sociological superstition as we dealt with the naturalistic; that is to say, by skipping the preface with its proposals that can never be carried out, and seeing what it is that the objective necessities of the case have forced the author to assert, and which of the possible alternative views he accepts, or between what selection of them his allegiance wavers. During this examination we shall ignore the fairly common case of an author who while pretending to construct an Æsthetic simply compiles a list of facts connected with the history of art or civilization.

Proudhon.

Some social reformers of our day, like Proudhon, have revived the condemnations of Plato, or the mitigated moralism of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Proudhon denied the formula Art for Art's sake; he looked on art as a mere purveyor of sensuous pleasure, something which must be subordinated to legal and economical ends; poetry, sculpture, painting, music, romance, history, comedy, tragedy had for him no aim save exhortation to virtue and dissuasion from vice.[31]

J. M. Guyau.

Development of social sympathy is the whole duty of art in the estimation of J. M. Guyau, who became famous as the founder of Social Æsthetic and was, according to certain French critics, inaugurator of the third epoch in the history of Æsthetic, the first being the æsthetic of the ideal (Plato), the second that of perception (Kant), and the third that of "Social Sympathy" (Guyau). In his Problems of Contemporary Æsthetic (1884) Guyau combats the theory of play, and substitutes that of Life; in a posthumous publication Art in Its Sociological Aspect (1889) he explains more clearly that the life of which he speaks is social life.[32] If the beautiful be the intellectually pleasing, certainly it cannot be identified with the useful which is only searching for what is pleasing; but the useful (says Guyau, in the belief that he is correcting both Kant and the evolutionists) does not always exclude the beautiful, of which indeed it often forms the lowest degree. The study of art is embraced partly,[33] not wholly, by Sociology: for art fulfils two ends, firstly and primarily that of provoking pleasant sensations (of colour, sound, etc.) and in this sense finds itself in the presence of practically incontestable scientific laws which connect Æsthetic with the physics (optics, acoustics, etc.), mathematics, physiology and psychophysics. Sculpture, in fact, rests especially on anatomy and physiology: painting on anatomy, physiology and optics: architecture on optics (golden section, etc.): music on physiology and acoustics: poetry on metrics, whose most general laws are acoustical and physiological. The second function of art is to produce the phenomena of "psychological induction," which bring to a head ideas and sentiments of most complex nature (sympathy with personages represented, interest, pity, indignation, etc.), in short all the social feelings, which constitute it "the expression of life." Whence are derived the two tendencies recognised in art; one inclining towards harmony, consonance, and everything delightful to ear and eye: the other towards the transfusion of life into the domain of art. Genius, true genius is destined to preserve the balance of the two tendencies: decadents and degenerates deprive art of its social sympathetic aim by setting æsthetic sympathy at war against human sympathy.[34] Translating all this into familiar terms, we may say that Guy au asserts one purely hedonistic art, above which he superimposes another art, also hedonistic, but serviceable to the cause of morality.

M. Nordau.

The same polemic against decadents, degenerates and individualists is carried on by another writer, Max Nordau, who gives art the task of re-establishing the wholeness of life amongst the fragmentary specialisation characteristic of industrial society; he asserts that art for art's sake, art as the simple expression of internal states or the objectification of the artist's feelings, no doubt exists, but is merely "the art of Quaternary man, the art of the cave-dweller."[35]

Naturalism. C. Lombroso.

Naturalistic is the best term with which to qualify the Æsthetic derived from that identification of genius with degeneracy which made the fortune of Lombroso and his school. This identification derives its chief strength from the following piece of reasoning. Great mental efforts, total absorption in one dominating thought, often bring about physiological disorders in the bodily organism and weakness or atrophy of various vital functions. But such derangements come under the head of the pathological concept of illness, degeneration, madness. Therefore genius is identical with illness, degeneration and madness. A syllogism from particular to general, in which case, according to traditional Logic, non est consequentia. But with sociologists such as Nordau, Lombroso and company, we almost overstep the line separating respectable error from that grosser form which we call a blunder.

A mere confusion between scientific analysis and historical inquiry or description is visible in the works of certain sociologists and anthropologists. Thus one of them, Carl Bücher, in studying the life of primitive peoples, asserts that poetry, music and work were originally fused in one single act; that poetry and music were used to regulate the rhythms of labour.[36] This may be historically true or false, important or no: it has nothing whatever to do with æsthetic science. In the same way Andrew Lang maintains that the doctrine concerning the origin of art as disinterested expression of the mimetic faculty finds no confirmation from what we know of primitive art, which is decorative rather than expressive:[37] as though primitive art, which is a mere fact awaiting interpretation, could ever be converted into a criterion for the interpretation of art in general.

Decline of Linguistic.

The same vague naturalism exercised a baneful influence on Linguistic, which of late years has been wholly lacking in such profound research as that inaugurated by Humboldt and followed up by Steinthal. But Steinthal never succeeded in founding a school. Max Müller, popular and inaccurate, maintained the indivisibility of speech and thought, confounding, or at least not distinguishing, æsthetic and logical thought; although at one time he had noted that the formation of names had a closer connexion with wit, in the sense of Locke, than with judgement. He maintained, moreover, that the science of language is not a historical but a natural science, because language is not the invention of man: the dilemma of "historical" and "natural" was canvassed and resolved over and over again with little result.[38] Another philologist, Whitney, attacked the "miraculous" theory of Müller and denied that thought is indivisible from speech: "The deaf-mute does not speak, but he can think," he observes; "thought is not function of the acoustic nerve." By this means Whitney relapsed into the ancient doctrine that speech is a symbol or means of expression, of human thought, subject to the will, the result of a synthesis of faculties and of a capacity for intelligent adaptation of means to end.[39]

Signs of revival. H. Paul.

Philosophical spirit reappeared in Paul's Principles of the History of Language (1880),[40] though the author's efforts to defend himself from the terrifying accusation of being a philosopher led him to hunt out a fresh title to replace the scandalous "Philosophy of Language." But if Paul is vague about the relation of Logic to Grammar, he must be given every credit for identifying, as Humboldt had already done, the question of the origin of language with that of its nature; and reasserting that language is created afresh whenever we speak. He must also be given credit for having conclusively criticized the Ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie) of Steinthal and Lazarus, showing that there is no such thing as collective psyche and that there can be no language other than of the individual.

The linguistic of Wundt.

Wundt[41] on the other hand attached the study of language, mythology and customs to this non-existent science of Ethnopsychology; in his latest work, on this very subject of language,[42] he foolishly echoes Whitney's gibes and denounces as a "miracle theory" (Wundertheorie) that glorious doctrine inaugurated by Herder and Humboldt, whom he accuses of "mystical obscurity" (mystiche Dunkel): he observes that this view may have had some justification before the principle of evolution had reached its triumphant application to organic nature in general and to man in particular. He has not the faintest notion of the function of imagination, or of the true relation between thought and expression; he finds no substantial difference between expression in the naturalistic, and expression in the spiritual and linguistic sense; he considers language as a special highly developed form of the vital psychophysical manifestations and of the expressive movements of animals. Out of these facts language is developed by imperceptible gradations; so that, beyond the general concept of expressive movement (Ausdrucksbewegung) "there is no specific mark by which language can be distinguished in any but an arbitrary manner."[43] The philosophy of Wundt betrays its own weakness by showing its inability to master the problem of language and art. In his Ethics æsthetic facts are presented as a complex of logical and ethical elements; the existence of æsthetic as a special normative science is denied, not for the good and sufficient reason that there are no such things as "normative sciences," but because this special science is said by him to be absorbed by the two sciences of Logic and Ethics,[44] which amounts to denying the existence of Æsthetic and the originality of art.

XVIII

ÆSTHETIC PSYCHOLOGISM AND OTHER RECENT TENDENCIES

Neo-criticism and empiricism.

The neo-critical or neo-Kantian movement was powerless to make headway against hedonistic, psychological and moralistic views of the æsthetic fact, although it made every effort to save the concept of spirit from the invading rush of naturalism and materialism.[1] Kant bequeathed to neo-criticism his own failure to understand creative imagination, and the neo-Kantians do not seem to have had the faintest notion of any form of cognition other than the intellectual.

Kirchmann.

Amongst German philosophers of any renown who clung to æsthetic sensationalism and psychologism was Kirchmann, promoter of a so-called realism, and author of Æsthetic on a Realistic Basis (1868).[2] In his doctrine the æsthetic fact is an image (Bild) of a real; an animated (seelenvolles) image, purified and strengthened, that is, idealized, and divided into the image of pleasure, which is the beautiful, and that of pain, which is the ugly. Beauty admits of a threefold series of varieties or modifications, being determined according to the content as sublime, comic, tragic, etc.; according to the image, as beauty of nature or of art; and according to the idealization as idealistic or naturalistic, formal or spiritual, symbolical or classical. Not having grasped the nature of æsthetic objectification, Kirchmann takes the trouble to draw up a new psychological category of ideal or apparent feelings, arising from artistic images and being attenuations of the feelings of real life.[3]

Metaphysic translated into Psychology. Vischer.

To the evolution or involution of the Herbartians into physiologists of æsthetic pleasure corresponds a similar evolution or involution of the idealists into adherents of psychologism. The first place must be given to the veteran Theodor Vischer, who in a criticism of his own work pronounced Æsthetic to be "the union of mimics and harmonics" (vereinte Mimik und Harmonik), and Beauty the "harmony of the universe," never actually realized because realized only at infinity, so that when we think to seize it in the Beautiful, we are under an illusion: a transcendent illusion, which is the very essence of the æsthetic fact.[4] His son Robert Yischer coined the word Einfühlung to express the life with which man endows natural objects by means of the æsthetic process.[5] Volkelt, when treating of the Symbol[6] and joining symbolism to pantheism, opposed associationism and favoured a natural teleology immanent in Beauty.

Siebeck.

The Herbartian Siebeck (1875) abandoned the formalistic theory and tried to explain the fact of beauty by the concept of the appearance of personality.[7] He distinguishes between objects which please by their content alone (sensuous pleasures), those which please by form alone (moral facts), and those which please by the connexion of content with form (organic and æsthetic facts). In organic facts the form is not outside the content, but is the expression of the reciprocal action and conjunction of the constitutive elements: whereas in æsthetic facts the form is outside the content, and as it were its mere surface; not a means to the end, but an end in itself. Æsthetic intuition is a relation between the sensible and the spiritual, matter and spirit, and is thus form regarded as the appearance of personality. Æsthetic pleasure arises from the spirit's consciousness of discovering itself in the sensible. Siebeck borrows the theory of modifications of the beautiful from the metaphysical idealists, who held that only in such modifications can beauty be found in the concrete, just as humanity can only exist as a man of determinate race and nationality. The sublime is that species of beauty wherein the formal moment of circumscription is lost, and is therefore the unlimited, which is a kind of extensive or intensive infinity; the tragic arises when the harmony is not given but is the result of conflict and development; the comic is a relation of the small to the great; and so on. These traces of idealism, together with his firm hold on the Kantian and Herbartian absoluteness of the judgement of taste, make it impossible to regard Siebeck's Æsthetic as purely psychological and empirical and wholly devoid of philosophical elements.

M. Diez.

It is the same with Diez, who, in his Theory of Feeling as Foundation of Æsthetic (1892),[8] tries to explain the artistic activity as a return to the ideal of feeling (Ideal des fühlenden Geistes), parallel with science (ideal of thought), morality (ideal of will) and religion (ideal of personality). But whatever is this so-called feeling? is it the empirical feeling of the psychologists, irreducible to an ideal, or the mystic faculty of communication and conjunction with the Infinite and the Absolute? the absurd "pleasure-value" of Fechner, or the "judgement" of Kant? One is inclined to say that these writers, and others like them, still under the influence of metaphysical views, lack the courage of their opinions: they feel themselves to be in an atmosphere of hostility and speak under reservations or compromises. The psychologist Jodi asserts the existence of elementary æsthetic feelings, as discovered by Herbart, and defines them as "immediate excitations not resting upon associative or reproductive activity or on the fancy," although "in ultimate analysis they must be reduced to the same principles."[9]

Psychological tendency. Teodor Lipps.

The purely psychological and associationistic tendency becomes clearly defined in Professor Teodor Lipps and his school. Lipps criticizes and rejects a whole series of æsthetic theories: (a) of play; (b) of pleasure; (c) of art as recognition of real life, even if displeasing; (d) of emotion and passional excitation; (e) syncretism, attributing to art beside the primary purpose of play and pleasure the further ends of recognition of life, in its reality, revelation of individuality, commotion, freedom from a weight, or free play of the imagination. His theory differs little at bottom from that of Jouffroy, for in his thesis he assumes artistic beauty to be the sympathetic. "The object of sympathy is our objectified ego, transposed into others and therefore discovered in them. We feel ourselves in others and we feel others in ourselves. In others, or by means of them, we feel ourselves happy, free, enlarged, elevated, or the contrary of all these. The æsthetic feeling of sympathy is not a mere mode of æsthetic enjoyment, it is that enjoyment itself. All æsthetic enjoyment is founded, in the last analysis, singly and wholly upon sympathy; even that caused by geometrical, architectonic, tectonic, ceramic, etc., lines and forms." "Whenever in a work of art we find a personality (not a defect of the man, but something positively human) which harmonizes with and awakes an echo in the possibilities and tendencies of our own life and vital activities: whenever we find positive, objective humanity, pure and free from all real interests lying outside the work of art, as art only can reproduce it and æsthetic contemplation alone can demand; the harmony, the resonance, fills us with joy. The value of personality is ethical value: outside it there is no possibility or determination of ethical character. All artistic and in general æsthetic enjoyment is, therefore, the enjoyment of something which has ethical value (eines ethische Werthvollen); not as element of a complex, but as object of æsthetic intuition."[10]

The æsthetic fact is thus deprived of all its own value and allowed merely a reflexion from the value of morality.

Without lingering over Lipps's pupils (such as Stern and others[11]) and writers of similar tendency (such as Biese, with his theory of anthropomorphism and universal metaphor;[12] or Konrad Lange, who propounds a thesis that art is conscious self-deception),[13] we will call attention to Professor Karl Groos (1892), who comes within measurable distance of the concept of æsthetic activity as a theoretic value.[14] Between the two poles of consciousness, sensibility and intellect, are several intermediate grades, amongst which lies intuition or fancy, whose product, the image or appearance (Schein), is midway between sensation and concept. The image is full like sensation, but regulated like the concept; it has neither the inexhaustible richness of the former, or the barren nudity of the latter. Of the nature of image or appearance is the æsthetic fact; which is distinguished from the simple, ordinary image not by its quality, but by its intensity alone: the æsthetic image is merely a simple image occupying the summit of consciousness. Representations pass through consciousness like a crowd of people hurrying over a bridge, each bent on his own business; but when a passer-by halts on the bridge and looks at the scene, then is it holiday, then arises the æsthetic fact. This is therefore not passivity but activity; according to the formula adopted by Groos it is internal imitation (innere Nachahnung).[15] It may be objected against the theory that every image, so far as it is an image at all, must occupy the summit of consciousness if only for an instant; and that the mere image is either the product of an activity just as is the æsthetic image, or it is not a real image at all. It may also be objected that the definition of the image as something sharing in the nature of sensation and concept may lead back to intellectual intuition and the other mysterious faculties of the metaphysical school, for which Groos professes abhorrence. His division of the æsthetic fact into form and content is even less happy. He recognizes four classes of content: associative (in the strict sense), symbolic, typical, individual:[16] and into his inquiries he introduces, quite unnecessarily, the concepts of infusion of personality and of play. In connexion with the latter he remarks that "internal imitation is the noblest game of man,"[17] and adds that "the concept of play applies fully to contemplation, but not to æsthetic production, save in the case of primitive peoples."[18]

The modifications of the Beautiful in Groos and Lipps.

Groos does however free himself from the "modifications of Beauty," because, æsthetic activity having been identified with internal imitation, it is clear that whatever is not internal imitation is excluded from that activity as something different. "All Beauty (beauty understood in the sense of 'sympathetic') belongs to the æsthetic activity, but not every æsthetic fact is beautiful." Beauty, then, is the representation of the sensuously pleasant; ugliness, the representation of the unpleasant; the sublime, that of a mighty thing (Gewaltiges) in a simple form; the comic, that of an inferiority which arouses in us a pleasing sense of our own superiority. And so forth.[19] With great good sense Groos holds up to derision the office assigned to the ugly by Schasler and Hartmann with their superficial dialectic. To say that an ellipse contains an element of ugliness in comparison with the circle because it is symmetrical about its two axes only and not about infinite diameters is like saying "wine has a relatively unpleasant taste because in it is lacking (ist aufgehoben) the pleasant taste of beer."[20] Lipps too, in his writings upon Æsthetic, recognizes that the comic (of which he gives an accurate psychological analysis)[21] has in itself no æsthetic value; but his moralistic views lead him to outline a theory of it not unlike that of the overcoming of the ugly; he explains it as a process leading to a higher æsthetic value (i.e. sympathy).[22]

E. Viron and the double form of Æsthetic.

Work such as that of Groos and, occasionally, of Lipps is of some value towards the elimination of errors, as well as confining æsthetic research to the field of internal analysis. Merit of the same kind belongs to the work of a Frenchman, Véron,[23] who controverts the Absolute Beauty of academical Æsthetic and, after accusing Taine of confounding Art with Science and Æsthetic with Logic, remarks that if it be the duty of art to make manifest the essence of things, their one dominating quality, then "the greatest artists would be those who have best succeeded in exhibiting this essence ... and the greatest works would resemble each other more closely than any others and would clearly demonstrate their common identity, whereas the exact opposite happens."[24] But one looks in vain for scientific method in Véron; a precursor of Guyau,[25] he asserts that art is at bottom two different things; there are two arts: one decorative, whose end is beauty, that is to say the pleasure of eye and ear resulting from determinate dispositions of fines, forms, colours, sounds, rhythms, movements, fight and shade, without necessary interventions of ideas and feelings, and capable of being studied by Optics and Acoustics: the other, expressive, which gives "the agitated expression of human personality." He considers that decorative art prevails in the ancient world, and expressive art in the modern.[26]

We cannot here examine in detail the æsthetic theories of artists and men of letters; the scientific and historicist prejudices, the theory of experiment and human document, which underlie the realism of Zola, or the moralism which underlies the problem-art of Ibsen and the Scandinavian school. Gustave Flaubert wrote of art profoundly, better perhaps than any other Frenchman has ever written, not in special treatises but throughout his letters, which were published after his death.[27]

L. Tolstoy.

Under the influence of Véron and his hatred for the concept of beauty, Leo Tolstoy wrote his book on art,[28] which, according to the great Russian artist, communicates feelings in the same way in which words communicate thoughts. The meaning of this theory is made clear by the parallel he drew between Art and Science, and his conclusion that "the mission of art is to render sensible and capable of assimilation that which could not be assimilated under the form of argumentation"; and that "true science examines truths considered as important for a certain society at a given epoch and fixes them in the consciousness of man, whereas art transports them from the domain of knowledge to that of feeling."[29] There is therefore no such thing as art for art's sake, any more than science for science' sake. Every human function should be directed to increase morality and to suppress violence. This amounts to saying that nearly all art, from the beginning of the world, is false. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Raphæl, Michæl Angelo, Bach, Beethoven are (according to Tolstoy) "artificial reputations created by critics."[30]

F. Nietzsche.

Amongst artists rather than amongst philosophers must be reckoned Friedrich Nietzsche, whom we should wrong (as we said of Ruskin) by trying to expound his æsthetic doctrines in scientific language and then holding them up to the facile criticism which, so translated, they would draw upon themselves. In none of his books, not even in his first, The Birth of Tragedy,[31] in spite of the title, does he offer us a real theory of art; what appears to be theory is the mere expression of the author's feelings and tendencies. He shows a kind of anxiety concerning the value and aim of art and the problem of its inferiority or superiority to science and philosophy, a state of mind characteristic of the Romantic period of which Nietzsche was, in many respects, a belated but magnificent representative. To Romanticism, as well as to Schopenhauer, belong the elements of thought which issued in the distinction between Apollinesque art (that of serene contemplation, to which belong the epic and sculpture) and Dionysiac art (the art of agitation and tumult, such as music and the drama). The thought is vague and does not bear criticism; but it is supported by a flight of inspiration which lifts the mind to a spiritual region seldom if ever reached again in the second half of the nineteenth century.

An æsthetician of music: E. Hanslick.

The most notable æsthetic students of that time were perhaps a group of persons engaged in constructing theories of particular arts. And since—as we have seen[32]—philosophical laws or theories of individual arts are inconceivable, it was inevitable that the ideas presented by such thinkers should be (as indeed they are) nothing more than general æsthetic conclusions. First may be mentioned the acute Bohemian critic Eduard Hanslick, who published his work On Musical Beauty in 1854; it was often reprinted and was translated into various languages.[33] Hanslick waged war against Richard Wagner and in general against the pretension of finding concepts, feelings and other definite contents in music. "In the most insignificant musical works, where the most powerful microscope can discover nothing, we are now asked to recognize a Night Before the Battle, a Summer Night in Norway, a Longing for the Sea, or some such absurdity, should the cover have the audacity to affirm that this is the subject of the piece."[34] With equal vivacity he protests against the sentimental hearers who, instead of enjoying the work of art, set themselves to extract pathological effects of passionate excitement and practical activity. If it be true that Greek music produced effects of this kind, "if it needed but a few Phrygian strains to animate troops with courage in the face of the enemy, or a melody in the Dorian mode to ensure the fidelity of a wife whose husband was far away, then the loss of Greek music is a melancholy thing for generals and husbands; but æstheticians and composers need not regret it."[35] "If every senseless Requiem, every noisy funeral march, every wailing Adagio had the power of depressing us, who could put up with existence under such conditions? But let a real musical work confront us, clear-eyed and glowing with beauty, and we feel ourselves enslaved by its invincible fascination even if its material is all the sorrows of the age."[36]

Hanslick's concept of form.

Hanslick maintained that the sole aim of music is form, musical beauty. This affirmation won him the goodwill of the Herbartians, who hastened to welcome such a vigorous and unexpected ally; by way of returning the compliment, Hanslick felt obliged in later editions of his work to mention Herbart himself and his faithful disciple Robert Zimmermann who had given (so he said) "full development to the great æsthetic principle of Form."[37] The praises of the Herbartians and the courteous declarations of Hanslick both arose from a misunderstanding: for the words "beauty" and "form" have one meaning for the former and quite another for the latter. Hanslick never thought that symmetry, purely acoustical relations and pleasures of the ear constituted musical beauty;[38] mathematics, he held, are utterly useless to musical Æsthetic.[39] Musical beauty is spiritual and significative: it has thoughts, undoubtedly; but those thoughts are musical. "Sonorous forms are not empty, but perfectly filled; they cannot be compared with simple lines delimiting a space; they are the spirit assuming body and extracting from itself the stuff of its own incarnation. Rather than an arabesque, music is a picture; but a picture whose subject can neither be expressed in words nor enclosed in precise concept. There are in music both meaning and connexion, but these are of a specifically musical nature; music is a language we understand and speak, but which it is not possible to translate."[40] Hanslick asserts that though music does not portray the quality of feelings, it does portray their dynamic aspect or tone: if not the substantives, then the adjectives: it depicts not "murmuring tenderness" or "impetuous courage," but the "murmuring" and the "impetuous."[41] The backbone of the book is the denial that form and content can ever be separated in music. "In music there can be no content in opposition to the form, since there can be no form outside the content." "Take a motive, the first that comes into your head; what is its content, what its form? where does this begin, and that end? ... What do you wish to call content? The sounds? Very well: but they have already received a form. What will you call form? Also the sounds? but they are form already filled; form supplied with content."[42] Such observations denote acute penetration of the nature of art, though not scientifically formulated or framed into a system. Hanslick thought he was dealing with peculiarities of music,[43] instead of with the universal and constitutive character of every form of art, and this prevented him from taking larger views.

Æstheticians of the figurative arts. C. Fiedler.

Another specialist æsthetician is Conrad Fiedler, author of many essays on the figurative arts, the most important being his Origin of Artistic Activity (1887).[44] No one, perhaps, has better or more eloquently emphasized the activistic character of art, which he compares with language. "Art begins exactly where intuition (perception) ends. The artist is not differentiated from other people by any special perceptive attitude enabling him to perceive more or with greater intensity, or endowing his eye with any special power of selecting, collecting, transforming, ennobling or illuminating; but rather by his peculiar gift of being able to pass immediately from perception to intuitive expression; his relation with nature is not perceptive, but expressive." "A man standing passively at gaze may well imagine himself in possession of the visible world as an immense, rich, varied whole: the entire absence of fatigue with which he traverses the infinite mass of visual impressions, the rapidity with which representations dart across his consciousness, convince him that he stands in the midst of an immense visible world, although he may quite well be unable at any one instant to represent it to himself as a whole. But this world, so great, so rich, so immeasurable, disappears the moment art seeks to become its master. The very first effort to emerge from this twilight and arrive at clear vision restricts the circle of things to be seen. Artistic activity may be conceived as continuation of that concentration by which consciousness makes the first step towards clear vision, which it reaches only by self-limitation." Spiritual process and bodily process are here an indivisible whole, which is expression.

Intuition and Expression.

"This activity, simply because it is spiritual, must consist of forms wholly determinate, tangible, sensibly demonstrative." Art is not in a state of subjection to science. Like the man of science, the artist desires to escape from the natural perceptive state and to make the world his own; but there are regions to which we can penetrate not by the forms of thought and science but only through art. Art is, strictly speaking, not imitation of nature; for what is nature save this confused mass of perceptions and representations, whose real poverty has been demonstrated already? In another sense, however, art may be called imitation of nature inasmuch as its aim is not to expound concepts or to arouse emotions, that is to create values of intellect and feeling. Art does create both these values, if you like to say so; but only in one quite peculiar quality, which consists in complete visibility (Sichtbarkeit). Here we have the same sane conception, the same lively comprehension of the true nature of art which we found in Hanslick, only expressed in a more rigorous and philosophical manner. With Fiedler is connected his friend Adolf Hildebrand, who brought into high relief the activistic, or architectonic as opposed to imitative, character of art, illustrating his theoretical discussions especially from sculpture, the art which he himself followed.[45]

Narrow limits of these theories.

What we chiefly miss in Fiedler and others of the same tendency is the conception of the æsthetic fact not as something exceptional, produced by exceptionally gifted men, but as a ceaseless activity of man as such; for man possesses the world, so far as he does possess it, only in the form of representation-expressions, and only knows in so far as he creates.[46] Nor are these writers justified in treating language as parallel with art, or art with language; for comparisons are drawn between things at least partially different, whereas art and language are identical.

H. Bergson.

The same criticism can be made in the case of the French philosopher Bergson, who in his book on Laughter[47] states a theory of art very similar to that of Fiedler and makes the same mistake of conceiving the artistic faculty as something distinct and exceptional in comparison with the language of everyday use. In ordinary life, says Bergson, the individuality of things escapes us; we see only as much of them as our practical needs demand. Language helps this simplification; since all names, proper names excepted, are names of kinds or classes. Now and then, however, nature, as if in a fit of absence of mind, creates souls of a more divisible and detached kind (artists), who discover and reveal the riches hidden under the colourless signs and labels of everyday life, and help others (non-artists) to catch a glimpse of what they themselves see, employing for this purpose colours, forms, rhythmic connexions of words, and those rhythms of life and breath even more intimate to man, the sounds and notes of music.

Attempts to return to Baumgarten. C. Hermann.

A healthy return to Baumgarten, a revival and correction of the old philosopher's theories in the light of later discoveries, might perhaps have given Æsthetic some assistance, after the collapse of the old idealistic metaphysic, towards thinking the concept of art in its universality and discovering its identity with pure and true intuitive knowledge. But Conrad Hermann, who preached the return to Baumgarten[48] in 1876, did bad service to what might have been a good cause. According to him Æsthetic and Logic are normative sciences; but Logic does not contain, as does Æsthetic, "a definite category of external objects exclusively and specifically adequate to the faculty of thought"; and on the other hand "the products and results of scientific thought are not so external and sensibly intuitive as those of artistic invention." Logic and Æsthetic alike refer not to the empirical thinking and feeling of the soul, but to pure and absolute sensation and thought. Art constructs a representation standing midway between the individual and the universal. Beauty expresses specific perfection, the essential or, so to speak, the rightful (seinsollend) character of things. Form is "the external sensible limit, or mode of appearance of a thing, in opposition to the kernel of the thing itself and to its essential and substantial content." Content and form are both æsthetic, and the æsthetic interest concerns the entirety of the beautiful object. The artistic activity has no special organ such as thought possesses in speech. The æsthetician, like the lexicographer, has the task of compiling a dictionary of tones and colours and of the different meanings which may possibly be attached to them.[49] We can see that Hermann accepted side by side the most inconsistent propositions. He welcomes even the æsthetic law of the golden section, and applies it to tragedy; the longer segment of the Une is the tragic hero; the punishment which overtakes him (the entire line) exceeds his crime in the same proportion in which he oversteps the common measure (the shorter segment of the line).[50] It reads almost like a joke.

Without direct reference to Baumgarten, a proposal that Æsthetic be reformed and treated as the "science of intuitive knowledge" was made in a miserable little work by one Willy Nef (1898),[51] who makes the dumb animals share his "intuitive knowledge," in which he distinguishes a formal side (intuition) and a material side or content (knowledge), and considers the everyday relations between men, their games and their art, as belonging to intuitive knowledge.

Eclecticism. B. Bosanquet.

The English historian of Æsthetic, Bosanquet (1892) tried to find a reconciliation between content and form in unity of expression. "Beauty," says Bosanquet in the Introduction to his History, "is that which has characteristic and individual expressiveness for sensuous perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness by the same means." In another passage he observes: "The difficulty of real Æsthetic is to show how the combination of decorative forms in characteristic representations, by intensifying the essential character immanent in them from the beginning, subordinates them to a central signification which stands to their complex combination as their abstract signification stands to each one of them taken singly."[52] But the problem, as propounded in a way suggested by the antithesis between the two schools (contentism and formalism) of German Æsthetic, is in our opinion insoluble.

Æsthetic of expression: present state.

De Sanctis founded no school of æsthetic science in Italy. His thought was quickly misunderstood and mutilated by those who presumed to correct it, and, in fact, only returned to the outworn rhetorical conception of art as consisting of a little content and a little form. Only within the last ten years has there been a renewal of philosophical studies, arising out of discussions concerning the nature of history[53] and the relation in which it stands to art and science, and nourished by the controversy excited by the publication of De Sanctis' posthumous works.[54] The same problem of the relation between history and science, and their difference or antithesis, reappeared also in Germany, but without being put in its true connexion with the problem of Æsthetic.[55] These inquiries and discussions, and the revival of a Linguistic impregnated by philosophy in the work of Paul and some others, appear to us to offer much more favourable ground for the scientific development of Æsthetic than can be found on the summits of mysticism or the low plains of positivism and sensationalism.

XIX

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF SOME PARTICULAR DOCTRINES

Result of the history of Æsthetic.

We have reached the end of our history. Having passed in review the travail and doubt through which the discovery of the æsthetic concept was achieved, the vicissitudes first of neglect, then of revival and rediscovery to which it was exposed, the various oscillations and failures in its exact determination, the resurrection, triumphant and overwhelming, of ancient errors supposed to be dead and buried; we may now conclude, without appearing to assert anything unproven, that of Æsthetic in the proper sense of the word we have seen very little, even including the last two centuries' active research. Exceptional intellects have hit the mark and have supported their views with energy, with logic, and with consciousness of what they were doing. It would no doubt be possible to extract many true affirmations leading to the same point of view from the works of non-philosophical writers, art-critics and artists, from commonly received opinions and proverbial sayings; such a collection would show that this handful of philosophers does not stand alone, but is surrounded by a throng of supporters and is in perfect agreement with the general mind and universal common sense. But if Schiller was right in saying that the rhythm of philosophy is to diverge from common opinion in order to return with redoubled vigour, it is evident that such divergence is necessary, and constitutes the growth of science, which is science itself. During this tedious process Æsthetic made mistakes which were at once deviations from the truth and attempts to reach it: such were the hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity and of the sensationalists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth century; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes, of the Stoics, of the Roman eclectics, of the mediæval and Renaissance writers; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers of the Church, of some mediæval and even some quite modern rigorists; and finally, the æsthetic mysticism which first appeared in Plotinus and reappeared again and again until its last and great triumph in the classical period of German philosophy. In the midst of these variously erroneous tendencies, ploughing the field of thought in every direction, a tenuous golden rivulet seems to flow, formed by the acute empiricism of Aristotle, the forceful penetration of Vico, the analytical work of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, De Sanctis and others who echoed them with weaker voice. This series of thinkers suffices to remind us that æsthetic science no longer remains to be discovered; but at the same time the fact that they are so few and so often despised, ignored or controverted, proves that it is in its infancy.

History of science and history of the scientific criticism of particular errors.

The birth of a science is like that of a living being: its later development consists, like every life, in fighting the difficulties and errors, general and particular, which lurk in its path on every side. The forms of error are numerous in the extreme and mingle with each other and with the truth in complications equally numerous: root out one, another appears in its stead; the uprooted ones also reappear, though never in the same shape. Hence the necessity for perpetual scientific criticism and the impossibility of repose or finality in a science and of an end to further discussion. The errors which may be described as general, negations of the concept of art itself, have been touched on from time to time in the course of this History; whence it may be gathered a simple affirmation of the truth has not always been accompanied by any considerable recapture of enemy territory. As to what we have called particular errors, it is clear that when freed from confusing admixture of other forms and divested of fanciful expression, they reduce themselves to three heads, under which they have already been criticized in the first or theoretical part of this work. That is to say, errors may be directed (a) against the characteristic quality of the æsthetic fact; (b) against the specific; (c) against the generic: they may involve denial of the character of intuition, of theoretic contemplation, or of spiritual activity, which together constitute the æsthetic fact. Among the errors which fall into these three categories we are now to sketch in outline the history of those which have had, or have to-day, the greatest importance. Rather than a history it will be a historical essay, sufficient to show that, even in the criticism of individual errors, æsthetic science is in its infancy. If among these errors some appear to be decadent and nearly forgotten, they are not dead; they have not accomplished a legal demise at the hands of scientific criticism. Oblivion or instinctive rejection is not the same thing as scientific denial.

I

RHETORIC: OR THE THEORY OF ORNATE FORM

Rhetoric in the ancient sense.

Proceeding according to rank in importance, we inevitably head the list of theories for examination with the theory of Rhetoric, or Ornate Form.

It will not be superfluous to observe that the meaning given in modern times to the word Rhetoric, namely, the doctrine of ornate form, differs from that which it had for the ancients. Rhetoric in the modern sense is above all a theory of elocution, while elocution (λέξις, φράσις, ἑρμηνεία, elocutio) was but one portion, and not the principal one, of ancient Rhetoric. Taken as a whole, it consisted strictly of a manual or vade-mecum for advocates and politicians; it concerned itself with the two or the three "styles" (judicial, deliberative, demonstrative), and gave advice or furnished models to those striving to produce certain effects by means of speech. No definition of the art is more accurate than that given by its inventors the earliest Sicilian rhetoricians, scholars of Empedocles (Corax, Tisias, Gorgias): Rhetoric is the creator of persuasion (πειθος δημιουργός). It devoted itself to showing the method of using language so as to create a certain belief, a certain state of mind, in the hearer; hence the phrase "making the weaker case stronger" (τὸ τὸν ἥττω λόgον κρείττω ποιεῖν); the "increase or diminution according to circumstances" (eloquentia in augendo minuendoque consistit); the advice of Gorgias to "turn a thing to a jest if the adversary takes it seriously, or to a serious matter if he takes it as a jest,"[1] and many similar well-known maxims.

Criticism from moral point of view.

He who acts in this manner is not only æsthetically accomplished, as saying beautifully that which he wishes to say; he is also and especially a practical man with a practical end in view. As a practical man, however, he cannot evade moral responsibility for his actions; this point was fastened upon by Plato's polemic against Rhetoric, that is to say against fluent political charlatans and unscrupulous lawyers and journalists. Plato was quite right to condemn Rhetoric (when dissociated from a good purpose) as blameworthy and discreditable, directed to arouse the passions, a diet ruinous to health, a paint disastrous to beauty. Even had Rhetoric allied herself to Ethics, becoming a true guide of the soul (ψυχαγωγία τις διὰ τῶν λόγον); had Plato's criticism been directed solely against her abusers (everything being liable to abuse save virtue itself, says Aristotle); had Rhetoric been purified, producing such an orator as Cicero desired, non ex rhetorum officinis sed ex academiae spatiis[2] and imposing on him, with Quintilian, the duty of being vir bonus dicendi peritus;[3] yet the unalterable fact remains that Rhetoric can never be considered a regular science, being formed of a congeries of widely dissimilar cognitions.

Accumulation without system.

It included descriptions of passions and affections, comparisons of political and judicial institutions, theories of the abbreviated syllogism or enthymeme and of proof leading to a probable conclusion, pedagogic and popular exposition, literary elocution, declamation and mimicry, mnemonic, and so forth.

Its fortunes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The rich and heterogeneous content of this ancient Rhetoric (which reached its highest development in the hands of Hermagoras of Temnos in the second century B.C.) gradually diminished in volume with the decadence of the ancient world and the change in political conditions. This is not the place to dwell on its fortunes in the Middle Ages or its partial replacement by formularies and Artes dictandi (and later by treatises upon the art of preaching), or to quote the reasons given by such writers as Patrizzi and Tassoni for its disappearance from the world of their day;[4] such history would be well worth writing, but would be out of place here. We will merely state that whilst conditions were at work on every side corroding this complex of cognitions, Louis Vives, Peter Ramus and Patrizzi himself were busy criticizing it from the point of view of systematic science.

Criticisms by Vives, Ramus and Patrizzi.

Vives emphasized the confused methods of the ancient treatise-writers, who embraced omnia, united eloquence with morality, and insisted that the orator must be vir bonus. He rejected four-fifths of ancient Rhetoric as extraneous: namely, memory, which is necessary in all arts; invention, which is the matter of each individual art; recitation, which is external; and disposition, which belongs to invention. He retained elocution only, not that which treats of quid dicendum, but of quem ad modum, extending it beyond the three styles or kinds to include history, apologue, epistles, novels and poetry.[5] Antiquity furnishes us with few and faint attempts at such extension; now and then a Rhetorician ventures to suggest that the γένος ίστορικόν and ἐπιστολικόν be included in Rhetoric, and even (in spite of opposition) "infinite" questions, that is to say merely theoretical questions with no practical application, which amounts to a scientific or philosophical genus;[6] others agreed with Cicero[7] that when one had mastered the most difficult of all arts, forensic eloquence, all else seemed child's-play (ludus est homini non hebeti ...). Ramus and his pupil Omer Talon reproached Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian with having confused Dialectic and Rhetoric; and they assigned invention and disposition to the former, agreeing with Vives that "elocution" alone should be allowed to Rhetoric.[8] Patrizzi, on the other hand, refused the name of science to either, recognizing them as simple faculties, containing no individual matter (not even the three genera), and differentiating them only by attaching the term Dialectic to the dialogue form and proof of the necessary, and Rhetoric to connected discourse directed to persuasion in matters of opinion. Patrizzi observes that "conjoined speech" is used by historians, poets and philosophers, no less than by orators; and thus approaches the view of Vives.[9]

Survival into modern times.

In spite of these opinions the body of rhetorical doctrine continued to flourish in the schools. Patrizzi was forgotten; if Ramus and Vives had some followers (such as Francisco Sanchez and Keckermann), they were generally held up to odium by the traditionalists. In the end, Rhetoric found a supporter in philosophy when Campanella made the following declaration in his Rational Philosophy: "quodammodo Magiae portiuncula, quae affectus animi moderator et per ipsos voluntatem ciet ad quaecumque vult sequenda vel fugienda."[10] Baumgarten owed to it his tripartition of Æsthetic into heuristic, methodology and semeiotic (invention, disposition and elocution), adopted later by Meier. Among Meier's numerous works is a little book entitled Theoretic Doctrine of Emotional Disturbances in General,[11] considered by him to be a psychological introduction to æsthetic doctrine. On the other hand, Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment observes that eloquence, in the sense of ars oratoria or art of persuasion by means of beautiful appearance and dialectical form, must be distinguished from beautiful speaking (Wohlredenheit); and that the art of oratory, playing upon the weakness of men to gain its own ends, "is worthy of no esteem" (gar keiner Achtungwürdig)[12] But in the schools it flourished in many celebrated compilations, including one by the French Jesuit Father Dominique de Colonne, which was in use until some few decades ago. Even to-day, in so-called Literary Institutions, we come across survivals of ancient Rhetoric, notably in chapters devoted to the art of oratory; and fresh manuals on judicial or sacred eloquence (Ortloff, Whately, etc.[13]) are actually appearing, though rarely, to-day. Still, Rhetoric in the ancient sense may be said to have disappeared from the system of the sciences; to-day no philosopher would dream of following Campanella in dedicating a special section of rational philosophy to Rhetoric.

Modern signification of Rhetoric. Theory of literary form.

In compensation for this process, the theory of elocution and beautiful speech has been in modern times progressively emphasized and thrown into scientific form. But the idea of such a science is ancient, as we have seen; and equally ancient is the style of exposition, consisting in the doctrine of a double form and the concept of ornate form.

Concept of ornament.

The concept of "ornament" must have occurred spontaneously to the mind as soon as attention was directed to the values of speech by listening to poets reciting[14] or to oratorical contests in public gatherings. It must very early have been thought that the difference between good speaking and bad, or between that which gave more pleasure and that which gave less, between grave or solemn, and commonplace or colloquial, consisted in something additional superimposed upon the canvas of ordinary speech like an embroidery by a skilful orator. These considerations led the Græco-Roman rhetoricians to adopt the practice, like the Indians, who arrived at the distinction independently, to distinguish the bare (ψιλή) or purely grammatical form from another form containing an addition which they called ornament, κόσμος: ornatum est (Quintilian will serve, as typical of all the rest) quod perspicuo ac probabili plus est.[15]

The notion of ornament as something added on from outside forms the basis of the theory which Aristotle, the philosopher of Rhetoric, gave of the queen of ornaments, Metaphor. According to him the high pleasure aroused by metaphor arises from the collocation of different terms and the discovery of relations between species and genera, producing "learning and knowledge by means of the genus" (μαθησιν καi γνῶσιν διὰ τοῦ γένους), and that easy learning which is the greatest of human pleasures,[16] which amounts to saying that metaphor adds to the concept under consideration a group of minor incidental cognitions, as a kind of diversion and relief and pleasant instruction for the mind.

Classes of ornament.

Ornaments were divided and subdivided in a number of different ways. Aristotle (and previously Isocrates, rather differently) classified the ornaments which diversify bare or nude form, under the heads of dialect forms, substitutions and epithets, prolongations, truncations and abbreviations of words, and other departures from common usage, and, finally, rhythm and harmony. Substitutions were of four classes: species for genus; genus for species; species for species; and proportionate.[17] After Aristotle, elocution was especially studied by Theophrastus and Demetrius Phalereus; these rhetoricians and their followers further solidified the classification of ornament by distinguishing tropes from figures (σχήματα) and dividing figures into figures of speech (scheimata τῆς λέχεως) and of thought (τῆς διανοίας), figures of speech into grammatical and rhetorical, and figures of thought into pathetic and ethic. Substitutions were divided into fourteen principal forms, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, antonomasia, onomatopeia, catachresis, metalepsis, epithet, allegory, enigma, irony, periphrase, hyperbaton and hyperbole; each divided into subspecies and contrasted with its relative vice. Figures of speech amounted to a score or so (repetition, anaphora, antistrophe, climax, asyndeton, assonance, etc.); figures of thought to about the same number (interrogation, prosopopœia, ætiopœia, hypotyposis, commotion, simulation, exclamation, apostrophe, aposiopesis, etc.). If these divisions have any value as aids to memory in relation to particular literary forms, considered rationally they are simply capricious, as is evidenced by the fact that many classes of the ornate appear now under the heading of tropes, now of figures; sometimes under figures of speech, then as those of thought, no reason for the alteration is given except the arbitrary caprice of an individual rhetorician which so decrees and disposes. And since one function which may be fulfilled by the rhetorical categories is to point out the divergence between two ways of expressing the same thing, one of which is arbitrarily selected as "proper,"[18] it is easy to see why the ancients defined metaphor as "verbi vel sermonis a propria significatione in aliam cum virtute mutatio," and figure as "conformatio quaedam orationis remota a communi et primum se offerenti ratione."[19]

The concept of the Fitting.

So far as we know, antiquity raised no revolt against the theory of ornament or of double form. We do sometimes hear Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca and others saying, Ipsae res verba rapiunt, Pectus est quod disertos facit et vis mentis, Rem tene, verba sequentur, Curam verborum rerum volo esse sollicitudinem, or Nulla est verborum nisi rei cohaerentium virtus. But these maxims did not bear the weighty meanings which we moderns might attach to them; they were perhaps in contradiction with the theory of ornament, but as the contradiction was unheeded, it was ineffective: they were the protests of common sense, powerless to combat the fallacies of school doctrine. Moreover, the latter was fitted with a safety-valve, a sage contrivance to disguise its inherent absurdity. If the ornate consisted of a plus, in what degree should it be used? if it gave pleasure, must we not conclude that the more it were used, the greater the pleasure derived? would its extravagant use be attended by extravagant pleasure? Herein was peril: instinctively the rhetoricians hastened to the defence, snatching up the first weapon that came to hand, namely, the fitting (πρέπον) Ornament must be used carefully; neither too much too little; in medio virtus; as much as is fitting (ἀλλά πρέπον). Aristotle recommends a style seasoned with "a certain dose" (δεῑ ἃρα κεκρᾶσθαί πως τούτοις.) for ornament should be a condiment, not a food (ἤδυσμα, οὐκ ἒδεσμα). [20] The fitting was a concept quite inconsistent with that of ornament; it was a rival, and enemy, destined to destroy it. Fitting to what? to expression of course; but that which is fitting to expression cannot be called an ornament, an external addition; it coincides with expression itself. But the rhetoricians contented themselves with maintaining peaceful relations between the ornate and the fitting, without troubling to mediate them through a third concept. The pseudo-Longinus alone in answer to an observation of his predecessor Cæcilius that more than two or three metaphors must not be used in the same place, remarked that a larger number ought to be used where passion (τὰ πάθη) rushes headlong like a torrent, carrying with it as necessaries (ὡς ἀναγκαῑον) a multitude of such substitutions.[21]

The theory of ornament in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Preserved in the compilations of later antiquity (such as the works of Donatus and Priscian and the celebrated allegorical tract of Marcianus Capella), and in the compendia of Bede, Rhabanus Maurus and others, the theory of ornament passed to the Middle Ages. Throughout this period Rhetoric, Grammar and Logic continued to form the trivium of the schools. The theory was to some extent favoured in mediæval times by the fact that writers and scholars made use of a dead language; this helped to reinforce the idea that beautiful form was not a spontaneous thing but consisted in an addition or embroidery. Under the Renaissance the theory continued to flourish and was revived by study of the best classical sources; to the works of Cicero were added the Institutiones of Quintilian and the Rhetoric of Aristotle, with the host of minor Latin and Greek rhetoricians, amongst whom was Hermogenes with his celebrated Ideas, brought into fashion by Giulio Camillo.[22]

Even those writers who dared to criticize the organism of ancient Rhetoric left the theory of ornament unassailed. Vives lamented over the "exaggerated subtlety of the Greeks" which had multiplied distinctions to infinity in this matter without diffusing light,[23] but he never took up a definite stand against the theory of ornament. Patrizzi was dissatisfied with the insufficient definition of ornament given by the ancients; but he asserted the existence of ornaments and metaphors as well as seven different modes of "conjoined speech,"—narrative, proof, amplification, diminution, ornament with its contrary, elevation and depression.[24] The school of Ramus continued to entrust Rhetoric with the "embellishment" of thought. Owing to the vast extension and intensification of life and literature in the sixteenth century, it would be easy to quote phrases, as we have done from ancient authors, asserting the strict dependence of speech upon the things it wishes to express, and lively attacks on pedants and pedantic forms and rules for beautiful speech. But what would be the use? The theory of ornament was always in the background, tacitly admitted as indisputable by all. Juan de Valdés, for instance, makes the following confession of stylistic faith: "Escribo como hablo; solamente tengo cuidado de usar de vocablos que sinifiquen bien lo que quiero decir, y dígolo cuanto más llanamente me es posible, porqué, á mi parecer, en ninguna lengua está bien la afectación." But Valdés also says that beautiful language consists "en que digais lo que quereis con las menos palabras que pudiéredes, de tal manera que ... no se pueda quitar ninguna sin ofender á la sentencia, ó al encarescimiento, ó á la elegancia."[25] Here it seems that amplification and elegance are conceived as extraneous to the meaning or content.—A gleam of truth is visible in Montaigne, who, confronted by the laboured categories into which rhetoricians divide ornament, observes: "Oyez dire Métonymie, Métaphore, Allégorie et aultres tels noms de la Grammaire; semble il pas qu'on signifie quelque forme de langage rare et pellegrin? Ce sont tiltres qui touchent le babil de vostre chambrière."[26] That is to say, they are anything but language remote from the primum se offerens ratio.

Reductio ad absurdum in the seventeenth century.

The impossibility of upholding the theory of ornament was first noticed during the decadence of Italian literature in the seventeenth century, when literary production became but a play of empty forms, and the convenient, long violated in practice, was abandoned and forgotten even in theory, and came to be looked on as a limit arbitrarily imposed on the fundamental principle of ornamentation. The opponents of that style loaded with conceits which is known as "secentismo" from its prevalence in the seventeenth century (Matteo Pellegrini, Orsi and others) felt the viciousness of the literary production of their day; they were aware that decadence was due to the fact that literature was no longer the serious expression of a content; but they were embarrassed by the reasoning of the champions of bad taste, who were able to demonstrate that the whole business conformed in every particular with the literary theory of ornament, the common ground of both parties. In vain did the former appeal to the "convenient," the "moderate," the "avoidance of affectation," to ornament as "condiment, not food," and all the other weapons which had sufficed in times when healthy literary production and sound æsthetic taste had automatically corrected faulty theory: the other party replied, there was no reason to be sparing in use of ornament when it lay in masses ready to hand, or to avoid an ostentatious display of wit when one had an inexhaustible supply.[27]

Polemic concerning the theory of ornament.

The same reaction against the abuse of ornament, against "Spanish and Italian conceits" (whose supporters had been Gracian in Spain and Tesauro in Italy), took place in France. "... Laissez à l'Italie De tous ces faux brillants l'éclatante folie"; "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement. Et les mots, pour le dire, arrivent aisément."[28] Among the sharpest critics of conceits was the Jesuit Bouhours, already quoted, author of the Manière de bien penser dans les œuvres d'esprit. The rhetorical forms were the subject of warm controversy. Orsi, on national grounds the opponent of Bouhours (1703), asserted that all the ornamental devices of wit rested on a middle term and could be reduced to a rhetorical syllogism, and that wit consists of a truth which appears false or a falsehood which appears true.[29] If this controversy produced no great scientific result at the time, at least it prepared the mind for greater liberty; and, as we have remarked elsewhere,[30] it may have influenced Vico, who, in framing his new concept of poetical imagination, recognized that it necessitated a wholesale reconstruction of the theory of rhetoric and the conclusion that its figures and tropes are not "caprices of pleasure" but "necessities of the human mind."[31]

Du Marsais and metaphor.

We find the theory of rhetorical ornament jealously kept intact by Baumgarten and Meier, while in France it was as vigorously assailed by César Chesneau du Marsais, who published in 1730 a treatise on Tropes (the seventh part of his General Grammar)[32] wherein he develops, on the subject of metaphor, the observation already made by Montaigne: indeed he was perhaps inspired by Montaigne, although he does not mention his name. Du Marsais remarks that it is said that figures are modes of speech and turns of expression removed from the ordinary and common; which is an empty phrase, as good as saying "the figured differs from the non-figured and figures are figures and not non-figures." On the other hand it is wholly untrue that figures are removed from ordinary speech, for "nothing is more natural, ordinary and common than figures: more figures of speech are used in the town square on a market-day than in many days of academical discussion"; and no speech, however short, can be composed entirely of non-figurative expressions. And Du Marsais gives instances of quite obvious and spontaneous expressions in which Rhetoric cannot refuse to recognize the figures of apostrophe, congeries, interrogation, ellipsis, prosopopœia: "The apostles were persecuted and suffered their persecutions with patience. What can be more natural than the description given by St. Paul? Maledicimur et benedicimus; persecutionem patimur et sustinemus; blasphemamur et obsecramus. Yet the apostle makes use of a fine figure of antithesis; cursing is the opposite to blessing; persecution to endurance; blasphemy to prayer." But further, the very language of the figure is figured, since it is a metaphor.—But after such acute observations, Du Marsais ends by himself becoming confused and defines figures as "manners of speech differing from others in a particular modification by which it is possible to reduce each one to a species apart, and give a more lively, noble or pleasing effect than can be gained by a manner of speech expressing the same content of thought without such particular modification."[33]

Psychological interpretation.

But the psychological interpretation of figures of speech, the first stage towards their æsthetic criticism, was not allowed to drop here. In his Elements of Criticism, Home says that he had long questioned whether that part of Rhetoric concerning figures might not be reduced to rational principles, and had finally discovered that figures consist in the passional element;[34] he set himself therefore to analyse prosopopœia, apostrophe and hyperbole in the light of the passional faculty. From Du Marsais and Home is derived everything of value in the Lectures on Rhetoric and belles lettres of Hugh Blair, professor at Edinburgh University from 1759 onwards;[35] published in book form, these lectures had an immense vogue in all the schools of Europe including those of Italy, and replaced advantageously, by their "reason and good sense," works of a much cruder type. Blair defined figures in general as "language suggested by imagination or passion."[36] Similar ideas were promulgated in France by Marmontel in his Elements of Literature.[37] In Italy Cesarotti was contrasting the logical element or "cypher-terms" of language with the rhetorical element or "figure-terms," and rational eloquence with imaginative eloquence.[38] Beccaria, though a shrewd psychological analyst, held to the view of literary style as "accessory ideas or feelings added to the principal in any discourse"; that is, he failed to free himself from the distinction between the intellectual form intended for the expression of the principal ideas, and the literary form, modifying the first by the addition of accessory ideas.[39] In Germany an effort was made by Herder to interpret tropes and metaphors as Vico had done, that is to say as essential to primitive language and poetry.

Romanticism and Rhetoric. Present day.

Romanticism was the ruin of the theory of ornament, and caused it practically to be thrown on the scrap-heap, but it cannot be said to have gone under for good or to have been superseded by a new and accurately stated theory. The chief philosophers of Æsthetic (not only Kant, who as we know remained in bondage to the mechanical and ornamental theory; not only Herder, whose knowledge of art seems to have been confined to a little music and a great deal of rhetoric; but such romantic philosophers as Schelling, Solger and Hegel) still retained the sections devoted to metaphor, trope and allegory for tradition's sake, without severe scrutiny. Italian Romanticism with Manzoni at its head destroyed the belief in beautiful and elegant words, and dealt a blow at Rhetoric: but was it killed by the stroke? Apparently not, judging by the concessions unconsciously made by the scholastic treatise-writer Ruggero Bonghi, whose Critical Letters assert the existence of two styles or forms, which at bottom are nothing else than the plain and the ornate.[40] German schools of philology have pretty generally accepted the stylistic theory of Gröber, who divides style into logical (objective) and affective (subjective):[41] an ancient error masked by terminology borrowed from the psychological philosophy in fashion at modern universities. In the same spirit a recent writer rechristens the rhetorical doctrine of tropes and figures by the title "Doctrine of the Forms of Æsthetic Apperception," and divides them into the four categories (the ancient wealth of categories reduced to a paltry four!) of personification, metaphor, antithesis, and symbol.[42] Biese has devoted an entire book to metaphor; but one searches it in vain for a serious æsthetic analysis of this category.[43]

The best scientific criticism of the theory of ornament is found scattered throughout the writings of De Sanctis, who when lecturing on rhetoric preached what he called anti-rhetoric.[44] But even here the criticism is not conducted from a strictly systematic point of view. It seems to us that the true criticism should be deduced negatively from the very nature of æsthetic activity, which does not lend itself to partition; there is no such thing as activity type a or type b, nor can the same concept be expressed now in one way, now in another. Such is the only way of abolishing the double monster of bare form which is, no one knows how, deprived of imagination, and ornate form which contains, no one knows how, an addition on the side of imagination.[45]

II

HISTORY OF THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY KINDS

The kinds in antiquity. Aristotle.

The theory of artistic and literary kinds and of the laws or rules proper to each separate kind has almost always followed the fortunes of the rhetorical theory.

Traces of the threefold division into epic, lyric and dramatic are found in Plato; and Aristophanes gives an example of criticism according to the canon of the kinds, particularly that of tragedy.[1] But the most conspicuous theoretical treatment of the kinds bequeathed us by antiquity is precisely the doctrine of Tragedy which forms a large part of the Aristotelian fragment known as the Poetics. Aristotle defines such a composition as an imitation of a serious and complete action, having size, in language adorned in accordance with the requirements of the different parts, its exposition to be by action and not by narration, and using pity or terror as means to free or purify us from these same passions;[2] he gives minute details as to the six parts of which it is composed, especially the plot and the tragic character. It has been often said, ever since the days of Vincenzo Maggio in the sixteenth century, that Aristotle treated of the nature of poetry, or particular forms of poetry, without claiming to give precepts. But Piccolomini answered that "all these things and other similar ones are shown or asserted with no other purpose but that we may see in what way their precepts and laws must be obeyed and carried out," just as, to make a hammer or saw, one begins by describing the parts of which they are composed.[3] The error of which we take Aristotle as representative lies in transmuting abstractions and empirical partitions into rational concepts: this was almost inevitable at the beginnings of æsthetic reflexion, and the Sanskrit theory of poetry employed the same method independently when, for example, it defines and legislates for ten principal and eighteen secondary styles of drama; forty-eight varieties of hero; and we know not how many kinds of heroines.[4]

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

After Aristotle, the theory of poetic kinds does not seem to have been completely or elaborately developed in antiquity. The Middle Ages may be said to have expressed the doctrine in treatises of the kind known as "rhythmic arts" or "methods of composition." When the Aristotelian fragment was first noticed, it is curious to see the way in which the paraphrase of Averroes distorted the theory of kinds. Averroes conceives tragedy as the art of praise, comedy as that of blame, which amounts to identifying the former with panegyric, the latter with satire; and he believes the peripeteia to be the same thing as antithesis, or the artifice of beginning the description of a thing by describing its opposite.[5] This distortion demonstrates afresh the merely historical character of these kinds and their unintelligibility by the methods of pure logic to a thinker living in times and under customs different from those of the Hellenic world. The Renaissance seized upon Aristotle's text, partly expounded it, partly distorted it and partly thought it out afresh, and thus succeeded in establishing a long list of kinds and sub-kinds rigidly defined and subjected to inexorable laws. Controversy now began over the correct understanding of the unities of epic or dramatic poetry; over the moral quality and social standing proper to the characters in this kind of poem and in that; over the nature of the plot, and whether it includes passions and thoughts, and whether lyrics should or should not be received as true poetry; whether the material of tragedy should be historical; whether the dialogue of comedy may be in prose; whether a happy ending may be allowed in tragedy; whether the tragic character may be a perfect gentleman; what kind and number of episodes is admissible in the poem, and how they should be incorporated in the main plot; and so on. Great anguish was caused by the mysterious rule of catharsis found in black and white in Aristotle's text, and Segni naïvely predicted that tragic poetry would be revived in its perfect spectacular entirety for the sake of experiencing the effect spoken of by Aristotle, that "purgation" which causes "the birth of tranquillity in the soul and of freedom of all perturbation."[6]

The doctrine of the three unities.

Amongst the many undertakings brought to a glorious end by the critics and treatise-writers of the sixteenth century, the best known is the establishment of the three unities of time, place and action. One cannot indeed see why they are called unities, for in strictness they could at most be spoken of as shortness of time, straitness of space and limitation of tragic subjects to a certain class of action. It is well known that Aristotle prescribed unity of action only, and reminded his hearers that theatrical custom alone imposed on the action a time-limit of one day. On this last point the critics of the sixteenth century accorded six, eight, or twelve hours according to individual taste or humour: some of them (amongst them Segni) allowed twenty-four hours, including the night as particularly propitious to assassinations and the other acts of violence which usually form the plot of tragedies; others extended the limit to thirty-six or forty-eight hours. The last, and most curious, unity, that of place, was slowly developed by Castelvetro, Riccoboni and Scaliger until the Frenchman Jean de la Taille joined it as a third to the existing two in 1572, and in 1598 Angelo Ingegneri finally formulated it more explicitly.

Poetics of the kinds and rules. Scaliger.

The Italian treatises were widely read and regarded as authoritative all over Europe, and awakened the first effort towards a learned theory of poetry in France, Spain. England and Germany. A good representative of his class is Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who has been considered, with some exaggeration, as the true founder of French pseudo-classicism or neo-classicism; as one who (it has been said) "laid the first stone of the classical Bastille." But if he was neither the first nor the only one, he certainly helped greatly to reduce "to a system of doctrines the principal consequences of the sovranty of Reason in works of literature," with his minute distinctions and classifications of kinds, the insurmountable barriers he erected between them, and his distrust of free inspiration and imagination.[7] Scaliger numbers among his descendants (beside Daniel Heinsius) d'Aubignac, Rapin, Dacier and other tyrants of French literature and drama: Boileau turned the rules of neo-classicism into neat verses.

Lessing.

It has been noticed that Lessing entered the same field; his opposition to the French rules (which was an opposition of rule to rule, in which he had been forestalled by Italian writers, for example by Calepio in 1732) is anything but radical. Lessing maintained that Corneille and other authors had misinterpreted Aristotle, to whose laws even the Shakespearian drama could be shown to conform;[8] but on the other hand he strongly opposed the abolition of all rules and those who shouted "genius, genius," placing genius above the law and saying that genius makes the law. For the very reason that genius is law, replied Lessing, laws have their value and can be determined: negation of them would entail the confinement of genius to its first trial flights, making example or practice useless.[9]

Compromises and extensions.

But the "kinds" and their "limits" could be maintained for centuries solely by means of infinitely subtle interpretations, analogical extensions and more or less concealed compromises. The Italian Renaissance critics, while working at their Poetics in the style of Aristotle, found themselves confronted with chivalric poetry, and had to make the best of it; this they did by assigning it to a kind of poem not foreseen by antiquity (Giraldi Cintio).[10] Here and there indeed a rigorist was heard protesting that romances were in no way different from heroic poetry, and were only "badly written heroics" (Salviati). And since it was impossible to deny a place in Italian literature to Dante's poem, Iacopo Mazzoni, in his Defence of Dante, overhauled once more the categories of Poetics in order to find a niche for the sacred poem.[11] Farces made their appearance at this time, and Cecchi (1585) declares "Farce is a third novelty, occupying a place between tragedy and comedy ..."[12] The Pastor fido of Guarini was published, neither tragedy nor comedy, but tragicomedy; and discovering no heading among the kinds deduced from moral or civil philosophy suitable for the intruder, Jason de Nores proceeded to rule it out of existence; Guarini made a valiant defence and claimed special protection for his beloved Pastor under a third, or mixed, style, representative of real life.[13] Another rigorist, Fioretti (Udeno Nisieli) proclaimed the poem "a poetic monster, so huge and deformed that centaurs, hippogriffs and chimæras are comparatively graceful and charming ..., fit to bring a blush to the cheek of the muse, a disgrace to poetry, a mixture of ingredients in themselves discordant, inimical and incompatible";[14] but will this bluster drive the delicious Pastor fido from the hands of lovers of poetry? The same thing occurred in the case of Marino's Adone, described by Chapelain as "a poem of peace" for want of a better definition, though other supporters called it "a new form of epic poem";[15] and the same thing happened again in the case of the comedy of art and musical drama. Corneille, who had called down a furious tempest from Scudéry and the Academicians on the head of his Cid, remarked in his discourse on Tragedy, though basing his position on that of Aristotle, that there was necessity for "quelque modération, quelque favorable interprétation,... pour n'être pas obligés de condamner beaucoup de poèmes, que nous avons vu réussir sur nos théâtres." "Il est aisé de nous accommoder avec Aristote..."[16] he says in another place: a piece of literary hypocrisy which startles by its verbal resemblance to "les accommodements avec le Ciel" of the Tartuffian ethics. The following century saw the accepted kinds augmented by "bourgeois tragedy" and pathetic comedy, nicknamed "lachrymose" by its enemies; de Chassiron[17] attacked, and Diderot, Gellert and Lessing[18] defended the new arrival. In this way the schematism of the kinds continued to suffer violence and to cut a very poor figure; nevertheless, in spite of adversity, it made every effort to retain power even at the sacrifice of dignity: just as an absolute king turns constitutional by force of circumstance, and chooses the lesser evil of squaring his divine right with the will of the nation.

Rebellion against rules in general.

This retention of power would have been more difficult had any success attended the attempts at rebellion against all laws, against law in general, which broke out in varying degrees at the end of the sixteenth century. Pietro Aretino made mock of the most sacred precepts: in a prologue to one of his comedies he remarks derisively, "If you see more than five characters on the stage at once, do not laugh; for chains which would fasten water-mills to the river could not hold the fools of to-day."[19]

G. Bruno. Guarini.

A philosopher, Giordano Bruno, entered the lists against the "regulators of poetry": rules, said he, are derived from poetry: "there are as many genera and species of true rules as there are genera and species of true poets"; such an individualization of kinds dealt them a deathblow. "How then" (asks the interlocutory opponent) "shall veritable poets be recognized?" "By their singing of verse" (answers Bruno); "of that which, being sung, either delights or instructs, or delights and instructs at the same time."[20] In much the same way Guarini defended his Pastor fido in 1588, declaring "the world is the judge of poets; against its sentence there is no appeal."[21]

Spanish critics.

Amongst European countries, Spain was perhaps the sturdiest in her resistance to the pedantic theories of the writers of treatises; Spain was the land of freedom in criticism from Vives to Feijóo, from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century when decadence of the old Spanish spirit allowed Luzán, with others, to introduce neo-classical poetry of Italian and French origin.[22] That rules must change with the times and with actual conditions; that modern literature demands modern poetics; that work carried out contrary to established rule does not signify that it is contrary to all rule or unwilling to submit itself to a higher law; that nature should give, not receive, laws; that the laws of the three unities are as ridiculous as it would be to forbid a painter to paint a large landscape in a small picture; that the pleasure, taste, approbation of readers and spectators are the deciding element in the long run; that notwithstanding the laws of counterpoint, the ear is the true judge of music; these affirmations and many like them are frequent in Spanish criticism of the period. One critic, Francisco de la Barreda (1622), went so far as to compassionate the strong wits of Italy bound by fear and cowardice (temerosos y acobardados) to rules that hampered them on every side;[23] he may have been thinking of Tasso, a memorable case of such degradation. Lope de Vega wavered between neglect of rules in practice, and obsequious acceptance of them in theory, alleging in excuse for his conduct that he was forced to yield to the demands of the public who paid money to see his plays; he said, "when I write my comedies, I lock and double-lock the door against the precept-mongers, that they may not rise up and bear witness against me"; "Art (that is, Poetics) speaks truth which is contradicted by the vulgar ignorant"; "may the rules forgive us when we are induced to violate them."[24] But a contemporary admirer of Lope's work writes of him that "en muchas partes de sus escritos dice que el no guardar el arte antiguo lo hace por conformarse con el gusto de la plebe ... dicelo por su natural modestia, y porqué no atribuya la malicia ignorante à arrogancia lo que es politica perfeccion."[25]

G. B. Marino.

Giambattista Marino also protested "I assert that I have a more thorough knowledge of the rules than have all the pedants in the world; but the only true rule is to know how to break the rules at the right place and time, and to conform with the custom and taste of the day."[26] The drama of Spain, the comedy of art, and other literary novelties of the seventeenth century caused Minturno, Castelvetro and other rigid treatise-writers of the preceding century to be looked at with contemptuous pity as "antiquaries"; this may be seen in Andrea Perucci (1699), the theorist of improvised comedy.[27] Pallavicino criticized the writers on "the disciplines of beautiful speech" on the ground that they "generally base their precepts on observing by experience what things in writers give pleasure, rather than pointing out what would naturally conform to the particular affections and instincts implanted by the Creator in the souls of men."[28]

G. V. Gravina.

A note of distrust towards the fixed kinds may be heard in the Discorso sull' Endimione (1691), wherein Gravina severely blames the "ambitious and miserly precepts" of rhetoricians, and makes the penetrating comment: "No work can see the fight without finding itself confronted by a tribunal of critics specially convened to examine it, and questioned firstly as to its name and nature. Next begins the action which lawyers call prejudicial, and controversy arises as to its status, whether it is a poem, a romance, a tragedy, a comedy, or another of the prescribed kinds. And if the said work have ignored the slightest precept ... they decree forthwith its exile and perpetual banishment. And yet, however they recast and expand their aphorisms, they will never be able to include all the different kinds that can be freshly created by the varied and ceaseless motion of human wit. For this reason I cannot see why we should not free ourselves from this insolent curb on the soaring grandeur of our imaginations, and allow them to follow an open road amongst those immeasurable spaces they are fitted to explore." He remarks on the work of Guidi which forms the subject of his discourse, "I know not whether it be tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, or anything else invented by rhetoricians. It is a representation of the loves of Endymion and Diana. If those terms have sufficient breadth of extension, they will comprehend this work; if they have not, let another be framed (a power which may be granted to any one in so unimportant a matter); if no such term can be invented, let us not, for want of a word, deprive ourselves of a thing so beautiful."[29] These remarks have quite a modern ring, but Gravina can hardly have thought out their implications very deeply, for later on he wrote a special treatise on the rules of the tragic kind.[30] Antonio Conti too declared at times his antagonism towards the rules, but he referred to the Aristotelian rules only.[31]

Fr. Montani.

More courage was displayed by Count Francesco Montani of Pesaro in the polemic roused by Orsi's book against Bouhours; in 1705 he wrote: "I know that there are immutable and eternal rules, founded on such sound good sense and solid reason as will remain unshaken as long as mankind lives. But these rules, whose incorruptibility gives them authority to guide our spirits to the end of time, are rare enough to be counted with the nose, and it seems to me somewhat arbitrary to claim to test and regulate our new works by old laws now wholly abrogated and annulled."[32]

Critics of the eighteenth century.

In France the rigorism of Boileau was followed by the rebellion of Du Bos, who unhesitatingly declared that "men will always prefer poetry which moves them to that composed according to rule,"[33] and the like heresies. In 1730, De la Motte made war against the unities of time and place, asserting as the most general, and even superior to that of action, the unity of interest.[34] Batteux tended to make free with the rules; and Voltaire, though he opposed De la Motte and declared the three unities to be the "three great laws of good sense," uttered some bold sentiments in his Essay on Epic Poetry, and it was he who remarked that "tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux," and that the best kind is "celui qui est le mieux traité." Diderot was in certain respects a forerunner of Romanticism, and with him must be mentioned Friedrich Melchior Grimm, who was influenced by him. A breath of liberty was wafted into Italy by Metastasio, Bettinelli, Baretti and Cesarotti: in 1766 Buonafede notes in his Epistola della libertà poetica that when erudite persons "define epic poetry, or comedy, or odes, they ought to frame as many definitions as there are compositions and authors."[35] In Germany the first to rise in rebellion against the rules (opposing Gottsched and his disciples) were the representatives of the Swiss school.[36] In England, after examining the definitions by which critics endeavoured to distinguish epic poetry from other compositions, Home wrote, "It affords no little diversion to watch so many profound critics hunting after that which does not exist. They presuppose—without shadow of proof—that there exists a precise criterion by which to distinguish epic poetry from all other kinds of composition. But literary compositions melt one into another like colours: and if in their stronger shades it is easy to recognize them, they are susceptible of such variety and of so many different forms that it is impossible to say where one ends and another begins."[37]

Romanticism and the "strict kinds": Berchet, V. Hugo.

Literary thought between the late eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century, that is to say from" the period of genius" to that of romanticism properly so called, rose in rebellion against separate individual rules and against all rules as such. But to describe the battles fought, and their more important episodes; to recount the names of captains victorious or discomfited, or to deplore the excesses committed by the conquerors, is no part of our present task. Upon the ruins of the strict kinds, the "genres tranchés" beloved by Napoleon[38] (a Romanticist in the art of war, but a Classicist in poetry), flourished the drama, the romance and every other mixed kind: upon the ruins of the three unities, flourished the unity of ensemble. Italy made her protest against rules of style in Berchet's famous Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo (1816); and France made hers somewhat later in Victor Hugo's preface to Cromwell (1827). Henceforth men discussed not the kinds, but Art. What is the unity of ensemble but the demand of art itself, which is always an ensemble, a synthesis? What else is the principle, introduced by August Wilhelm Schlegel and adopted by Manzoni and other Italian romanticists, to the effect that form of component parts must be "organic not mechanical, resulting from the nature of the subject and its interior development ... not from the impress of an external and extraneous stamp"?[39]