BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 4)

The name "artistic" or "literary" critic is used in various senses: sometimes it is applied to the scholar who devotes his services to literature; sometimes to the historian who reveals the works of art of the past in their reality; more often to both. By critic is sometimes understood in a more restricted sense he who judges and describes contemporary literary works, and by historian, he who treats of those less recent. These are linguistic uses and empirical distinctions, which may be neglected; because the true difference lies between the scholar, the man of taste and the historian of art. These words designate three successive stages of work, each one independent relatively to the one that follows, but not to that which precedes. As we have seen, a man may be a mere scholar, and possess little capacity for understanding works of art; he may even both be learned and possess taste, yet be unable to portray them by writing a page of artistic and literary history. But the true and complete historian, while containing in himself both the scholar and the man of taste as necessary pre-requisites, must add to their qualities the gift of historical comprehension and representation.

The method of artistic and literary history.

The theory of artistic and literary historical method presents problems and difficulties, some common to the theory of historical method in general, others peculiar to it, because derived from the concept of art itself.

Criticism of the problem of the origin of art.

History is commonly divided into human history, natural history, and the mixture of both. Without! examining here the question of the solidity of this distinction, it is clear that artistic and literary history belongs in any case to the first, since it concerns a spiritual activity, that is to say, an activity proper to man. And since this activity is its subject, the absurdity of propounding the historical problem of the origin of art becomes at once evident. We should note that by this formula many different things have in turn been included on many different occasions. Origin has often meant nature or character of the artistic fact, in which case an attempt was made to deal with a real scientific or philosophic problem, the very problem in fact which our treatise has attempted to solve. At other times, by origin has been understood the ideal genesis, the search for the reason of art, the deduction of the artistic fact from a first principle containing in itself both spirit and nature. This is also a philosophical problem, complementary to the preceding, coinciding indeed with it, although it has sometimes been strangely interpreted and solved by means of an arbitrary and semi-imaginary metaphysic. But when the object was to discover further exactly in what way the artistic function was historically formed, the result has been the absurdity which we have mentioned. If expression be the first form of consciousness, how can we look for the historical origin of what is not a product of nature and is presupposed by human history? How can we assign a historical genesis to a thing which is a category by means of which all historical processes and facts are understood? The absurdity has arisen from the comparison with human institutions, which have been formed in the course of history, and have disappeared or may disappear in its course. Between the æsthetic fact and a human institution (such as monogamic marriage or the fief) there exists a difference comparable with that between simple and compound bodies in chemistry. It is impossible to indicate the formation of the former, otherwise they would not be simple, and if this be discovered, they cease to be simple and become compound.

The problem of the origin of art, historically understood, is only justified when it is proposed to investigate, not the formation of the artistic category, but where and when art has appeared for the first time (appeared, that is to say, in a striking manner), at what point or in what region of the globe and at what point or epoch of its history; when, that is to say, not the origin of art, but its earliest or primitive history is the object of research. This problem forms one with that of the appearance of human civilization on the earth. Data for its solution are certainly wanting, but there yet remains the abstract possibility of a solution, and certainly tentative and hypothetical solutions abound.

The criterion of progress and history.

Every representation of human history has the concept of progress as foundation. But by progress must not be understood the imaginary law of progress which is supposed to lead the generations of man with irresistible force to some unknown destiny, according to a providential plan which we can divine and then understand logically. A supposed law of this sort is the negation of history itself, of that accidentality, that empiricity, that contingency, which distinguish concrete fact from abstraction. And for the same reason, progress has nothing to do with the so-called law of evolution, which, if it mean that reality evolves (and it is only reality in so far as it evolves or becomes), cannot be called a law, and if it be given as a law, becomes identical with the law of progress in the sense just described. The progress of which we speak here is nothing but the very concept of human activity, which, working upon the material supplied to it by nature, conquers its obstacles and bends it to its own ends.

Such conception of progress, that is to say, of human activity applied to a given material, is the point of view of the historian of humanity. No one but a mere collector of unrelated facts, a mere antiquary or inconsequent annalist, can put together the smallest narrative of human doings unless he have a determined point of view, that is to say, a personal conviction of his own regarding the facts whose history he has undertaken to relate. No one can start from the confused and discordant mass of crude facts and arrive at the historical work of art save by means of this apperception, which makes it possible to carve a definite representation in that rough and formless mass. The historian of a practical action should know what is economy and what is morality; the historian of mathematics, what is mathematics; the historian of botany, what is botany; the historian of philosophy, what is philosophy. If he does not really know these things, he must at least have the illusion of knowing them; otherwise he will not even be able to delude himself into believing that he is writing history.

We cannot here expand the demonstration of the necessity and inevitability of this subjective criterion in every narrative of human affairs (which is compatible with the utmost objectivity, impartiality and scrupulousness in dealing with data of fact and indeed forms a constitutive element in these virtues), in every narrative of human doings and happenings. It suffices to read any book of history to discover at once the point of view of the author, if he be a historian worthy of the name and know his own business. There are liberal and reactionary, rationalist and catholic historians, who deal with political or social history; for the history of philosophy there are metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist and spiritualist historians. Purely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Were Thucydides and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire, wholly without moral and political views; and, in our time, was Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo, Ranke or Mommsen? And in the history of philosophy, from Hegel, who was the first to raise it to a great height, to Ritter, Zeller, Cousin, Lewes and our Spaventa, was there one who did not possess his conception of progress and his criterion of judgement? Is there one single work of any value on the history of Æsthetic which has not been written from this or that point of view, with this or that bias (Hegelian or Herbartian), from a sensationalist or from an eclectic or some other point of view? If the historian is to escape from the inevitable necessity of taking a side, he must become a political or scientific eunuch; and history is not an occupation for eunuchs. Such would at most be of use in compiling those great tomes of not useless erudition, elumbis atque fracta, which are called, not without reason, monkish.

If, then, a concept of progress, a point of view, a criterion, be inevitable, the best to be done is not to try and escape from it, but to obtain the best possible. Every one tends to this end when he forms his own convictions, seriously and laboriously. Historians who profess to wish to interrogate the facts without adding anything of their own to them are not to be trusted. This is at best the result of ingenuousness and illusion on their part: they will always add something of their own, if they be truly historians, even without knowing it, or they will only believe that they have avoided doing so because they have conveyed it only by hints, which is the most insinuating, penetrative and effective of methods.

Non-existence of a single line of progress in artistic and literary history.

Artistic and literary history cannot dispense with the criterion of progress any more easily than other history. We cannot show what a given work of art is, save by proceeding from a conception of art, in order to fix the artistic problem which the author of such work of art had to solve, and by determining whether or no he has solved it, or by how much and in what way he has failed to do so. But it is important to note that the criterion of progress assumes a different form in artistic and literary history to that which it assumes (or is believed to assume) in the history of science.

It is customary to represent the whole history of knowledge by one single line of progress and regress. Science is the universal, and its problems are arranged in one single vast system or comprehensive problem. All thinkers labour upon the same problem as to the nature of reality and of knowledge: contemplative Indians and Greek philosophers, Christians and Mohammedans, bare heads and turbaned heads, wigged heads and college-capped heads (as Heine said); and future generations will weary themselves with it, as ours has done. It would take too long to inquire here if this be true or not of science. But it is certainly not true of art; art is intuition, and intuition is individuality, and individuality does not repeat itself. To conceive of the history of the artistic production of the human race as developed along a single line of progress and regress would therefore be altogether erroneous.

At the most, and working to some extent with generalizations and abstractions, it may be asserted that the history of æsthetic productions shows progressive cycles, but each cycle with its own problem and each progressive only in respect to that problem. When many are at work in a general way upon the same subject, without succeeding in giving to it the suitable form, yet drawing always more near to it, there is said to be progress, and when appears the man who gives it definite form, the cycle is said to be complete, and progress is ended. A typical example of this would here be the progress in the elaboration of the mode of using the subject-matter of chivalry, during the Italian Renaissance, from Pulci to Ariosto (using this as an example and excusing excessive simplification). Nothing but repetition and imitation, diminution or exaggeration, a spoiling of what had already been done, in short decadence could be the result of employing that same material after Ariosto. The epigoni of Ariosto prove this. Progress begins with the beginning of a new cycle. Cervantes, with his more open and conscious irony, is an instance of this. In what did the general decadence of Italian literature at the end of the sixteenth century consist? Simply in having nothing more to say and in repeating and exaggerating motives already discovered. If the Italians of this period had even been able to express their own decadence, they would not have been altogether failures, but would have anticipated the literary movement of the Risorgimento. Where the matter is not the same, a progressive cycle does not exist. Shakespeare does not represent an advance on Dante, nor Goethe upon Shakespeare. Dante, however, represents an advance on the visionaries of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare on the Elizabethan dramatists, Goethe, with Werther and the first part of Faust, on the writers of the Sturm und Drang period. This mode of presenting the history of poetry and art contains, however, as we have remarked, something of the abstract, of the merely practical, and is without strict philosophical value. Not only is the art of savages not inferior, as art, to that of civilized peoples, if it be correlative to the impressions of the savage; but every individual, indeed every moment of the spiritual life of an individual, has its artistic world; none of these worlds can be compared with any other in respect of artistic value.

Errors committed against this law.

Many have sinned and continue to sin against this special form of the criterion of progress in artistic and literary history. Some, for instance, talk of the infancy of Italian art in Giotto, and of its maturity in Raphæl or in Titian; as though Giotto were not complete and absolutely perfect, granted the material of feeling with which his mind was furnished. He was certainly incapable of drawing a figure like Raphæl, or of colouring it like Titian; but was Raphæl or Titian capable of creating the Marriage of Saint Francis with Poverty or the Death of Saint Francis? The spirit of Giotto had not felt the attraction of the body beautiful, which the Renaissance studied and raised to a place of honour; the spirits of Raphæl and of Titian were no longer interested in certain movements of ardour and of tenderness with which the man of the fourteenth century was in love. How, then, can a comparison be made, where there is no comparative term?

The celebrated divisions of the history of art into an oriental period, representing a lack of equilibrium between idea and form, the latter dominating, a classical representing an equilibrium between idea and form, a romantic representing a new lack of equilibrium between idea and form, the former dominating, suffer from the same defect. The same is true of the division into oriental art, representing imperfection of form; classical, perfection of form; romantic or modern, perfection of content and of form. Thus classic and romantic have also received, among their many other meanings, that of progressive or regressive periods, in respect to the realization of some alleged artistic ideal of all humanity.

Other meanings of the word "progress" in respect to Æsthetic.

There is no such thing, then, as an æsthetic progress of humanity. However, by æsthetic progress is sometimes meant, not what the two words coupled together really signify, but the ever-increasing accumulation of our historical knowledge, which makes us able to sympathize with all the artistic products of all peoples and of all times, or, as they say, makes our taste more catholic. The difference appears very great if the eighteenth century, so incapable of escaping from itself, be compared with our own time, which enjoys alike Greek and Roman art, now better understood, Byzantine, mediæval, Arabic and Renaissance art, the art of the Cinquecento, baroque art, and the art of the eighteenth century. Egyptian, Babylonian, Etruscan, and even prehistoric art are more profoundly studied every day. Certainly, the difference between the savage and civilized man does not lie in the human faculties. The savage has speech, intellect, religion and morality in common with civilized man, and is a complete man. The only difference lies in this, that civilized man penetrates and dominates a larger portion of the universe with his theoretic and practical activity. We cannot claim to be more spiritually alert than, for example, the contemporaries of Pericles; but no one can deny that we are richer than they—rich with their riches and with those of how many other peoples and generations besides our own?

By æsthetic progress is also meant, in another sense, which is also improper, the greater abundance of artistic intuitions and the smaller number of imperfect or inferior works which one epoch produces in respect to another. Thus it may be said that there was æsthetic progress, an artistic awakening in Italy, at the end of the thirteenth or of the fifteenth century.

Finally, æsthetic progress is talked of in a third sense, with an eye to the refinement and complications of soul-states exhibited in the works of art of the most civilized peoples, as compared with those of less civilized peoples, barbarians and savages. But in this case the progress is of the comprehensive psycho-social conditions, not of the artistic activity, to which the material is indifferent.

These are the most important points to note concerning the method of artistic and literary history.

XVIII

CONCLUSION:

IDENTITY OF LINGUISTIC AND ÆSTHETIC

Summary of the study.

A glance over the path traversed will show that we have completed the entire programme of our treatise. We have studied the nature of intuitive or expressive knowledge, which is the æsthetic or artistic fact (I. and II.), and described the other form of knowledge, the intellectual, and the successive complications of these forms (III.); it thus became possible for us to criticize all erroneous æsthetic theories arising from the confusion between the various forms and from the illicit transference of the characteristics of one form to another (IV.), noting at the same time the opposite errors to be found in the theory of intellectual knowledge and of historiography (V.). Passing on to examine the relations between the æsthetic activity and the other activities of the spirit, no longer theoretic but practical, we indicated the true character of the practical activity and the place which it occupies in respect to the theoretic activity: hence the criticism of the intrusion into æsthetic theory of practical concepts (VI.); we have distinguished the two forms of the practical activity, as economic and ethical (VII.), reaching the conclusion that there are no other forms of the spirit beyond the four which we have analyzed; hence (VIII.) the criticism of every mystical or imaginative Æsthetic. And since there are no other spiritual forms co-ordinate with these, so there are no original subdivisions of the four established, and in particular of Æsthetic. From this arises the impossibility of classes of expressions and the criticism of Rhetoric, that is, of ornate expression distinct from simple expression, and of other similar distinctions and subdistinctions (IX.) But by the law of the unity of the spirit, the æsthetic fact is also a practical fact, and as such, occasions pleasure and pain. This led us to study f the feelings of value in general, and those of æsthetic value or of the beautiful in particular (X.), to criticize æsthetic hedonism in all its various manifestations and complications (XI.), and to expel from the system of Æsthetic the long series of psychological concepts which had been introduced into it (XII.). Proceeding from æsthetic production to the facts of reproduction, we began by investigating the external fixing of the æsthetic expression, for the purpose of reproduction. This is called the physically beautiful, whether natural or artificial (XIII.). We derived from this distinction the criticism of the errors which arise from confounding the physical with the æsthetic side of facts (XIV.). We determined the meaning of artistic technique, or that technique which is at the service of reproduction, thus criticizing the divisions, limits and classifications of the individual arts, and establishing the relations of art, economy and morality (XV.). Since the existence of physical objects does not suffice to stimulate æsthetic reproduction to the full, and since, in order to obtain it, we must recall the conditions in which the stimulus first operated, we have also studied the function of historical erudition, directed toward re-establishing the communication between the imagination and the works of the past, and to serve as the basis of the æsthetic judgement (XVI.). We have concluded our treatise by showing how the reproduction thus obtained is afterwards elaborated by the categories of thought, that is to say, by an examination of the method of literary and artistic history (XVII.).

The æsthetic fact has in short been considered both in itself and in its relations with the other spiritual activities, with the feelings of pleasure and pain, with what are called physical facts, with memory and with historical treatment. It has passed before us as subject until it became object, that is to say, from the moment of its birth until it becomes gradually changed for the spirit into subject-matter of history.

Our treatise may appear to be somewhat meagre when externally compared with the great volumes usually dedicated to Æsthetic. But it will not seem so when we perceive that those volumes are nine-tenths full of matter that is not pertinent, such as definitions, psychological or metaphysical, of pseudo-æsthetic concepts (the sublime, the comic, the tragic, the humorous, etc.), or of the exposition of the supposed Zoology, Botany and Mineralogy of Æsthetic, and of universal history æsthetically judged; that the whole history of concrete art and literature has also been dragged into those Æsthetics and generally mangled, and that they contain judgements upon Homer and Dante, Ariosto and Shakespeare, Beethoven and Rossini, Michæl Angelo and Raphæl. When all this has been deducted from them, we flatter ourselves that our treatise will no longer be held to be too meagre, but, on the contrary, far richer than ordinary treatises, which either omit altogether, or hardly touch at all, the greater part of the difficult problems proper to Æsthetic which we have felt it to be our duty to study.

Identity of linguistic and Æsthetic.

But although Æsthetic as science of expression has been studied by us in its every aspect, it remains to justify the sub-title which we have added to the title of our book, General Linguistic, to state and make clear the thesis that the science of art and that of language, Æsthetic and Linguistic, conceived as true sciences, are not two distinct things, but one thing only. Not that there is a special Linguistic; but the much-sought-for science of language, general Linguistic, in so far as what it contains is reducible to philosophy, is nothing but Æsthetic. Whoever studies general Linguistic, that is to say, philosophical Linguistic, studies æsthetic problems, and vice versa. Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing.

Were Linguistic really a different science from Æsthetic it would not have for its object expression, which is the essentially æsthetic fact; that is to say, we must deny that language is expression. But an emission of sounds which expresses nothing is not language. Language is sound articulated, circumscribed and organized for the purposes of expression. If, on the other hand, linguistic were a special science in respect to Æsthetic, it would necessarily have for its object a special class of expressions. But the non-existence of classes of expression is a point which we have already demonstrated.

Æsthetic formulation of linguistic problems. Nature of language.

The problems which Linguistic tries to solve, and the errors in which Linguistic has been and is involved, are the same that respectively occupy and complicate Æsthetic. If it be not always easy, it is on the other hand always possible to reduce the philosophic questions of Linguistic to their æsthetic formula.

The disputes themselves as to the nature of the one find their parallel in those as to the nature of the other. Thus it has been disputed whether Linguistic be a historical or a scientific discipline, and, the scientific having been distinguished from the historical, it has been asked whether it belong to the order of the natural or of the psychological sciences, understanding by these latter empirical Psychology as well as the Sciences of the spirit. The same has happened with Æsthetic, which some have looked upon as a natural science (confusing the æsthetic and the physical sense of the word expression). Others have looked upon it as a psychological science (confusing expression in its universality with the empirical classification of expressions). Others again, denying the very possibility of a science of such a subject, change it into a simple collection of historical facts; not one of these attaining to the consciousness of Æsthetic as a science of activity or of value, a science of the spirit.

Linguistic expression, or speech, has often seemed to be a fact of interjection, which belongs to the so-called physical expressions of the feelings, common alike to men and animals. But it was soon perceived that an abyss yawns between the "Ah!" which is a physical reflex of pain and a word; as also between that "Ah!" of pain and the "Ah!" employed as a word. The theory of the interjection being abandoned (jocosely termed the "Ah! Ah!" theory by German linguists), the theory of association or convention appeared. This is liable to the same objection which destroyed æsthetic associationism in general: speech is unity, not multiplicity of images, and multiplicity does not explain, but indeed presupposes the expression to be explained. A variant of linguistic associationism is the imitative, that is to say, the theory of onomatopœia, which the same philologists deride under the name of the "bow-wow" theory, from the imitation of the dog's bark, which, according to the onomatopœists, must have given its name to the dog.

The most usual theory of our times as regards language (apart from mere crass naturalism) consists of a sort of eclecticism or mixture of the various theories to which we have referred. It is assumed that language is in part the product of interjections and in part of onomatopœia and convention. This doctrine is altogether worthy of the philosophical decadence of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Origin of language and its development.

We must here note an error into which have fallen those very philologists who have best discerned the activistic nature of language, when they maintain that although language was originally a spiritual creation, yet that it afterwards increased by association. But the distinction does not hold, for origin in this case cannot mean anything but nature or character; and if language be spiritual creation, it must always be creation; if it be association, it must have been so from the beginning. The error has arisen from having failed to grasp the general principle of Æsthetic, known to us: that expressions already produced must descend to the rank of impressions before they can give rise to new impressions. When we utter new words we generally transform the old ones, varying or enlarging their meaning; but this process is not associative, it is creative, although the creation has for material the impressions, not of the hypothetical primitive man, but of man who has lived long ages in society, and who has, so to say, stored so many things in his psychic organism, and among them so much language.

Relation between Grammar and Logic.

The question of the distinction between the æsthetic and the intellectual fact appears in Linguistic as that of the relations between Grammar and Logic. This problem has been solved in two partially true ways: the inseparability and the separability of Logic and Grammar. But the complete solution is this: if the logical form be inseparable from the grammatical (æsthetic), the grammatical is separable from the logical.

Grammatical kinds or parts of speech.

If we look at a picture which for instance portrays a man walking on a country road we may say: "This picture represents a fact of movement, which, if conceived as voluntary, is called action; and since every movement implies a material object, and every action a being that acts, this picture also represents a material object or being. But this movement takes place in a definite place, which is a piece of a definite heavenly body (the Earth), and precisely of a piece of it which is called terra-firma, and more precisely of a part of it that is wooded and covered with grass, which is called country, cut naturally or artificially into a form called road. Now, there is only one example of that star, which is called Earth: the earth is an individual. But terra-firma, country, road are genera or universals, because there are other terra-firmas, other countries, other roads." And it would be possible to continue for a while with similar considerations. By substituting a phrase for the picture that we have imagined, for example one to this effect: "Peter is walking on a country road," and by making the same remarks, we obtain the concepts of verb (motion or action), of noun (material object or agent), of proper noun, of common noun; and so on.

What have we done in both cases? Neither more nor less than submit to logical elaboration what first presented itself only æsthetically; that is to say, we have destroyed the æsthetic for the logical. But since in general Æsthetic error begins when we wish to return from the logical to the æsthetic and ask what is the expression of motion, action, matter, being, of the general, of the individual, etc.; so in the case of language, error begins when motion or action are called verb, being or matter, noun or substantive, and when linguistic categories, or parts of speech, are made of all these, noun and verb and so on. The theory of the parts of speech is really identical with that of artistic and literary kinds, already criticized in our Æsthetic.

It is false to say that the verb or noun is expressed in definite words, truly distinguishable from others. Expression is an indivisible whole. Noun and verb do not exist in it, but are abstractions made by us, destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the sentence. This last is to be understood, not in the way common to grammars, but as an organism expressive of a complete meaning, which includes alike the simplest exclamation and a great poem. This sounds paradoxical, but is nevertheless the simplest truth.

And since in Æsthetic the artistic productions of certain peoples have been looked upon as imperfect, owing to the error above mentioned, because the supposed kinds have seemed not yet to have been discriminated, or to be in part wanting; so in Linguistic, the theory of the parts of speech has caused the analogous error of judging languages as formed and unformed, according to whether there appear in them or no some of those supposed parts of speech; for example, the verb.

The individuality of speech and the classification of languages.

Linguistic also discovered the irreducible individuality of the æsthetic fact, when it affirmed that the word is what is really spoken, and that two truly identical words do not exist. Thus were synonyms and homonyms destroyed, and thus was shown the impossibility of really translating one word into another, from so-called dialect into so-called language, or from the so-called mother-tongue into the so-called foreign tongue.

But the attempt to classify languages ill agrees with this just view. Languages have no reality beyond the propositions and complexes of propositions really written and pronounced by given peoples at definite periods; that is to say, they have no existence outside the works of art (whether little or great, oral or written, soon forgotten or long remembered, does not matter) in which they exist concretely. And what is the art of a given people but the whole of its artistic products? What is the character of an art (for example of Greek art or Provençal literature) but the whole physiognomy of those products? And how can such a question be answered, save by narrating in its particulars the history of the literature, that is to say, of the language in its actuality?

It may be thought that this argument, although possessing validity as against many of the usual classifications of languages, yet is without any as regards that queen of classifications, the historico-genealogical, that glory of comparative philology. And this it certainly is; but why? Precisely because that historico-genealogical method is not a mere classification. He who writes history does not classify, and the philologists themselves have hastened to say that languages which can be arranged in historical series (those whose series have hitherto been traced) are not distinct and separate species but a single whole of facts in the various phases of its development.

Impossibility of a normative grammar.

Language has sometimes been regarded as a voluntary or arbitrary act. But at others the impossibility of creating language artificially, by an act of will, has been clearly seen. "Tu, Caesar, civitatem dare potes homini, verbo non potes" was once said to a Roman Emperor. And the æsthetic (and therefore theoretic as opposed to practical) nature of expression supplies the method of discovering the scientific error which lies in the conception of a (normative) Grammar, establishing the rules of correct speech. Good sense has always rebelled against this error. An example of such rebellion is the "So much the worse for grammar" attributed to Monsieur de Voltaire. But the impossibility of a normative grammar is also recognized by those who teach it, when they confess that to write well cannot be learned by rules, that there are no rules without exceptions, and that the study of Grammar should be conducted practically, by reading and examples, which should form the literary taste. The scientific reason of this impossibility lies in the principle that we have demonstrated: that a technique of the theoretical amounts to a contradiction in terms. And what could a (normative) grammar be, but precisely a technique of linguistic expression, that is to say of a theoretic fact?

Didactic organisms.

The case in which Grammar is understood merely as an empirical discipline, that is to say, as a collection of schemes useful for learning languages, without any claim whatever to philosophic truth, is quite different. Even the abstractions of the parts of speech are in this case both admissible and useful. And we must tolerate as merely didascalic many books entitled "Treatises of Linguistic," where we generally find a little of everything, from the description of the vocal apparatus and of the artificial machines (phonographs) which can imitate it, to summaries of the most important I results obtained by Indo-European, Semitic, Coptic, Chinese, or other philologies; from philosophical generalizations as to the origin or nature of language, to advice on format, calligraphy and the arrangement of notes relating to philological work. But this mass of notions, here administered in a fragmentary and incomplete manner about language in its essence, about language as expression, resolves itself into notions of Æsthetic. Nothing exists outside Æsthetic, which gives knowledge of the nature of language, and empirical Grammar, which is a pedagogic expedient, save the History of languages in their living reality, that is to say, the history of concrete literary productions, which is substantially identical with the History of literature.

Elementary linguistic facts or roots.

The same error of taking the physical for the æsthetic, from which the search for the elementary forms of the beautiful originates, is made by those who go in search of elementary linguistic facts, decorating with that name the divisions of the longer series of physical sounds into shorter series. Syllables, vowels and consonants, and the series of syllables called words, all these elements of speech, which give no definite sense when taken alone, must be called not facts of language, but mere sounds, or rather sounds abstracted and classified physically.

Another error of the same sort is that of roots, to which the most distinguished philologists now accord but small value. Having confused physical with linguistic or expressive facts, and considering that the simple precedes the complex in the order of ideas, they necessarily ended by thinking that the smallest physical facts indicated the simplest linguistic facts. Hence the imaginary necessity that the most ancient primitive languages had a monosyllabic character, and that historical research must always lead to the discovery of monosyllabic roots. But (to follow up the imaginary hypothesis) the first expression that the first man conceived may have had not a phonetic but a mimetic physical reflex; may have been externalized not in a sound but in a gesture. And assuming that it was externalized in a sound, there is no reason to suppose that sound to have been monosyllabic rather than polysyllabic. Philologists readily blame their own ignorance and impotence, when they do not always succeed in reducing polysyllabism to monosyllabism, and rely upon the future to accomplish the reduction. But their faith is without foundation, and their blame of themselves is an act of humility arising from an erroneous presumption.

For the rest, the limits of syllables, as those of words, are altogether arbitrary, and distinguished somehow or other by empirical use. Primitive speech, or the speech of uneducated man, is a continuum, unaccompanied by any consciousness of divisions of the discourse into words or syllables, imaginary beings created by schools. No true law of Linguistic can be founded on such divisions. Proof of this is to be found in the confession of linguists, that there are no truly phonetic laws of the hiatus, of cacophony, of diæresis or synæresis, but merely laws of taste and convenience; that is to say, æsthetic laws. And what are laws of words which are not at the same time laws of style?

Æsthetic judgement and the model language.

Finally, the search for a model language, or for a method of reducing linguistic usage to unity, arises from the superstition of a rationalistic measure of the beautiful, from that concept which we have called false æsthetic absoluteness. In Italy we call this the question of the unity of the language.

Language is perpetual creation. What has been linguistically expressed is not repeated, save by reproduction of what has already been produced. The ever-new impressions give rise to continuous changes of sound and meaning, that is, to ever-new expressions. To seek the model language, then, is to seek the immobility of motion. Everyone speaks and should speak according to the echoes which things arouse in his soul, that is, according to his impressions. It is not without reason that the most convinced supporter of any one of the solutions of the problem of the unity of language (whether by adopting a standard Italian approximating to Latin, or to fourteenth-century usage, or to the Florentine dialect) feels repugnance in applying his theory, when he is speaking to communicate his thoughts and to make himself understood. The reason is that he feels that in substituting the Latin, fourteenth-century Italian, or Florentine word for that of different origin, but which answers to his natural impressions, he would be falsifying the genuine form of truth. He would become a vain listener to himself instead of a speaker, a pedant in place of a serious man, an actor instead of a sincere person. To write according to a theory is not really to write: at the most, it is making literature.

The question of the unity of language is always reappearing, because, stated as it is, it is insoluble, being based upon a false conception of what language is. Language is not an arsenal of arms already made, and it is not a vocabulary, a collection of abstractions, or a cemetery of corpses more or less well embalmed.

Our dismissal of the question of the model language, or of the unity of the language, may seem somewhat abrupt, and yet we would not wish to appear otherwise than respectful towards the long line of literary men who have debated this question in Italy for centuries. But those ardent debates were fundamentally concerned with debates of æstheticity, not of æsthetic science, of literature rather than of literary theory, of effective speaking and writing, not of linguistic science. Their error consisted in transforming the manifestation of a need into a scientific thesis, the desirability, for example, of easier mutual understanding among a people divided by dialects into the philosophic demand for a single, ideal language. Such a search was as absurd as that other search for a universal language, a language possessing the immobility of the concept and of abstraction. The social need for a better understanding of one another cannot be satisfied save by the spread of education becoming general, by the increase of communications, and by the interchange of thought among men.

Conclusion.

These scattered observations must suffice to show that all the scientific problems of Linguistic are the same as those of Æsthetic, and that the truths and errors of the one are the truths and errors of the other. If Linguistic and Æsthetic appear to be two different sciences, this arises from the fact that people think of the former as grammar, or as a mixture between philosophy and grammar, that is, an arbitrary mnemonic schematism or a pedagogic medley, and not of a rational science and a pure philosophy of speaking. Grammar, or something not unconnected with grammar, also introduces into the mind the prejudice that the reality of language lies in isolated and combinable words, not in living discourse, in the expressive organisms, rationally indivisible.

Those linguists or philologists, philosophically endowed, who have penetrated deepest into the problems of language, find themselves (to employ a trite but effective simile) like workmen piercing a tunnel: at a certain point they must hear the voices of their companions, the philosophers of Æsthetic, who have been at work on the other side. At a certain stage of scientific elaboration, Linguistic, in so far as it is philosophy, must merge itself in Æsthetic: and this indeed it does without leaving a residue.

II

HISTORY OF ÆSTHETIC

I

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN GRÆCO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY

Point of view of this history of Æsthetic.

The question whether Æsthetic is to be considered as an ancient or a modern science has on several occasions been a matter of controversy; whether, that is to say, it arose for the first time in the eighteenth century, or had previously arisen in the Græco-Roman world. This is a question, not only of facts, but of criteria, as is easily to be understood: whether one answers it in this way or that depends upon one's idea of that science, an idea afterwards adopted as a standard or criterion.[1]

Our view is that Æsthetic is the science of the expressive (representative or imaginative) activity. In our opinion, therefore, it does not appear until a precise concept is formulated of imagination, representation or expression, or in whatever other manner we prefer to name that attitude of the spirit, which is theoretical but not intellectual, a producer of knowledge, but of the individual, not of the universal. Outside this point of view, we for our part are not able to discover anything but deviations and errors.

These deviations can lead in various directions. Following the distinctions and terminology of an eminent Italian philosopher[2] in an analogous case, we shall be inclined to say that they arise either from excess or from defect. The deviation from defect would be that which denies the existence of a special æsthetic and imaginative activity, or, which amounts to the same thing, denies its autonomy, and thus mutilates the reality of the spirit. Deviation by excess is that which substitutes for it or imposes upon it another activity, altogether undiscoverable in the experience of the interior life, a mysterious activity which does not really exist. Both these deviations, as can be deduced from the theoretical part of this work, take various forms. The first, that due to defect, may be: (a) purely hedonistic, in so far as it considers and accepts art as a simple fact of sensuous pleasure; (b) rigoristic-hedonistic, in so far as, looking upon it in the same way, it declares it to be irreconcilable with the highest life of man; (c) hedonistic-moralistic or pedagogic, in so far as it consents to a compromise, and while still considering art to be a fact of sense, declares that it need not be harmful, indeed that it may render some service to morality, provided always that it is submissive and obedient.[3] The forms of the second deviation (which we shall call "mystical") are not determinable a priori, for they belong to feeling and imagination in their infinite variety and shades of meaning.[4]

Mistaken tendencies, and attempts towards an Æsthetic, in Græco-Roman antiquity.

The Græco-Roman world presents all these fundamental forms of deviation: pure hedonism, moralism or pedagogism, mysticism, and together with them the most solemn and celebrated rigoristic negation of art which has ever been made. It also exhibits attempts at the theory of expression or pure imagination; but nothing more than approaches and attempts. Hence, since we must now take sides in the controversy as to whether Æsthetic is an ancient or modern science, we cannot but place ourselves upon the side of those who affirm its modernity.

A rapid glance at the theories of antiquity will suffice to justify what we have said. We say rapid, because to enter into minute particulars, collecting all the scattered observations of ancient writers upon art, would be to do again what has been done many times and sometimes very well. Further, those ideas, propositions and theories have passed into the common patrimony of knowledge, together with what else remains of the classical world. It is therefore more advisable here than in any other part of this history merely to indicate the general lines of development.

Origin of the æsthetic problem in Greece.

Art, the artistic faculty, only became a philosophical problem in Greece after the sophistical movement and as a consequence of the Socratic dialectic. The historians of literature generally point to the origins of Greek Æsthetic in the first appearance of criticism and reflection upon poetical works, painting and sculpture; in the judgements pronounced on the occasion of poetical competitions, in the observations that were made as to the methods of the different artists, in the analogies between painting and poetry as expressed in the sayings attributed to Simonides and Sophocles; or, finally, in the appearance of that word which served to group together the various arts and to indicate in a certain way their relationship—the word mimesis or mimetic (μίμησις)—which oscillates between the meaning of "imitation" and that of "representation." Others make the origin of Æsthetic go back to the polemics which were conducted by the first naturalistic and moralistic philosophers against the tales, fantasies and morals of poets, and to the interpretations of the hidden meaning (υπόνοια), or, as the moderns call it, allegory, employed to defend the good name of Homer and of the other poets; finally, to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, as Plato was afterwards to call it.[5] But, to tell the truth, none of these reflections, observations and arguments implied a true and proper philosophical discussion of the nature of art. Nor was the sophistical movement favourable to its appearance. For although attention was at that time certainly given to internal psychical facts, yet these were conceived as mere phenomena of opinion and feeling, of pleasure and pain, of illusion, whim or caprice. And where there is no true and no false, no good and no evil, there can be no question of beautiful and ugly, nor of a difference between the true and the beautiful or between the beautiful and the good. The most one has in that case is the general problem of the irrational and the rational, but not that of the nature of art, which assumes the difference between rational and irrational, material and spiritual, mere fact and value, to have been already stated and grasped. If, then, the sophistical period was the necessary antecedent to the discoveries of Socrates, the æsthetic problem could only arise after Socrates. And it did indeed arise with Plato, author of the first, or indeed of the only really great negation of art of which there remains documentary proof in the history of ideas.

Plato's rigoristic negation.

Is art, mimesis, a rational or an irrational fact? Does it belong to the noble region of the soul, where philosophy and virtue are found, or does it dwell in that base lower sphere, with sensuality and crude passionality? This is the question asked by Plato,[6] who thus states the problem of Æsthetic for the first time. The sophist Gorgias was able to note, with his sceptical acuteness, that tragic representation is a deception, which (strangely enough) turns out to the honour both of him who deceives and of him who is deceived, in which it is shameful not to know how to deceive oneself and not to let oneself be deceived.[7] With that remark he could rest content. That was for him a fact like another. But Plato, the philosopher, was bound to solve the problem: if it were a deception, then down with tragedy and the rest of mimetic productions: down with them among the other things to be despised, among the animal qualities of man. But if it were not deception, what was it? What place did art occupy among the lofty activities of philosophy and of good action?

The answer that he gave is well known. Mimetic does not realize the ideas, that is to say the truth of things, but reproduces natural or artificial things, which are pale shadows of them; it is a diminution of a diminution, a third-hand work. Art, then, does not belong to the lofty and rational region of the soul (του λογιστικοϋ ἐν ψυχή) but to the sensual; it is not a strengthening but a corruption of the mind (λώβη τής διάνοιας); it can serve only sensual pleasure, which troubles and obscures. For this reason, mimetic, poetry and poets, must be excluded from the perfect Republic.

Plato is the most consistent example of those who do not succeed in discovering any other form of knowledge but the intellectual. It was correctly observed by him that imitation stops at natural things, at the image (το φάντασμα), and does not reach the concept, logical truth (άλήθεια), of which poets and painters are altogether ignorant. But his error consisted in believing that there is no other form of truth below the intellectual; that there is nothing but sensuality and passionality outside or prior to the intellect, that which discovers the ideas. Certainly, the fine æsthetic sense of Plato did not echo that depreciatory judgement of art; he himself declared that he would have been very glad to have been shown how to justify art and to place it among the forms of the spirit. But since none was able to give him this assistance, and since art with its appearance that yet lacks reality was repugnant to his ethical consciousness, and reason compelled him (ό λόγος ήρει) to banish it and place it with its peers, he resolutely obeyed his conscience and his reason.[8]

Æsthetic hedonism and moralism.

Others were not troubled with these scruples, and although art was always looked upon as a mere thing of pleasure among the later hedonistic schools of various sorts, among rhetoricians and worldly people the duty of combating or of abolishing it was not felt. Nevertheless, this opposite extreme was also not calculated to meet with the endorsement of public opinion, for the latter, if tender towards art, is no less tender towards rationality and morality. For this reason both rationalists and moralists, compelled to recognize the force of such a condemnation as Plato's, sought for a compromise, a half measure. Away with the sensual and with art: certainly. But can we expel the sensual and the pleasurable without more ado? Can fragile human nature nourish itself exclusively with the strong food of philosophy and morality? Can we obtain observance of the true and of the good from the young and from the people, without allowing them at the same time some amusement? And has not man himself always something of the child, has he not always something of the people in him, is he not to be treated with the same precautions? Is there not a risk that the over-bent bow will break?—These considerations prepared the way for the justification of art, for they showed that if it were not rational in itself, it could on the other hand serve a rational end. Hence the search for the external end of art, which takes the place of the search for the essence or internal end. When art had been lowered to the level of a simple pleasurable illusion, an inebriation of the senses, it was necessary to subordinate the practical action of producing such an illusion and inebriation, like any other action, to the moral end. Art, being deprived of any dignity of its own, was obliged to assume a reflected or secondhand dignity. Thus the moralistic and pedagogic theory was constructed upon a hedonistic basis. The artist, who, for the pure hedonist, was comparable to a hetaira, became for the moralist a pedagogue. Hetaira and pedagogue, these are the symbols of the two conceptions of art that were disseminated in antiquity, and the second was grafted upon the first.

Even before Plato's peremptory negation had directed thought to this way of issue, the literary criticism of Aristophanes was already full of the pedagogic idea: "What schoolmasters are to children, poets are to young men" (τοΐς ήβώσιν δὲ ποιηταί), he says in a celebrated verse[9] But we can find traces of it in Plato himself (in the dialogues in which he seems to withdraw from the too rigid conclusions of the Republic) and in Aristotle, both in the Politics, where he determines the use of music in education, and perhaps in the Poetics, where he speaks obscurely of a tragical catharsis; although as regards this latter, it is not to be altogether denied that he may have had a sort of glimpse of the modern idea of the liberating power of art.[10] Later on, the pedagogic theory takes a form that was much affected by the Stoics. Strabo develops and defends this at great length, in the introduction to his geographical work, where he combats Eratosthenes, who has made poetry consist in mere pleasure without any notion of teaching. Strabo, on the contrary, maintained the opinion of the ancients, that it was "a first philosophy (φιλοσοφίαν τινα πρωτήν), which educated young men for life, and created customs, affections and actions, by means of pleasure." Therefore, he said, poetry has always been a part of education; one cannot be a good poet unless one is a good man (άνδρα άγαθόν). Legislators and founders of cities were the first to employ fables to admonish and to terrify: then this duty, which must be performed for women and children and even for adults, passed to the poets. We caress and dominate the multitude with fiction and with falsehood.[11] "The poets tell many lies" (πολλά ψεύδονται άοιδοί) is a hemistich recorded by Plutarch, who describes minutely in one of his lesser works how the poets should be read to youths.[12] For him too poetry is a preparation for philosophy; it is a disguised philosophy, and therefore delights us in the same way as do fish and meat at feasts, so prepared as not to seem to be fish and meat; it is philosophy softened with fables, like the vine that grows close to the mandragora, and produces a wine that is the giver of sweet slumbers. It is not possible to pass from dense darkness to sunlight; one should first accustom the eyes to moderate light. Philosophers, in order to exhort and instruct, take their examples from true things; poets aim at a like result, when they create fictions and fables.[13] Lucretius, in Roman literature, gives us the well-known comparison of the boys for whom the doctors "prius or as pocula circum Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore," in order to administer the bitter wormwood.[14] Horace, in certain verses of the Epistle to the Pisones which have become proverbial (perhaps his source for them was the Greek of Neoptolemus of Paros?), offers both views (that of art as courtesan and of art as pedagogue) in his "Aut prodesse volunt aut deledare poetae ... omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci."[15]

Thus looked at, the office of the poet was confounded with that of the orator, for he too was a practical man aiming at practical effects; hence there arose discussions as to whether Virgil was to be considered as a poet or as an orator ("Virgilius poeta an orator?"). To both was assigned the triple end of delectare, movere, docere; in any case this tripartition was very empirical, for we clearly perceive that the delectare is here a means-and the docere a simple part of the movere: to move in the direction of the good, and therefore, among other goods, towards that of instruction. In like manner, it was said of the orator and poet (recording the meretricious basis of their task, and with a metaphor significant in its naïveté) that they were bound to avail themselves of the allurements (lenocinium) of form.

Mystical æsthetic in antiquity.

The mystical view, which considers art as a special mode of self-beatification, of entering into relation with the Absolute, with the Summum Bonum, with the ultimate root of things, appeared only in late antiquity, almost at the entrance to the Middle Ages. Its representative is the founder of the neo-Platonic school, Plotinus.

It is strange that Plato should be usually selected as the founder and head of this æsthetic tendency, and that for this very reason to him should be attributed the honour of being the father of Æsthetic. But how could he, who had expounded with such great limpidity and clearness the reasons for which he was not able to accord to art a high place among the activities of the spirit, be credited with having accorded to it one of the highest places, equal, if not superior, to philosophy itself? This misunderstanding has evidently arisen out of the enthusiastic effusions about the Beautiful that we read in the Gorgias, the Philebus, the Phædrus, the Symposium, and other Platonic dialogues. It is well to dissipate it by declaring that the Beauty of which Plato discourses has nothing to do with art or with artistic beauty.

Investigations as to the Beautiful.

The search for the meaning and scientific content of the word "beautiful" could not but early attract the attention of the subtle and elegant Greek dialecticians. Indeed, we find Socrates engaged in discussing this question in one of the discourses that have been preserved for us by Xenophon; and we find him disposed to stop for the moment at the conclusion that the beautiful is that which is convenient and which answers to the end desired, or at the other conclusion that it is that which one loves[16] Plato too examines this sort of problem and proposes various sorts of solutions or attempts at solutions of it. He sometimes speaks of a beauty that dwells not only in bodies, but also in laws, in actions, in the sciences; sometimes he seems to conjoin and almost to identify it with the true, the good and the divine; now he returns to the view of Socrates and confuses it with the useful; now he distinguishes between a beautiful in itself (καλά καθ' αυτά) and a relatively beautiful (πρός τι καλά); or he makes true beauty consist in pure pleasure (ήδονη καθαρά), free from all shadow of pain; or he places it in measure and proportion (μετριότης καί ξνμμετρία); or talks of colours and sounds as possessing a beauty in themselves.[17] It was impossible to find an independent dominion for the beautiful, if the artistic or mimetic activity were deserted. This explains his wandering among so many different conceptions, among which it is just possible to say that the identification of the Beautiful with the Good prevails. Nothing better describes this uncertainty than the dialogue of the Hippias maior (which, if it be not Plato's, is Platonic). He here wishes to find out not what things are beautiful things, but what the beautiful is; that is to say, what it is that makes beautiful, not only a beautiful virgin, but also a beautiful mare, a beautiful lyre, a beautiful pot with two graceful ears of clay. Hippias and Socrates himself propose in turn the most various solutions; but the latter ends by confuting them all. "That which makes things beautiful is the gold that is added to them by way of ornament." No: gold only embellishes where it is fitting (πρέπων): for instance, a pot should have a wooden rather than a golden handle. "That is beautiful which cannot seem ugly to any one." But it is not a question of seeming: the question is to define what the beautiful is, whether it seems so or not. It is the fitting which makes things seem to be beautiful. But in that case, the fitting (which makes them appear, not be) is one thing, and the beautiful another. "The beautiful is what leads to the end, that is to say, the useful (χρήσιμον)." But if that were so, then evil would also be beautiful, because the useful leads also to the evil. "The beautiful is the helpful, that which leads to the good (ωφέλιμον)." But in this case, the good would not be beautiful nor the beautiful good; for the cause is not the effect, and the effect is not the cause. "The beautiful is that which delights the sight and hearing." But this fails to persuade for three reasons: firstly, because beautiful studies and laws are beautiful, which have nothing to do with the eye or with the ear; secondly, because we cannot discover a reason for limiting the beautiful to those senses, while excluding the pleasure of eating and smelling, and the extremely vivid pleasures of sex; thirdly, because, if the foundation of the beautiful were visibility, it would not be audibility, and if it were audibility it would not be visibility; hence that which constitutes the beautiful cannot dwell in either of the two qualities. And the question which has been repeated so insistently in the course of the dialogue: what is the beautiful? (τί εστι το καλόν;) remains unanswered.[18]

Later writers also conducted inquiries into the beautiful, and we possess the titles of several treatises upon the theme, which have been lost. Aristotle shows himself changeable and uncertain upon the point. In the scanty references which he makes to it, he at one time confounds the beautiful with the good, defining it as that which is both good and pleasing;[19] at another he notes that the good consists of action (εν πράξει) and the beautiful also in things that are immoveable (εν τοΐς άκινήτοις), drawing from this the argument that mathematics should be studied in order to determine its characters, order, symmetry and limit;[20] sometimes he places it in bigness and in order (εν μεγεθει καί τάξει);[21] at others he was led to look upon it as something apparently indefinable.[22] Antiquity also established canons of beautiful things, such as that attributed to Polycletus on the proportions of the human body. And Cicero said of the beauty of bodies that they were "quaedam apta figura membrorum cum coloris quadam suavitate."[23] All these affirmations, even when they are not mere empirical observations, or verbal glosses and substitutions, meet with unsurmountable obstacles.

Distinction between the theory of Art and the theory of the Beautiful.

In any case, not only is the conception of the beautiful, taken as a whole, identified with art in none of them; but sometimes art and beauty, mimesis and pleasing or displeasing material of mimesis, are clearly distinguished. Aristotle notes in his Poetics that it pleases us to see the most faithful images of things that are repugnant to us in reality, such, for instance, as the most contemptible forms of animals, or corpses (τάς εικόνας τάς μάλιστα ήκριβωμενας χαίρομεν θεωρουντες).[24] Plutarch demonstrates at length that works of art please us not as beautiful but as resembling (ούχ ως καλόν, άλλ,' ως ομοιον); he affirms that if the artist beautified things that are ugly in nature he would be offending against fitness and resemblance (το πρεπον και το eίκός); and he proclaims the principle that the beautiful is one thing and beautiful imitation another (oύ yaρ εστι ταυτό, το καλον και καλως τι μιμεισθαι). Paintings of horrible events are pleasing, such as Medea slaying her sons by Timomachus, Orestes the matricide by Theon, and the Pretended madness of Ulysses by Parrhasius; and if the grunting of a pig, the grating of a machine, the noise of the winds and the tumult of the sea are unpleasing, they pleased on the contrary in the case of Parmenon, who imitated the pig perfectly, and in Theodorus, who was not less expert in rendering the grating of machines.[25] If the ancients had really wanted to place the beautiful and art in relation, a secondary and partial connexion of the two conceptions was to hand in the shape of the category of the relatively as distinguished from the absolutely beautiful. But where the word καλόν or pulchrum is applied to artistic productions in the writings of literary critics, it does not seem to be more than a linguistic usage, as we find, for instance, in the case of Plutarch's beautiful imitation, or also in the terminology of the rhetoricians, who sometimes called elegance and adornment of discourse beauty of elocution (το τής φράσεως κάλλος).

Fusion of the two by Plotinus.

It is only with Plotinus that the two divided territories are united and the beautiful and art are fused into a single concept, not by means of a beneficial absorption of the equivocal Platonic conception of beauty into the unequivocal conception of art, but by absorption of the clear into the confused, of imitative art in the so-called beautiful. And thus we reach an altogether new view: the beautiful and art are now both alike melted into a mystical passion and elevation of the spirit.

Beauty, observes Plotinus, resides chiefly in things visible; but it is also to be found in things audible, such as verbal and musical compositions, and it is not lacking in things supersensible, such as works, offices, actions, habits, sciences and virtues. What is it that makes beautiful sensible and supersensible things alike? Not, he answers, the symmetry of their parts among themselves, and with the whole (συμμετρία των μερών προς αλληλα και προς το ολον) and their colour (ενχροια), according to one of the definitions most in vogue, which we have quoted above in the words of Cicero; because there are proportions in things ugly, and there are things that are simply beautiful without any relation of proportion: beauty, then, is one thing and symmetry another.[26] The beautiful is what we welcome as akin to our own nature; the ugly is what repels us as our opposite, and the affinity of beautiful things with our souls that perceive them has its origin in the Idea, which produces both. That is beautiful which is formed; the ugly is what is unformed, that is to say, something which is capable of receiving form, but does not receive it or is not entirely dominated by it. A beautiful body is such, because of its communion (κοινωνία) with the Divine; beauty is the Divine, the Idea, shining through; and matter is beautiful, not in itself, but only when it is illuminated by the Idea. Light and fire, which are nearest to this state, shed beauty upon visible things, as the most spiritual among bodies. But the soul must purify itself, in order to perceive the beautiful, and make the power of the Idea that lies in it efficacious. Moderation, strength, prudence, and every other virtue, what else are they, according to the oracle, but purification? Thus there opens another eye in the soul, beside that of sensible beauty, which permits it to contemplate divine Beauty coincident with the Good, which is the supreme condition of beatitude.[27] Art enters into such contemplation, because beauty, in things made by man, comes from the mind. Compare two blocks of stone, the one placed beside the other: one rough and crude, the other reduced to the statue of a god or of a man, for example of a Grace or of a Muse, or of a human being of such a shape, as art has collected from many particular beauties. The beauty of a block of this shape does not consist in its being of stone, but in the form that art has been able to give to it (παρά του ειδους o ενηκεν η τέχνη); and when the form is fully impressed upon it, the thing of art is more beautiful than any other natural thing. Hence he who despised the arts (Plato), because they imitated nature, was wrong; whereas the truth is, in the first place, that nature itself imitates the idea, and then that the arts do not simply limit themselves to imitating what the eyes see, but go back to those reasons or ideas from which nature itself is derived (ώς ούχ απλώς το όρώμενον μεμούνται, αλλ' άνατρέχουσιν επι τούς λόγους έξ ων η φύσις). Art therefore does not belong to nature, but adds beauty where it is wanting in nature: Phidias did not represent Jove because he had seen him, but such as he would appear if he wished to reveal himself to mortal eyes.[28] The beauty of natural things is the archetype existing in the soul, the sole source of natural beauty.[29]

The scientific tendency. Aristotle.

This affirmation of Plotinus and of neo-Platonism is the first true and proper affirmation of mystical Æsthetic, destined to such high fortunes in modern times, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the attempts at a true Æsthetic, excluding certain luminous but incidental observations to be found even in Plato: for instance, that the poet should weave fables, not arguments (μύθους άλλ' ού λόγους),[30] go back to Aristotle and are altogether independent of his few and feeble speculations as to the beautiful. Aristotle by no means agreed with the Platonic condemnation; he felt (as indeed Plato himself had suspected) that such a result could not be altogether true, and that some aspect of the problem must have been neglected. When in his turn he attempted to find a solution, he found himself in more advantageous conditions than his great predecessor, since he had already overcome the obstacle that arose from the Platonic doctrine of ideas, a hypostasis of concepts and abstractions. The ideas were for him simply concepts, and reality presented itself in a far more lively manner, not as a diminution of ideas, but as a synthesis of matter and form, it was thus much more easy for him to recognize the rationality of mimesis in his general philosophical doctrine and to assign to it its right place; and indeed it seems generally clear to Aristotle that mimesis, being proper to man by nature, is contemplation or theoretic activity; although he sometimes seems to forget this (as when he confuses imitation with the case of boys, who acquire their first knowledge by following an example[31]), and although his system, which admits practical sciences and poietic activities (distinguished from the practical as leaving a material object behind them), disturbed the firm and constant consideration of artistic mimesis and poetry as a theoretical activity. But if it is a theoretical activity, by what characteristic is poetry distinguished both from scientific knowledge and from historical knowledge? This is the way Aristotle states the problem concerning the nature of art, and this is the true and only way of stating it. Even we moderns ask ourselves in what way art is distinguished from history and from science, and what this artistic form can be, which has the ideality of science and the concreteness and individuality of history. Poetry, answers Aristotle, differs from history, because, while the latter draws things that have happened (τα γενόμενα), poetry draws things that may possibly happen (οια αν γένοιτο), and differs from science, because, although it regards the universal and not the particular (τα καθ' εκαστον) like history, it does not regard it in the same way as science, but in a certain measure, which the philosopher indicates by the word rather (μαλλον τα καθόλου). The point then is to establish the precise meaning of the possible, the rather and the historical particular. But no sooner does Aristotle attempt to determine the meaning of these words, than he falls into contradictions and fallacies. That universal of poetry, which is the possible, seems to identify itself for him with the probable or the necessary (τα κατά το είκος η το άναγκαΐον), and the particular of history is not explained at all, except by giving instances: "that which Alcibiades did and what happened to him."[32] Aristotle, in fact, after having made so good a beginning in the discovery of the purely imaginative, proper to poetry, remains half-way, perplexed and uncertain. Thus he sometimes makes the truth of imitation consist in a certain learning and syllogizing that takes place when we look at imitations, by which we recognize that "this is that," that a copy answers to the original;[33] or, worse, he loses the grains of truth that he has found and forgets that poetry has for its content the possible, admitting, not only that it may also depict the impossible (το αδύνατον), and even the absurd (το άτοπον), seeing that both are credible and that they do not injure the end of art, but even that we must prefer impossible probabilities to incredible possibilities.[34] Art, since it has to do even with the impossible and absurd, will not therefore have in it anything of the rational, but in accordance with the Platonic theory it will be an imitation of the appearance in which empty sense indulges itself; that is to say, a thing of pleasure. Aristotle does not attain to this result, because he does not attain to any clear and precise result in this part of the subject, but it is one of the results that can be deduced from what he has said, or that, at any rate he is not able to exclude. This means that he did not fulfil his tacitly assumed task, and that although he re-examined the problem with marvellous acuteness after Plato, he failed truly to rid himself of the Platonic definition, by substituting a firmly-established one of his own.

The concepts of imitation and of imagination after A ristotle. Philostratus.

But the field of investigation toward which Aristotle had turned was generally neglected in antiquity: the very Poetics of Aristotle does not seem to have been widely known or influential. Ancient psychology knew fancy or imagination as a faculty midway between sense and intellect, but always as conservative and reproductive of sensuous impressions or conveying conceptions to the senses, never properly as a productive autonomous activity. That faculty was rarely and with little result placed in relation with the problem of art. Several historians of Æsthetic attach singular importance to certain passages in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by the elder Philostratus, in which they believe that they discover a correction of the theory of mimesis and the first affirmation in history of the conception of imaginative creation. Phidias and Praxiteles (says the extract in question) did not need to go to heaven to see the gods, in order to be able to depict them in their works, as would have been necessary according to the theory of imitation. Imagination, without any need of models, made them able to do what they did: imagination, which is a wiser agent than simple imitation (φαντασία ... σοφωτόρα μιμήσεως δημιουργός), and gives form, like the other, not only to what has been seen, but also to what has never been seen, imagining it on the basis of existing things and in that way creating Jupiters and Minervas.[35] However, the imagination of which Philostratus speaks here is not something different from the Aristotelian mimesis, which, as has been noted, was concerned not only with real things but also and chiefly with possible things. And had not Socrates observed (in the dialogue with the painter Parrhasius, preserved for us by Xenophon) that painters work by collecting what they need to form their figures from several bodies (εκ πολλων συνάγοντες τα εξ εκάστου καλλιστα)?[36] And was not the anecdote of Zeuxis, who was supposed to have taken the best of five Crotonian maidens in order to paint his Helen, and other anecdotes of a like sort, sufficiently widespread in antiquity? And had not Cicero eloquently explained, some years before Philostratus, how Phidias, when he was carving Jupiter, did not copy anything real, but kept his looks fixed upon "species pulcritudinis eximia quaedam," which he had in his soul and which directed his art and his hand?[37] Nor can it be said that Philostratus opened the way to Plotinus, for whom the superior or intellectual imagination (νοητή), or eye of supersensible beauty, when it is not a new designation for beautiful imitation, is mystical intuition.

The vagueness of the concept of mimesis reached its apex in those writers who gave it as a general title to any sort of work that had nature for its object, employing the Aristotelian phrase to affirm that "omnis ars naturae imitatio est,"[38] or saying, like the painter Eupompus when he blamed his servile imitators, that "natura est imitanda, non artifex."[39] And those who wished to escape this vagueness did not know how to do so, save by conceiving the activity of imitation as the practical producer of duplicates of natural objects, a prejudice bora in the bosom of the pictorial and plastic arts, against which Philostratus perhaps intended to argue, in common with the other advocates of imagination.

Speculations on language.

The speculations upon language had a close connexion with those upon the nature of art begun by the sophists, for whom it became a matter for wonder that sounds could signify colours or things inaudible; that is to say, speech presented itself as a problem.[40] It was then discussed whether language was by nature (φύσει or by convention νόμω). By nature was sometimes understood mental necessity, and by convention what we should call a merely natural fact, psychological mechanism or sensationalism. In that sense of the terms, language would have been better called φύσει than νόμω. But at other times the distinction led to the question whether language answers to objective or logical truth and to the real relations between things (όρθότης των ονομάτων); and in this case, those would seem to be nearer the truth who proclaimed it to be conventional or arbitrary in respect to logical truth: νόμω or θέσει, and not φύσει Two different questions were consequently being treated together, and both were confusedly and equivocally discussed. They find their monument in the obscure Cratylus of Plato, which seems to fluctuate between different solutions. Nor did the later affirmation that the word is a sign (σημείον) of the thought solve anything, for it still remained to be shown in what way the sign was to be understood, whether φύσει or νόμω. Aristotle, who looked upon words as imitations (μιμηματα), in the same way as poetry,[41] made an observation of first-rate importance: in addition to the enunciative propositions, which express the (logically) true or false, there are others which do not express either the (logically) true or false, as for example the expressions of aspirations and of desires (εύχή), which therefore belong, not to logical exposition, but to poetical and rhetorical exposition.[42] And in another place we find him affirming in opposition to Bryson (who had said that a base thing remained such with whatever word it were designated) that base things can be expressed both with words that place them beneath the eye in all their crudity, and with other words which surround them with a veil.[43] All this might have led to the separation of the linguistic faculty from the properly logical, and to its consideration in union with the poetical and artistic faculty; but here too the attempt stopped half-way. The Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and formalistic character, which became more and more accentuated as time went on and formed an obstacle to the distinction between the two theoretical forms. Nevertheless, Epicurus asserted that the diversity of names designating the same thing with various peoples was due, not to convention and caprice, but to the fact that the impressions produced by things were different in each one of them.[44] And the Stoics, although they connected language with thought (διάνοια) and not with imagination, seem to have had a suspicion of the non-logical nature of language, for they interposed between thought and sound a certain something which was indicated in Greek by the word λεκτόν, and by the words effatum or dicibile in Latin. But we are not sure what they really meant, and whether that vague concept were intended by them to distinguish the linguistic representation from the abstract concept (which would bring them into touch with the modern view), or the meaning of sound in general.[45]

We cannot collect any other germ of truth from the ancient writers. A philosophical Grammar, like a philosophical Poetics, remained unattainable in antiquity.

II

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

Middle Ages, Mysticism, Ideas on the beautiful.

Almost all the developments of ancient Æsthetic were continued by tradition or reappeared by spontaneous generation in the course of the Middle Ages. Neo-Platonic mysticism continued, entrusted to the care of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (De cœlesti hierarchia, De ecclesiastica hierarchia, De divinis nominibus, etc.), to the translations of these works made by John Scotus Eriugena, and to the divulgations of the Spanish Jews (Avicebron). The Christian God took the place of the Summum Bonum or Idea: God, wisdom, goodness, supreme beauty, source of beautiful things in nature, which are a ladder to the contemplation of the Creator. But these speculations continued to recede further and further from the consideration of art, with which Plotinus had connected them; and the empty definitions of the beautiful by Cicero and other ancient writers were often repeated. Saint Augustine defined beauty in general as unity (omnis pulchritudinis forma unitas est,) and that of the body as congruentia partium cum quadam colons suavitate, and the old distinction between something that is beautiful in itself and relative beauty reappeared in a book of his, which has been lost, entitled De pulchro et apto; the very name shows that he reasserted the old distinction between the beautiful in itself and the relatively beautiful, quoniam apte accommodaretur alicui. Elsewhere he notes that an image is called beautiful si perfecte implei illud cujus imago est, et coaequatur ei.[1]

Thomas Aquinas varied but little from him in positing three requisites for beauty: integrity or perfection, due proportion, and clearness; following Aristotle, he distinguished the beautiful from the good, defining the first as that which pleases in the mere contemplation of it (pulcrum ... id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet); he referred to the beauty that even base things possess if well imitated, and applied the doctrine of imitation to the beauty of the Second Person of the Trinity (in quantum est imago expressa Patris).[2] If it were wished to discover references to the hedonistic conception of art, it would be possible to do this, with a little goodwill, in some of the sayings of jongleurs and troubadours. Æsthetic rigorism, the total negation of art for religion or for divine and human science, shows itself in Tertullian and among certain Fathers of the Church, at the entrance to the Middle Ages; at their conclusion, in a certain crude scholastic spirit, for example in Cecco d' Ascoli, who proclaimed against Dante: "I leave trifles behind me and return to the true; fables are always unpleasing to me," and later, in the reactionary Savonarola. But the narcotic theory of pedagogic or moralistic art prevailed over every other. It had contributed to send to sleep the æsthetic doubts and inquiries of the ancients, and was well suited to a period of relative decadence of culture. This was all the more the case, seeing that it accorded well with the moral and religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and afforded a justification not only for the new art of Christian inspiration, but also for the surviving works of classical and pagan art.

The pedagogic theory of art in the Middle Ages.

The allegorical interpretation was again a means of salvation for these last. The De continentia Virgiliana of Fulgentius (sixth century) is a curious monument to this fact. This work made Virgil compatible with the Middle Ages and opened his way to that great reputation which he was destined to attain, as the "gentle sage who knew all things." Even John of Salisbury says of the Roman poet, that "sub imagine fabularum totius philosophiae exprimit veritatem."[3] The process of interpretation became fixed in the doctrine of the four meanings, literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic, which Dante afterwards transferred to vernacular poetry. It would be easy to accumulate quotations from mediæval writers, repeating in all keys the theory that art inculcates the truths of morality and of faith and constrains hearts to Christian piety, beginning with those well-known verses of Theodulf: "In quorum dictis (that is to say, in the utterances of the poets) quamquam sint frivola multa, Plurima sub falso tegmine vera latent," and so on, until we reach the doctrines and opinions of our own great men, Dante and Boccaccio. For Dante, poetry "nihil aliud est quam fictio rhethorica in musicaque posita."[4] The poet should have a "reasoning" in his verses "under a cloak of figure or of rhetorical colour"; and it would be a shameful thing for him, if, "when asked, he were not able to divest his words of such a garment, in such a way as to show that they possessed a true meaning."[5] Readers sometimes stop at the external vesture alone, and this indeed suffices for those who, like the vulgar, do not succeed in penetrating the hidden meaning. Poetry will say to the vulgar, which does not understand "its argument," what a song of Dante's says at its conclusion, "At least behold how beautiful I am": if you are not able to obtain instruction from me, at least enjoy me as a pleasing thing. Many, indeed, "their beauty more than their goodness will delight," in poems, unless they are assisted by commentaries in the nature of the Convivio, "a light which will allow every shade of meaning to reach them."[6] Poetry was the "gay science," "un fingimiento" (as the Spanish poet the Marquis of Santillana wrote) "de cosas utiles, cubiertas ó veladas con muy fermosa cobertura, compuestas, distinguidas é scandidas, por cierto cuento, pessoé medida."[7]

It would not then be correct to say that the Middle Ages simply identified art with theology and with philosophy. Indeed it sharply distinguished the one from the other, defining art and poetry, like Dante, with the words fictio rhethorica, "figure" and "rhetorical colour," "cloak," "beauty," or like Santillana with those of fingimiento or fermosa cobertura. This pleasing falsity was justified from the practical point of view, very much in the same way as sexual union and love were justified and sanctified in matrimony. This did not exclude, indeed it implied, that the perfect state was certainly celibacy—that is to say, pure science, free from admixture of art.

Hints of an Æsthetic in scholastic philosophy.

The only tendency that had no true and proper representatives was the sound scientific tendency. The Poetics of Aristotle itself was hardly known or rather it was ill-known, from the Latin translation that a German of the name of Hermann made, not earlier than 1256, of the paraphrase or commentary of Averroes. Perhaps the best of the mediæval investigations into language is that supplied by Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, where the word is, however, still looked upon as a sign ("rationale signum et sensuale ... natura sensuale quidem, in quantum sonus est, rationale vero in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad piacitum").[8] The study of the expressive, æsthetic, linguistic faculty would, however, have found an appropriate occasion and a point of departure in the secular debate between nominalism and realism, which could not avoid touching to some extent the relations between the word and the flesh, thought and language. Duns Scotus wrote a treatise De modis significandi seu (the addition is due perhaps to the editors) grammatica speculativa.[9] Abelard had defined sensation as confusa conceptio, and imaginatio as a faculty that preserved sensations; the intellect renders discursive what is intuitive in the preceding stage, and we have finally the perfection of knowledge in the intuitive knowledge of the discursive. We find the same importance attached to intuitive knowledge, perception, of the individual or species specialissima, in Duns Scotus, together with the progressive denominations of the different sorts of knowledge as confusæ, indistinctæ and distinctæ. We shall see this terminology reappear, big with consequences, at the very commencement of modern Æsthetic.[10]

Renaissance. Philography and philosophical and empirical inquiries concerning the beautiful.

It may be said that the literary and artistic doctrines and opinions of the Middle Ages have, with few exceptions, a value rather for the history of culture than for the general history of science. The like observation holds good of the Renaissance, for here, too, the circle of the ideas of antiquity was not overstepped. Culture increases; original sources are studied; the ancient writers are translated and commented upon; many treatises are written and henceforth printed upon poetry and the arts, grammars, rhetorics, dialogues, and dissertations upon the beautiful: the proportions have increased, the world has become bigger; but truly original ideas do not yet show themselves in the domain of æsthetic science. The mystical tradition is refreshed and strengthened by the renewed cult of Plato: Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cattani, Leon Battista Alberti, in the fifteenth century, and Pietro Bembo, Mario Equicola, Castiglione, Nobili, Betussi, and very many others in the following century, wrote upon the Beautiful and upon Love. Among the most noteworthy productions of the sort, a crossing of the mediæval and classical currents, is the book of the Dialogues of Love (1535), composed in Italian by the Spanish Jew Leo, and translated into all the cultured languages of the time.[11] The three parts into which it is divided treat of the nature and essence, of the universality, and of the origin of love; and it is demonstrated that every beautiful thing is good, but not every good thing is beautiful; that beauty is a grace which dilates the soul and moves it to love, and that knowledge of lesser beauties leads to that of higher spiritual beauties. The author gave the name of "Philography" to these and similar affirmations and effusions of which the book is composed. Equicola's[12] work is also interesting, because it contains historical accounts of those who wrote upon the subject before he did so himself. The same intuition was versified and sighed forth by the Petrarchists in their sonnets and ballads, while others, rebellious and mocking, derided it in comedies, verses in terza rima and parodies of all sorts. Some mathematicians, reincarnations of Pythagoras, set to work to determine beauty by exact relations: for instance Leonardo's friend, Luca Paciolo, in the De divina proportione (1509), in which he laid down the pretended æsthetic law of the golden section.[13] And side by side with these new Pythagoreans were those who revived the canon of Polycletus as to the beauty of the human body, especially of the female body, such as Firenzuola, Franco, Luigini, and Dolce. Michæl Angelo fixed an empirical canon for painting in general, when he stated that the means of giving movement and grace to figures[14] consisted in the observance of a certain arithmetical relation. Others, such as Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, investigated the symbolism or meaning of colours. The Platonists generally placed beauty in the soul, the Aristotelians rather in the physical qualities. The Averroist, Agostino Nifo, amid much chatter and many inconclusive remarks, demonstrated the existence of the beautiful in nature by describing the supremely beautiful body of Joan of Aragon, Princess of Tagliacozzo, to whom the book is dedicated.[15] Torquato Tasso, in the "Mintumo,"[16] imitated the uncertainties of the Hippias of Plato, not without making a free use of the speculations of Plotinus. A chapter of the Poetica of Campanella possesses greater importance, where he describes the good as signum boni and the ugly as signum mali, understanding by good the three prime forces of Power, Wisdom and Love. Although Campanella was still tied to the Platonic idea of the beautiful, the conception of a sign or symbol, here introduced by him, represents progress. By this means he succeeded in perceiving that material things or external facts are neither beautiful nor ugly in themselves. "Mandricard called the wounds in the bodies of his friends the Moors beautiful, for they were large and gave evidence of the great strength of Roland who dealt them; Saint Augustine called the gashes and the dislocations in the body of Saint Vincent beautiful, because they were evidence of his endurance, but they were on the other hand ugly in so far as they were signs of the cruelty of the tyrant Dacianus and of his executioners. It is beautiful to die fighting, said Virgil, for it is the sign of a strong soul. The pet dog of his mistress will seem beautiful to the lover, and doctors call even urine and fæces beautiful, when they indicate health. Everything is both beautiful and ugly" (quapropter nihil est quod non sit pulcrum simul et turpe).[17] In such observations as these we have not a mere state of mystical exaltation, but to some extent a movement in the direction of analysis.

The pedagogic theory of art and the Poetics of Aristotle.

Nothing better serves to demonstrate that the Renaissance did not pass beyond the confines of ancient æsthetic thought than the fact that notwithstanding the renewed acquaintance with the thought of Aristotle, the pedagogic theory of art not only persisted and triumphed, but was transplanted bodily into the text of Aristotle, where its interpreters read it with a certainty that we have to make efforts to achieve. Certainly, a Robortelli (1548) or a Castelvetro (1570) stopped short at the simple, purely hedonistic solution, giving simple pleasure as the end of art: poetry, says Castelvetro, "was discovered solely for the purpose of delighting and of recreating ... the souls of the rude multitude and of the common people."[18] And here and there some were able to free themselves from both the pleasure theory and that of the didactic end; but the majority, such as Segni, Maggi, Vettori,[19] were for the docere delectando. Scaliger (1561) declared that mimesis or imitation was "finis medius ad illum ultimum qui est docendi cum delectatione," and believing himself to be altogether in agreement with Aristotle as to this, he continued, "docet affectus poeta per actiones, ut bonos amplectamur atque imitemur ad agendum, malos aspernemur ad abstinendum."[20] Piccolomini (1575) observed that "It must not be thought that so many excellent poets and artists, ancient and modern, would have devoted such care and diligence to this most noble study, had they not known and believed that in so doing they were aiding human life," and if "they had not thought that we were to be instructed, directed, and well established by it."[21] The "truth preserved in soft verses, which attracts and persuades the most reluctant" (Tasso),[22] with the comparison from Lucretius attached, is the conception that even Campanella repeats. Poetry is for him "Rhetorica quaedam figurata, quasi magica, quae exempla ministrat ad suadendum bonum et dissuadendum malum delectabiliter iis qui simplici verum et bonum audire nolunt, aut non possunt aut nesciunt."[23] Thus returned the comparison of poetry with oratory; according to Segni they only differ because the first occupies a more lofty situation: "for since imitation representing itself in act by means of poetry, in mighty, chosen words, in metaphors, images, and indeed the whole of figured speech, which is to be found more in poetry than in the art of oratory, the metrical qualities that are also required in verse, the subjects of which it treats, which have something of the great and delightful, make it appear most beautiful and worthy of being held all the greater marvel."[24] "Three most noble arts" (wrote Tassoni in 1620, and he repeated common opinion), "History, Poetics, and Oratory, come under the heading of Politics and depend upon it; the first of these has reference to the instruction of princes and gentlemen, the second of the people, the third of those who give counsel in public trials or defend private ones that come up for judgment."[25]