BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 6)

Quadrio and Zanotti.

By assiduous travail of thought and perpetual search for the best, Conti kept himself at the highest level of æsthetic speculation in contemporary Europe (Vico always excepted); at the same level as Baumgarten in Germany. We pass rapidly over other Italian writers such as Quadrio (1739), author of the first great encyclopædia of universal literature, in which he defines poetry as "the science of things human and divine, presented in pictures to the populace, and written in words connected by measure";[16] and Francesco Maria Zanotti (1768), who describes poetry as "the art of versification in order to give pleasure":[17] the first is worthy of a mediæval anthologist, the second of a no less mediæval composer of handbooks on rhythm and methods of composition. The only serious student of æsthetic was Melchior Cesarotti.

Cesarotti

Cesarotti called attention to popular and primitive poetry: he translated Ossian and illustrated the text with dissertations; he unearthed antique Spanish poems and even the folk-songs of Mexico and Lapland; he studied Hebrew poetry; he dedicated the greater part of his life to the Homeric poems, examining all the theories of critics past and present, encountering Vico in this connexion and discussing his views. Besides this, he debated the origin of poetry, the pleasure given by tragedy, taste, the beautiful, eloquence, style, in short every problem belonging to æsthetics which had been raised up to his time.[18] One seems to catch an echo of Vico as one listens to his words on La Motte: "He had logic, but knew not that the logic of poetry differs somewhat from ordinary logic: he was a man of great talent, but he recognized talent only, and was incapable of feeling the immeasurable distance between judicious prose and poetry: the real Homer with his attractive faults will always be more beloved than his reformed Homer with his cold, affected virtue."[19] Cesarotti purposed (1762) bringing out a great theoretico-historical book in whose first part "we shall suppose the non-existence of poetry and poetic art and try to trace by what path a man of illuminated reason can have reached the idea of the possibility of such an art and how he can have attained perfection by these means: every one will be able to see poetry growing up under his eyes, so to speak, and attest the truth of theory by the testimony of his own personal feelings."[20] Although celebrated throughout Italy in his day as one who "with the most pure torch of philosophy has thrown beams of light into the darkest recesses of poetry and eloquence,"[21] it does not appear that the distinguished scholar, the pleasing and desultory philosopher, offered any profound or original solutions. In 1797 he defined poetry as "the art of representing and perfecting nature by means of picturesque, animated, imaginative and harmonious discourse."[22]

Bettinelli and Pagano.

The fashion of the day in philosophy made men impatient of the ideas found in writers of treatises of former times. Arteaga praises Cesarotti for "that fine tact, that impartial criticism, that logical spirit derived not from the trickling streamlets of Sperone, Castelvetro, Casa and Bembo, but from the profound and inexhaustible springs of Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, d'Alembert, Sulzer, and writers of like temper."[23] Writing to Saverio Bettinelli, who was preparing a work on Enthusiasm, Paradisi hoped it would prove "a metaphysical history of enthusiasm which shall outweigh all those Poetics which are only fit to be burned," and would "make waste paper of Castelvetro, the 'Mintumo,' and that stupid creature, Quadrio."[24] In spite of these aspirations Bettinelli's book (1769) contains little beyond vivacious and eloquent empirical observations concerning the psychology of poets, "poetic enthusiasm," to which he assigns six degrees, namely, elevation, vision, rapidity, novelty and surprise, passion and transfusion. Equally empirical was Mario Pagano in his two fragments, Gusto e le belle arti and Origine e natura della poesia (1783-1785), in which he grotesquely combines some ideas from Vico with the current sensationalism. Theoretico-imaginative form and sensuous pleasure are presented by him as two historical periods of art. "In their cradle the fine arts are directed towards making a true imitation of nature rather than towards loveliness. Their first steps are towards expression rather than charm.... In the most ancient poetry, even in the ballads of barbarous ages, there lives a most compelling pathos: passions are expressed naturally, even the sound of the words is alive with the expression of the things described." But "the period of perfection is reached at the moment when exact imitation of nature is coupled with complete beauty, accord and harmony," when "the taste is refined and society reaches its most complete form of culture." Fine arts "precede by a short time the dawn of philosophy, that is to say, the time of the most intense perfection of society"; indeed, certain modes of art, such as tragedy, must necessarily come later than philosophy whose aid must be invoked to further "the purgation of manners."[25]

German disciples of Baumgarten. G. F. Meier.

The compatriots and successors of Baumgarten, like those of Vico, did little by way of understanding or improving upon his work. An enthusiastic admirer and disciple of Baumgarten who had attended his lectures at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, Georg Friedrich Meier, came forward in 1746 to defend the Meditationes against the attacks of Quistorp to whom the master had deigned no reply;[26] already in 1748, prior to the publication of the Æsthetic, he had published the first volume of his Principles of all the Beautiful Sciences,[27] followed in 1749 and 1750 by the second and third volumes. This book, which is a complete exposition of Baumgarten's theory, is divided, according to the master's method, into three parts: invention of beautiful thoughts (heuristic), æsthetic method (methodic), and the beautiful signification of thoughts (semiotic); the first of these (occupying two and a half volumes) is subdivided into three sections: beauty of sense-apprehension (æsthetic richness, grandeur, verisimilitude, vivacity, certainty, sensitive life and wit), sensitive faculties (attention, abstraction, senses, imagination, subtlety, acumen, memory, poetic power, taste, foresight, conjecture, signification and the minor appetitive faculties), and the diverse kinds of beautiful thought (æsthetic concepts, judgements, and syllogisms). Elsewhere than in this book, which was reprinted many times (in 1757 an epitome was issued[28]), Meier discusses Æsthetic in several of his numerous works, especially in a little tract, Considerations on the First Principles of all Fine Arts and Sciences.[29] Who was more tenderly inclined than he towards the science so recently born and baptized? He was ardent in her defence against those who denied both her possibility and her utility, and against those who admitted these yet complained, not unreasonably, that she was substantially the same as that which in former days had been treated as Poetics and Rhetoric. He parried this accusation, of which he recognized the partial truth, by asserting that it was impossible for one writer to have perfect knowledge of all the arts: another of his excuses was to the effect that Æsthetic was a science too young to show the perfection reached by other sciences after the cultivation of centuries; in one place he says he has no intention of arguing "with those enemies of Æsthetic who will not or cannot see the true nature and aim of this science, but have built for themselves in its place a deformed and miserable image against which, when they fight, they fight against themselves." With philosophic resignation he concludes that the same fate is in store for Æsthetic as for every science: "At first when almost unknown they encounter enemies and detractors who ridicule them through ignorance and prejudice; but later they meet persons of intellect who, by working at them conjointly, carry them on to their proper perfection."[30]

Confusions of Meier.

Students of the new science flocked to Halle University to hear Meier lecture on Æsthetic whose "chief author" or "inventor" (Haupturheber, Erfinder), as Meier never tired of repeating, was "Herr Professor Baumgarten"; at the same time warning them that his own Anfangsgründe were no mere transcription of Baumgarten's lectures.[31] Still, while recognizing the great gifts of Meier as publicity-agent, the facility, clarity and wealth of his eloquence, and his shrewdness in polemic, one cannot altogether deny the justice of the remark upon "Professor Baumgarten of Frankfort and his ape (Affe) Professor Meier of Halle."[32] Every defect of Baumgarten's Æsthetic reappears accentuated in Meier; the limits of the inferior cognitive faculties, alleged as the domain of poetry and the arts, are laid down by him most strangely. It is curious to note how, for example, he interprets the difference between the confused (æsthetical) and the distinct (logical), and the proposition that beauty disappears when made the object of distinct thought. "The cheeks of a beautiful girl whereon bloom the roses of youth are lovely so long as they are looked at with the naked eye. But let them be examined with a magnifying glass. Where is their beauty? One can hardly believe that such a disgusting surface, scaly, all mounts and hollows, the pores full of dirt, with hairs sprouting here and there, can be the seat of that amorous attraction which subdues the heart."[33] That is described as "æsthetically false" whose truth the inferior faculty is unable to grasp: for example, the theory that bodies are composed of monads.[34] Once they have become intelligible to these faculties, general concepts possess great æsthetic richness, since they include infinite consequences and particular cases.[35] Æsthetic also comprehends those things which cannot be thought distinctly or, if so thought, might be capable of upsetting philosophic gravity: a kiss may be an excellent subject for a poet; but whatever would be thought of a philosopher who sought to demonstrate its necessity by the mathematical method?[36] Moreover, Meier includes the whole theory of observation and experiment in Æsthetic, to which this theory belongs, he says, by right of its connexion with the senses,[37] and also the whole theory of the appetitive faculties, because "æsthetic requires not only a fine wit but a noble heart as well."[38] He comes near truth sometimes, when, for example, he observes that the logical form presupposes the æsthetic and that our first concepts are sensitive, later becoming distinct by the help of logic;[39] and when he condemns allegory as "among the most decadent forms of beautiful thinking."[40] But, on the other hand, he thinks that logical distinctions and definitions, although not necessarily sought after by genius, are very useful in poetry; they are even indispensable as regulators of beautiful thinking and make up, as it were, the skeleton of the body poetic: great care, however, must be taken not to judge æsthetical general concepts, notiones æstheticæ universales, with the rigorous exactitude demanded by philosophical. And since such concepts, taken singly, may be likened to unstrung jewels, they must be connected by the string of æsthetic judgement and syllogism, the theory of which is identical with that presented by Logic, setting aside that part which is of little or no use to genius, but belongs exclusively to the philosopher.[41] In his Considerations of 1757 Meier, having combated the principle of imitation (which appeared to him at once too broad, since science and morals are also imitations of nature, and too narrow, since art does not imitate natural objects solely nor should it imitate them all, for the immoral must be excluded), reaffirmed the thesis that the æsthetic principle consists in the "greatest possible beauty of sense-perception."[42] He upheld this by condemning as erroneous the belief that this sense-perception is wholly sensuous and confused, without any gleam of distinctness or rationality. The perception of sweet, bitter, red, etc., is wholly sensuous; but there is another perception which is both sensuous and intellectual, confused and distinct, in which both faculties, the higher and the lower, collaborate. When intellectuality prevails in this consciousness, then we have science: when sensibility, then we have poetry. "From our explanation it will be gathered that the inferior cognitive faculties must collect all the material of a poem, and all its parts. Intellect and judgement, on the other hand, watch and ensure that these materials are placed side by side in such a way that in their connexion distinction and order may be observed."[43] Here a plunge into sensationalism, there a fugitive glimpse of truth: most often, and in conclusion, an adherence to the old mechanical, ornamental, pedagogic theory of poetry: this is the impression left on us by the æsthetic writings of Meier.

M. Mendelssohn and other followers of Baumgarten. Vogue of Æsthetic.

Another disciple of Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, conceiving beauty as "indistinct image of a perfection," deduced that God can have no perception of beauty, as this is merely a phenomenon of human imperfection. According to him a primary form of pleasure is that of the senses, arising from "the bettered state of our bodily constitution"; a secondary form is the æsthetic fact of sensible beauty, that is to say, unity in variety; a third form is perfection, or harmony in variety.[44] He too repudiates Hutcheson's deus ex machina, the sense of beauty. Sensible beauty, perfection such as can be apprehended by the senses, is independent of the fact that the object represented is beautiful or ugly, good or bad by nature; it suffices that it leaves us not indifferent: whence Mendelssohn agrees with Baumgarten's definition, "a poem is a discourse sensibly perfect."[45] Elias Schlegel (1742) conceived art as imitation, not so servile as to seem a copy, but having similarity rather than identity with nature: he considered the duty of poetry was first to please and only afterwards to instruct.[46] Treatises on Æsthetic, university lectures or slender volumes for use of the public, Theories of the Fine Arts and Letters, Manuals, Sketches, Texts, Principles, Introductions, Lectures, Essays, and Considerations on Taste poured down thick and fast on Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. There are at least thirty full or complete treatises and many dozens of minor tracts or fragments. After the Protestant universities, the Catholic took up the new science, which was taught by Riedel at Vienna, Herwigh at Würzburg, Ladrone at Mainz, Jacobi at Freiburg, and by others at Ingolstadt after the expulsion of the Jesuits.[47] A pretty little volume on the First Principles of the Fine Arts[48] was written (1790) for Catholic schools by the notorious Franciscan friar Eulogius Schneider, who, after being unfrocked, terrorised Strasburg in the days of the Convention, and met his end under the guillotine. The frenzied output of these German Æsthetics resembles that of Poetics in Italy in the sixteenth century, after the rise to popularity of Aristotle's treatise. Between 1771 and 1774 the Swiss Sulzer brought out his great æsthetic encyclopædia, The General Theory of the Fine Arts, in alphabetical order, with historical notes upon each article, which were greatly enlarged in the second edition of 1792, edited by a retired Prussian captain, von Blankenburg.[49] In 1799, one J. Roller published a first Sketch of the History of Æsthetic,[50] in which he observes not unjustly, "Patriotic youth will be pleased to recognize that Germany has produced more literature on this subject than any other country."[51]

Eberhard and Eschenburg.

Confining ourselves to bare mention of the works of Riedel (1767), Faber (1767), Schütz (1776-1778), Schubart (1777-1781), Westenrieder (1777), Szerdahel (1779), König (1784), Gang (1785), Meiners (1787), Schott (1789), Moritz (1788),[52] we will select from the crowd the Theory of Fine Arts and Letters (1783) of Johann August Eberhard, successor to Meier in the Chair at Halle,[53] and the Sketch of a Theory and Literature of Letters (1783) by Johann Joachim Eschenburg, one of the most popular books of the day for students.[54] Both these authors are followers of Baumgarten, with inclinations towards sensationalism; amongst other things Eberhard considered the beautiful as "that which pleases the most distinct senses," that is to say, of sight and hearing.

J. G. Sulzer.

A word must be accorded to Sulzer, in whom we find the most curious alternation of new and old, the romantic influence of the new Swiss school and the utilitarianism and intellectualism of his day. He asserts that beauty exists wherever unity, variety and order are found: the work of an artist is strictly in the form, in lively expression (lebhafte Darstellung): the material is irrelevant to art, but the duty of every reasonable and sensible man is to make judicious selection. The beauty which is used to clothe the good as well as the bad is not the ineffable, celestial Beauty, offspring of the alliance between the beautiful, the good and the perfect, which awakens more than mere pleasure, a veritable joy which ravishes and beatifies our soul. Such is the human face when, by filling the eye of the beholder with the pleasure of form arising from the variety, proportion and order of the features, it proceeds to arouse the imagination and intellect by its suggestion of interior perfection; of the same nature is the statue of a great man carved by Phidias, or a patriotic oration by Cicero. If truth lie outside art and belong to philosophy, the most noble use to which art may be put is to make us feel the important truths which lend her strength and energy, not to mention that truth itself enters into art in the shape of truthful imitation or representation. Sulzer also repeats (and he is not the last) that orators, historians and poets are intermediaries between speculative philosophy and the people.[55]

K. H. Heydenreich.

Karl Heinrich Heydenreich returns to a sounder tradition when he defines art (1790) as "a representation of a determinate state of sensibility," and observes that man, as a cognitive being, is impelled to enlarge the sphere of his cognitions and impart his discoveries to his fellows, while as a sensitive being he is impelled to represent and communicate his sensations; whence arise science and art. But Heydenreich does not clearly grasp the cognitive character of art; for in his opinion sensations become objects of artistic representation either because they are pleasing or, when not pleasing, because they are useful to further the moral aims of man as a social being; the objects of sensibility which enter into art must be possessed of intrinsic excellence and value and bear reference not to a single individual but to the individual as a rational being: hence the objectivity and necessity of taste. Like Baumgarten and Meier, he divides Æsthetic into three parts: a doctrine of inventio, another of methodica, a third of the ars significandi.[56]

J. G. Herder.

Another disciple of Baumgarten is J. G. Herder, who had an unbounded admiration for the old Berlin master, whom he calls "the Aristotle of his day," and defends him warmly against those who think fit to describe him as a "stupid and obtuse syllogizer" (1769). On the other hand he had slight esteem for subsequent Æsthetic, for example Meier's work, which he stigmatized accurately enough as "in part a re-mastication of Logic, in part a patchwork of metaphorical terms, comparisons and examples." "O Æsthetic!" he cries with emphasis, "O Æsthetic! the most fertile, the most beautiful and by far the most novel of all abstract sciences, in what cavern of the Muses is sleeping the youth of my philosophic nation destined to bring thee to perfection?"[57] He denied Baumgarten's claim to have established an Ars pulchre cogitandi instead of limiting himself to a simple Scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice cogitans, and ridiculed the scruple which held Æsthetic to be unworthy of the dignity of Philosophy.[58] To compensate for this, however, he accepted the fundamental definition cf poetry as oratio sensitiva perfecta: gem of definitions (says he), the best that has ever been invented, that penetrates to the heart of the matter, touches the true poetic principles and opens the most extended view over the entire philosophy of the beautiful, "coupling poetry with her sisters, the fine arts."[59] Like Cesarotti the Italian, but with much less vivacity and brilliance, Herder the German had studied primitive poetry, Ossian and the songs of ancient peoples, Shakespeare (1773), popular love-songs (1778), the spirit of Hebrew poetry (1782), and oriental poetry; these studies powerfully impressed upon his mind the sensitive nature of poetry. His friend Hamann (1762) had written these memorable words, which read like an extract from one of Vico's aphorisms: "Poetry is the mother-tongue of mankind: in the same way that the garden is older than the ploughed field, painting than writing, song than declamation, barter than trade. The repose of our most ancient progenitors was a slumber deeper than ours; their motion a tumultuous dance. They spent seven days in the silence of thought or of stupor; and opened their mouths to pronounce winged words. Their speech was sensation and passion, and they understood nothing but images. Of images is composed all the treasure of human knowledge and felicity."[60] Although Herder, who knew and admired Vico,[61] does not mention him by name when treating of language and poetry, one might suppose him to be influenced by the great Neapolitan at least in the final consolidation of his theories; but, on the contrary, the authors whom he chiefly quotes in this connexion are Du Bos, Goguet and Condillac, and observes "the first beginnings of human speech in tone, gesture, expression of sensations and thoughts by means of images and signs, can only have been a kind of crude poetry, and so it is among every savage nation in the world." Not a speech with punctuation and a sense of syllable, like ours, learning as we do to read and write, but an unsyllabled melody which gave birth to the primitive epic. "Natural man depicts what he sees and as he sees it, alive, powerful, monstrous; in order or disorder, as he sees and hears, so he reproduces. Not alone did barbarous tongues thus arrange their images, but Greek and Latin do the same. As the senses offered material, so the poets utilized it; especially in Homer we see how closely nature is followed in images which glow and fade perpetually and inimitably. He describes things and events line by line, scene by scene; and, in the same way, he paints men in their very bodies, actually as they speak and move." Later we distinguish epic from what we call history; because the former "not only describes what has happened but describes the event in its entirety, showing how it occurred in the only possible way, having regard to surrounding circumstance of body and spirit": this is the reason of the more philosophical character of poetry. As for pleasure, no doubt we do find poetry pleasant; but the idea that the poet's motive is merely to excite pleasure cannot be condemned too strongly. "Homer's gods were as essential and indispensable to the poet's world as the forces of motion are to the world of matter. Without the deliberations and activities of Olympus, none of the necessary events which happen on this earth could take place. Homer's magic island in the western sea belongs to the map of his hero's wanderings by the same necessity which placed it on the map of the world: it was necessary to the plan of his poem. It is the same with the severe Dante and his circles of Hell and Heaven." Art is formative: she disciplines, orders and governs the imagination and every faculty of man: not only did she generate history, "but, earlier yet, she created gods and heroes and purified the uncouth imaginations and fables of peoples with their Titans, monsters and Gorgons, reducing to limit and law the riotous imagination of ignorant men which knows no bounds or rule."[62]

Notwithstanding these intuitions, so like those of Vico early in the same century, Herder as a philosopher is inferior to his Italian predecessor, and in point of fact does not rise superior to Baumgarten. By application of Leibniz' law of continuity, he too arrived at the opinion that the pleasing, the true, the beautiful and the good are degrees of one single activity. For instance, sensible pleasure" is a participation in the true and the good, so far as the senses may comprehend them; the feeling of pleasure and pain is no other than the feeling of the true and the good, that is to say, the consciousness that the aim of our organism, the conservation of our well-being and the avoidance of our hurt, has been attained."[63] Fine arts and letters are all instructive (bildend): hence the terms humaniora, the Greek καλόν, the Latin pulchrum, the gentle arts of days of chivalry, les belles lettres et les beaux arts of the French. A group of them (gymnastic, dance, etc.) educates the body; a second group (painting, plastic, music) educates the nobler senses of man, the eye, the ear, the hand and tongue; a third (poetry) touches the intellect, the imagination and the reason: a fourth group governs human tendencies and inclinations.[64] Herder disapproved of the facile theorists of art who began straight away with a definition of beauty, a complex and involved concept. He held that the theory of fine arts should be subdivided into three theories, each to be built up from the foundations, the theory of sight, of hearing and of touch, that is to say of painting, music and sculpture, i.e. into æsthetical Optics, æsthetical Acoustics and æsthetical Physiology. "Fairly well elaborated in the psychological and subjective aspects, Æsthetic is sadly undeveloped in all that belongs to the object and to the sensation of beauty, without which there can never be a fertile theory of the Beautiful capable of influencing all the arts."[65] Taste is not "a fundamental faculty of the soul but a habitual application of our judgement (intellectual judgement) to objects of beauty"; an acquired facility of the intellect (of which Herder outlines the genesis).[66] The poet is poet not only in his imagination but in his intellect. In 1782 he writes: "The barbarous name Æsthetic of recent invention indicates nothing beyond a section of Logic: that which we call taste is neither more nor less than a quick and rapid judgement which does not exclude truth and profundity, but rather presupposes and promotes them. All didactic poetry is nothing more than philosophy rendered sensible: the fable as exposition of a general doctrine is truth in act, in activity.... When expounded and applied to human affairs, Philosophy is not only a fine art in herself (schöne Wissenschaft,) but the mother of Beauty: it is only through her that Rhetoric and Poetry can ever be educational, useful, or in the truest sense pleasant."[67]

Philosophy of language.

Herder and Hamann deserve our gratitude for having brought a current of fresh air into the study of the philosophy of language. The lead given by the Port-Royal authors had been followed since the beginning of the century by many writers of logical or general grammars. According to the French Encyclopædia, "La grammaire générale est la science raisonnée des principes immuables et généraux de la parole prononcée ou écrite dans toutes les langues,"[68] and d'Alembert spoke of grammarians of invention and grammarians of memory, assigning to the former the duty of studying the metaphysics of grammar.[69] General grammars had been written by Du Marsais, De Beauzée, and Condillac in France; Harris in England; and many others.[70] But what was the relation between general grammar and particular grammars? If logic be one, how comes it that languages are many? Is the variety of tongues but a deviation on their part from one single model? And, if there be no such deviation or error, what is the explanation of the fact? What is language, and how was it born? If language be external to thought, how can thought exist if not in language? "Si les hommes," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "ont eu besoin de la parole pour apprendre à penser, ils ont eu bien plus besoin encore de savoir penser pour trouver l'art de la parole"; appalled at the difficulty, he declares his conviction "de l'impossibilité presque démontrée que les langues aient pu naître et s'établir par des moyens purement humains."[71] Such questions became fashionable; books on the origin and formation of language were written by de Brosses (1765) and Court de Gébelin (1776) in France, by Monboddo (1774) in England, Süssmilch (1766) and Tiedemann in Germany, and Cesarotti (1785) in Italy, and by others who had some slight acquaintance with Vico, but profited little by it.[72] None of the above-named writers was able to free himself of the notion that speech was either natural and mechanical, or else a symbol attached to thought: whereas in fact it was impossible to solve the difficulties under which they were labouring except by dropping the notion of a sign or symbol and attaining the conception of the active and expressive imagination, verbal imagination, language as the expression not of intellect but of intuition. An approach towards this explanation was made by Herder in a brilliant and imaginative thesis in 1770 upon this subject of the origin of language, chosen for discussion by the Berlin Academy. In it he says that language is the reflexion or consciousness (Besonnenheit) of man. "Man shows reflexion when he puts forth freely such force of mind as enables him to make selection from amongst the crowd of sensations by which he is assailed: from the ocean of the senses, so to speak, to select a single wave and consciously to watch it. He shows reflexion when, amidst the thronging chaos of images which pass before him as in a dream, he can in a waking moment collect himself and fasten his attention upon a single image, examine it calmly and clearly, and separate it from its neighbours. Once again, man shows reflexion when he is able not merely to grasp vividly and clearly all the properties of an image, but also to recognize one or more of its distinctive properties." The language of man "does not depend on the organization of the mouth, for even he who is dumb from birth has, if he reflects, a language; it is not a cry of the senses, since it resides in a reflective creature, not in a breathing machine; it is not an affair of imitation, since imitation of nature is a means, and we are here trying to explain the end: much less is it an arbitrary convention; a savage in the depths of the forest would have had to create a language for himself even though he never used it. Language is an understanding of the soul with herself, necessary just in so far as man is man."[73] Here language begins to show itself no longer as purely mechanical or as something derived from arbitrary choice and invention, but as a creative activity and a primary affirmation of the activity of the human mind. Herder's essay may not state such a view unequivocally, but it points forward to such a conclusion in a striking way for which its author has not received the credit he deserves. Hamann, in reviewing his friend's theories, agreed with him in denying the origin of language by invention or arbitrary choice; while dwelling also on the liberty of man, he regarded language as something which man could only have learned by means of a mystical communicatio idiomatum from God.[74] That, too, was one way of recognizing that the mystery of language is not to be solved except by placing it in the forefront of the problem of the spirit.

VII

OTHER ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE SAME PERIOD

Other writers of the eighteenth century: Batteux.

A great medley of heterogeneous ideas is noticeable among other writers on Æsthetic during the same period. In 1746 appeared a little volume by Abbé Batteux bearing the attractive title of The Fine Arts reduced to a Single Principle, in which the author attempted a unification of all the different rules laid down by the writers of treatises. All such rules (says Batteux) are branches emerging from one trunk; he who possesses the simple principle will be able to deduce the rules one by one without entangling himself in their mass, which can but involve him in endless coils. The author had passed in review the Ars Poetica of Horace and that of Boileau, and the works of Rollin, Dacier, le Bossu and d'Aubignac; but had found real help only in Aristotle's principle of imitation, which he thought could be easily and strikingly applied to poetry, painting, music and the art of gesture. But suddenly the Aristotelian principle of imitation yields place to a wholly new rendering, namely the "imitation of natural beauty." The business of art is to "select the most beautiful parts of nature in order to frame them into an exquisite whole which shall be more beautiful than nature's self, without ceasing to be natural." Now, what may this greater perfection, this beautiful nature, be? On one occasion Batteux identifies it with truth: but "with the truth which may be; with beauty-truth, which is represented as though it really existed with all the perfections it could possibly receive," recalling one example from the ancients in the Helen of Zeuxis, and one from the moderns in the Misanthrope of Molière. In another place he explains that beautiful nature, "tum ipsius (obiecti) naturæ, tum nostræ convenit," i.e. that it has the closest connexion with our own perfection, our advantage and our interest, and is, at the same time, perfect in itself. The aim of imitation is "to please, to move, to soften, in one word, to delight"; so beautiful nature must be interesting and furnished with unity, variety, symmetry and proportion. Embarrassed by the question of artistic imitation of things naturally ugly or objectionable, Batteux falls back on saying, as Castelvetro had said before him, that displeasing objects please when imitated, since imitation, being always imperfect, in comparison with the reality, cannot excite the horror and disgust aroused by the latter. From pleasure he deduces the other aim of utility: if the aim of poetry be to give pleasure, and "pleasure by moving the passions, then in order to give a perfect and enduring pleasure it ought to rouse such passions only as it is well to excite, not those inimical to goodness."[1]

The English: W. Hogarth.

It is difficult to string together a more insubstantial mass of contradictions. But Batteux is rivalled and outdone by the English philosophers or rather scribblers on Æsthetic or rather on things in general which sometimes accidentally include æsthetic facts. Happening to find in Lomazzo some words attributed to Michæl Angelo on the beauty of shapes, Hogarth the artist took into his head the idea that the figurative arts can be regulated by a special principle which can be expressed in a particular fine.[2] Filled with this discovery, in 1745 he designed a frontispiece for a volume of his engravings; it depicted a painter's palette scored across with an undulating line and the words The Line of Beauty. Public curiosity was immediately aroused by this hieroglyphic, to be satisfied a little later by the publication of his book The Analysis of Beauty (1753).[3] In this he combated the mistake of judging pictures either by the subject or the excellence of the imitation instead of by their form, which is the true essential of art and is composed "of symmetry, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy and quantity; all things which co-operate in the production of beauty, correcting and restraining each other as required."[4] But immediately afterwards Hogarth proclaims that there must also be correspondence and agreement with the thing copied; for "regularity, uniformity and symmetry give pleasure in so far only as they serve to give the illusion of faithful correspondence."[5] Further on, the reader learns that "amongst the immense variety of undulating lines which may be conceived, there is but one which truly merits the name of the Line of Beauty, and this is a precisely serpentine line which may be called the Line of Grace."[6] Again, we are told that intricacy of lines is beautiful because "the active mind likes to be engaged," and the eye delights in being "guided in a sort of hunt."[7] A straight line has no beauty, and the pig, the bear, the spider and the toad are ugly because devoid of undulating lines.[8] The ancients showed much judgement in the management and grouping of lines, "varying from the precise line of grace only on those occasions when the character or action demanded."[9]

E. Burke.

With similar indecision Edmund Burke wavers between the principle of imitation and other heterogeneous or imaginary principles in his book, An Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756). He observes, "Natural properties contained in an object give pleasure or displeasure to the imagination: beyond this, however, imagination may delight in the likeness of a copy to its original"; he asserts that from "these two reasons" arises the whole pleasure of imagination.[10]

Without dwelling further on the second, he proceeds to a lengthy discussion of the natural qualities which should be found in an object of sensible beauty: "Firstly, comparative smallness; secondly, smooth surface; thirdly, variety in disposition of the parts; fourthly, that it have no angularity, all lines fusing one in another; fifthly, a structure of great delicacy betraying no signs of violence; sixthly, vivid colouring without glare or harshness; seventhly, if it have any glaring colour, let it be different from the background." These are the properties of beauty working in harmony with nature and least liable to suffer from caprice and differences of taste.[11]

H. Home.

These books of Hogarth and Burke are generally described as classical; if so, they belong to the type of classic that fails to convince. To a somewhat higher type belongs the Elements of Criticism (1761) of Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, who seeks "the true principles of the fine arts" with the object of converting criticism into "a rational science," and to this end chooses "the upward path of facts and experiments." Home confines himself to feelings derived from objects of sight and hearing, which, in so far as unaccompanied by desires, are more truly described as simple feelings (emotions, not passions). These occupy a middle position between mere sense-impressions and intellectual or moral ideas, and are therefore akin to both; and it is from these that the pleasures of beauty are derived. Beauty is divided into beauty of relation and intrinsic beauty.[12] Of the latter, Home's only account is that regularity, simplicity, uniformity, proportion, order and other pleasing qualities have been "so disposed by the Author of nature in order to increase our happiness here on earth which, as is clearly shown in numberless instances, is not foreign to his care." This notion is confirmed when he reflects that "our taste for such details is not accidental, but uniform and universal, being a very part of our nature"; adding that "regularity, uniformity, order and simplicity help to facilitate perception and make it possible for us to form clearer conception of objects than it would be possible to gain by the most earnest attention were such qualities not present." Proportions are often combined with a view to utility, "as we see that the best proportioned amongst animals are also the strongest; but there are also many examples in which this conjunction does not hold good"; wherefore the wisest plan "is to rest content with the final cause just mentioned: that of the increase of our happiness intended by the Author of nature."[13] In his Essay on Taste (1758) and on Genius (1774) Alexander Gérard employs by turns, according to the various forms of art, the principles of association, of direct pleasure, of expression, and even of moral sense: the same kind of explanation reappears in another Essay on Taste by Alison (1792).

Eclecticism and sensationalism. E. Platner.

It is impossible to classify works of such calibre, almost wholly lacking as they are in scientific method; on each page their writers pass from physiological sensationalism to moralism; from the imitation of nature to mysticism and transcendent finalism without the slightest sense of incongruity. It would be absurd to take them seriously; in comparison it is almost refreshing to come across a frank hedonist in the German, Ernst Plainer, who interpreted Hogarth's inquiry into lines after a fashion of his own and was unable to see anything in æsthetic facts except a reverberation of sexual pleasure. Where can we find a beauty, he asks, that is not derived from the female figure, the centre of all beauty? Undulating lines are beautiful because found in a woman's body; beautiful are all movements distinctively feminine; beautiful the tones of music melting one into another; beautiful the poem where one thought embraces another with tenderness and facility.[14] Condillac's sensationalism had already shown itself wholly incapable of understanding æsthetic productivity; the associationism especially promoted by the work of Hume fared no better.

Fr. Hemsterhuis.

The Dutchman Hemsterhuis considered beauty as a phenomenon born of the meeting between sensibility, which gives multiplicity, and the internal sense, which tends to unity; hence the beautiful is "that which exhibits the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time." Man, to whom it is not permitted to attain ultimate unity, finds in beauty an approximate unity which gives him a pleasure somewhat analogous with the joy of love. This theory of Hemsterhuis, in which elements of mysticism and sensationalism mingle with glimpses of truth, developed later into the sentimentalism of Jacobi, for whom the totality of Truth and Goodness and even the Supersensible itself are sensibly present to the soul in the form of beauty.[15]

Neo-Platonism and mysticism. Winckelmann.

Platonism or, more accurately, neo-Platonism was revived by the creator of the history of figurative art, Winckelmann (1764). Contemplation of the masterpieces of antique plastic art, and the impression of superhuman loftiness and divine indifference which they create all the more irresistibly because we cannot reawaken the life they once possessed or understand their real significance, led Winckelmann, and others with him, to the conception of a Beauty which, descending from the seventh heaven of the divine Idea, embodied itself in works of this description. Baumgarten's follower Mendelssohn had denied the enjoyment of beauty to God: the neo-Platonist Winckelmann gave it back to him and lodged it in his bosom.

Beauty and lack of significance.

"Wise men who have meditated upon the causes of universal Beauty, seeking her amongst created things and trying to gain the contemplation of Supreme Beauty, have placed it in the perfect harmony of creatures with their ends and of their parts with one another. But as this is equivalent to perfection, which man is incapable of attaining, our concept of universal beauty remains indeterminate, and arises by means of particular cognitions which, when accurately collected and fitted together, give us the highest idea we can attain of human beauty, which we elevate in proportion as we raise it above matter. But, again, since the Creator deals out perfection to all his creatures in the proportion that befits them, and since every concept rests on some cause which must be sought outside the concept itself, the cause of Beauty which is to be found in every created thing cannot be sought in anything outside these created things. For this reason, and because our cognitions are comparative concepts, whereas Beauty cannot be compared with anything higher, it is difficult to attain a distinct and universal cognition of Beauty."[16] The only way out of this difficulty and others like it is the recognition that "supreme beauty resides in God": "the concept of human beauty becomes the more perfect in proportion as it can be thought more in conformity and agreement with supreme Being, which is distinguished from matter by its own unity and indivisibility. This conception of Beauty is as a spirit which, freed by fire from the prison of matter, strives to conjure up a creature in the likeness of the first reasonable creature formed by the divine intelligence. The forms of such an image are simple and continuous and within this unity they are varied and for that very reason harmonious."[17] 2 To these characteristics is added "lack of significance" (Unbezeichnung), since supreme beauty cannot be described with points or fines different from those which alone can constitute that beauty; its form "is not peculiar to this or that determinate person, neither does it express any state of feeling or sensation of passion, things which disturb unity and overcloud beauty." Winckelmann concludes: "We look upon Beauty as a purest water drawn from the centre of the spring; the less taste it has the higher it is esteemed because free from all impurities."[18]

To perceive pure beauty, a special faculty is required, which certainly is not sense, but may perhaps be intellect or even, as Winckelmann says, "a fine internal sense" free from all intentions or passions of instinct, inclination or pleasure. Having asserted beauty to be something supersensible, it is not surprising that Winckelmann should wish, if not wholly to exclude colour, at least to reduce it to a minimum, and treat it not as a constitutive element in beauty but as secondary and ancillary.[19] True beauty is given in form: by which he means line and surface, forgetting that these are only apprehended by the senses, and could not be seen without being in some way coloured.

Winckelmann's contradictions and compromises.

When error refuses to retire, hermit-like, to the narrow cell of a brief aphorism, it finds itself condemned to self-contradiction in order to live at all in the world of concrete facts and problems. Although composed with a view to stating a theory, the work of Winckelmann always led him among concrete historical facts clamouring to be brought into relation with his formally stated idea of supreme beauty. In his admission of line-drawing and his further admission, on a lower plane, of colour, we have two compromises already; to which a third is added in his principle of Expression. "Since human nature has no state intermediate between pain and pleasure" and as living creature without such feelings is inconceivable, "the human figure must be represented in a condition of action and passion, which artists call expression." Hence Winckelmann, after dealing with Beauty, goes on to treat of Expression.[20] He then found himself obliged to effect a fourth compromise between the single constant supreme beauty and individual beauties; for while he preferred the male to the female body as a completer embodiment of perfect beauty, he could not shut his eyes to the obvious fact that we know and admire beautiful women's bodies and even beautiful animals' bodies.

A. R. Mengs.

Friend and, in a sense, collaborator of Winckelmann was Raphæl Mengs the artist, no less eager than his archæological fellow-countryman to understand the nature of that beauty which the one studied as a critic while the other produced it as a painter. Remarking, writes Mengs, that of the two chief duties of a painter, the imitation of appearances and the selection of the most beautiful objects, much has been written on the former, while the latter "has scarcely been touched by the modems, who would have been ignorant of the art of drawing were it not for the statues of ancient Greece";[21] pondering this, "I read, asked and looked at everything likely to throw light on the subject, but never was I satisfied; either they spoke of beautiful things or of qualities which are the attributes of beauty, or they pretended to explain, as the saying is, the obscure by the more obscure, or even confused the beautiful with the pleasing: so that finally I determined to search for the nature of beauty on my own account."[22] One of his works on this subject was published during his lifetime by the advice and assistance of Winckelmann (1761); many others appeared posthumously (1780), all were reprinted several times and translated into several languages. In his Dreams of Beauty he says, "I have been sailing a long time on a vast sea seeking the understanding of beauty, and still I am far from any shore and in great doubt how to shape my course: gazing around, my sight is confounded by the immensity of the subject."[23] In truth it seems as though Mengs never arrived at a formula satisfactory to himself, although he conformed more or less to Winckelmann's doctrine that "beauty consists in material perfection according to our ideas; and since God alone is perfect, beauty is divine"; it is the "visible idea of perfection" and stands in the same relation to it as does a visible to a mathematical point. Our ideas proceed from the purposes which the Creator has willed to fulfil in various things; hence the multiplicity of beauties. In general, Mengs finds the types of things in natural species: e.g. "a stone, of which we have the idea that it should be uniform in colour"; which" is called ugly if it happen to be spotted"; or a child "would be ugly if he were like a man of mature age, just as a man is ugly when shaped like a woman, and a woman when she is like a man." He adds surprisingly, "As among stones there is but one perfect species, the diamond; among metals, gold; and among animated creatures, man only; so there is difference and distinction in every order, and very rarely is there perfection."[24] In his Dreams of Beauty he considers beauty as "a middle disposition, including perfection on the one hand and the pleasing on the other"; in reality it is a third thing, differing from perfection and the pleasing, and deserving a special name for itself.[25] The art of painting arises from four sources: beauty, significant or expressive character, the pleasing united to harmony, and colouring. Mengs finds the first amongst the ancients, the second in Raphæl, the third in Correggio and the fourth in Titian.[26] From this empirical studio-gossip he rouses himself to exclaim, "The force of beauty so transports me that I will tell thee, reader, what I feel. All nature is beautiful, and so is virtue; beautiful are forms and proportions; beautiful are appearances and beautiful the causes thereof; more beautiful is reason, most beautiful of all is the great first cause."[27]

G. E. Lessing.

An attenuated, that is to say, a less metaphysical, echo of Winckelmann's theory is found in Lessing (1766), who infused a new spirit into the literature and social life of the Germany of his time. According to Lessing the aim of art is "delight"; and since delight is a "superfluous thing" it seems reasonable that the legislator should not allow to art that liberty which is indispensable to science in her search for truth, the soul's necessity. For the Greeks painting was what by its nature it ought to be, "the imitation of beautiful bodies." "Its (Hellenic) cultivator represented nothing but the beautiful: common beauty of a low grade served him as an accidental subject, an exercise, a diversion. The attractiveness of his work must depend simply and solely on the perfection of his subject: he was far too true an artist to wish his audience to content itself with the barren pleasure arising from mere resemblance or from the inspection of skilful workmanship: nothing in his art was dearer to him, nothing seemed more noble, than the end at which it aimed."[28] Pictorial representation must exclude everything unpleasing or ugly; "painting as imitation may express ugliness: painting as a fine art will refuse to do so: all visible objects belong to art taken under the former title: the latter may claim only such objects as awaken pleasing sensations." If, on the contrary, ugliness may be represented by the poet, the reason is this: poetic description "conveys a less displeasing sense of bodily malformation which, in the end, almost loses its character as such; unable to use it for itself, the poet uses it as a means to provoke certain mixed feelings (the ridiculous, the terrible), in which we are content to remain, in the absence of any purely pleasant feelings."[29] In his Dramaturgie (1767) Lessing takes his stand upon the Aristotelian Poetics: it is well known that not only did he approve of rules in general but he believed those laid down by Aristotle to be as incontrovertible as the theorems of Euclid. His polemic against French writers and critics is waged in the name of probability, not to be confounded with historical accuracy. He understood the universal as a sort of average of what appears in individuals, and catharsis as a conversion of passions into virtuous dispositions, asserting it as beyond doubt that the aim of all poetry is to inspire a love for virtue.[30] He follows the example of Winckelmann in introducing the concept of ideal beauty into the doctrine of figurative art: "expression of corporeal beauty is the aim of painting: therefore supreme beauty of body is the supreme aim of art. But this supreme beauty of body is found in man only, and for him it exists only through the ideal. This ideal may be found among the brute creation in inferior degree; but is entirely absent from vegetable or inanimate nature." Landscape and flower painters are not really artists because "they imitate beauties possessed of no ideal: whereby they work by eye and hand alone, genius having little or no part in their compositions." Nevertheless, Lessing prefers a landscape painter to "the painter of historic pieces who, instead of making beauty his aim, merely depicts a crowd in order to show his cunning in simple expression, not in expression subordinate to beauty."[31] The ideal of bodily beauty then consists "chiefly in the ideal of form, but also in that of texture of the flesh, and in that of permanent expression. Mere colouring and transitory expression have no ideal since nature herself has placed no indelible seal upon them."[32] At the bottom of his heart Lessing dislikes colour; and when he finds the pen-sketches of painters showing "a life, a freedom, a brilliancy never to be found in their painted pictures," he asks himself "whether the most marvellous colouring can compensate so heavy a loss," and whether it is not to be wished "that painting in oils had never been invented"?[33]

Theorists of ideal beauty.

Ideal beauty, that curious alliance between God and the subtle outline traced with pen or graver, that cold academical mysticism, came into fashion. In Italy (the home of Winckelmann and Mengs, who published many of their works in Italian) it was much discussed by artists, antiquaries and connoisseurs. The architect Francesco Milizia professed himself a follower of "the principles of Sulzer and Mengs";[34] the Spaniard d'Azara, living in Italy, edited and annotated Mengs, adding his own definition of beauty: "The union of the perfect and the pleasing made visible";[35] another Spaniard, Arteaga, one of the many Jesuit refugees in Italy, wrote a treatise on Ideal Beauty (1789);[36] the Englishman Daniel Webb on coming to Rome and making the acquaintance of Mengs seized upon the ideas he heard him express on beauty, collected them and actually published them in a book anticipating Mengs' own.[37]

G. Spalletti and the characteristic.

The first voice of dissent from this doctrine of ideal beauty was raised in 1764 by a small circle of Italians who asserted the characteristic to be the principle of art. As such appears to be the necessary interpretation of the little Essay on Beauty written by Guiseppe Spalletti in the form of a letter to Mengs, with whom Spalletti had discussed the subject "in the solitudes of Grottaferrata," and who had urged him to put all his thoughts in writing.[38] Its polemical character, though not openly asserted, is discernible in every page. "Truth in general, conscientiously rendered by the artist, is the object of Beauty in general. When the soul finds those characteristics which wholly converge upon the matter which the work of art claims to represent, it judges that work beautiful. The same is true of the works of nature: if the soul perceives a man of fine proportions having the face of a lovely woman, which causes it to doubt whether the object before it be man or woman, it esteems that man ugly rather than the reverse, through deficiency of the characteristic of truth; if this can be said of natural Beauty, how much more can it be said of the Beauty of art." The pleasure given by Beauty is intellectual, that is to say, it is the pleasure of apprehending truth: when confronted by ugly things represented characteristically, man "delights in having increased his cognitions": Beauty, "with its property of supplying to the soul likeness, order, proportion, harmony and variety, provides it with an immense field for the construction of innumerable syllogisms, and by reasoning in this manner it will take pleasure in itself, in the object which arouses such pleasure, and in the feeling of its own perfection." Finally, the beautiful may be defined as "the inherent modification of the object under observation which presents it in the inevitably characteristic manner in which it is bound to appear."[39] In contrast to the fallacious profundity of Winckelmann and Mengs we welcome the sound good sense of this obscure Spalletti, upholder of the Aristotelian position against the revived neo-Platonism of the æstheticians.

Beauty and the characteristic: Hirt, Meyer, Goethe.

Many years went by before a similar rebellion arose in Germany; at length in 1797 the art-historian Ludwig Hirt, basing his case on ancient works of art which depicted all things, even things utterly vulgar and ugly, ventured to deny the view that ideal beauty is the principle of art, and that expression has only a secondary place, above which it must not rise for fear of disturbing ideal beauty. For the ideal he substituted the characteristic, as a principle to be applied equally to gods, heroes or animals. Character is "that individuality by which form, movement, signs, physiognomy and expression, local colour, fight, shade and chiaroscuro are distinguished and represented in the manner demanded by the object."[40] Another historian of art, Heinrich Meyer, who started from the position of Winckelmann and went on by adopting a series of compromises, finally asserting an ideal of trees and landscape side by side with the ideal of man and various other animals, tried to find an intermediate position between this doctrine and Hirt's, in the course of controversy with the latter. And Wolfgang von Goethe, forgetful of his youthful days when he chanted the praises of Gothic architecture, returning home from an Italian tour impregnated with Greece and Rome in 1798, also sought a middle term between Beauty and Expression; dwelling on the thought of certain characteristic contents which should supply the artist with forms of beauty to be by him remodelled and developed into complete beauty. The characteristic was thus the mere point of departure, and beauty was simply the result of the artist's elaboration: "we must start from the characteristic" (says he) "in order to attain the beautiful."[41]

VIII

IMMANUEL KANT

I. Kant.

Of all these writers, Winckelmann and Mengs, Home and Hogarth, Lessing and Goethe, none was a philosopher in the true sense of the word: not even those who like Meier laid claim to the title, nor those who had some gifts for philosophy like Herder or Hamann. After Vico, the next European mind of real speculative genius is Immanuel Kant, who now comes before us in his turn.

Kant and Vico.

That Kant took up the problem of philosophy where Vico laid it down (not, of course, in a directly historical, but in an ideal, sense) has already been noted by others.[1] How far he made an advance upon his predecessor and how far he failed to reach the same level it is not here our business to inquire; we must confine ourselves strictly to the consideration of Æsthetic questions.

Summarizing the results of such a consideration, we may say at once that though Kant holds an immensely important place in the development of German thought; though the book containing his examination of æsthetic facts is among his most influential works; and though in histories of Æsthetic written from the German point of view, which ignore practically the whole development of European thought from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Kant can pose as the man who discovered the problem of Æsthetic or solved it or brought it within sight of solution; yet in an unprejudiced and complete history whose aim is to take broad views and to consider not the popularity of a book or the historical importance of a nation but the intrinsic value of ideas, the judgement passed on Kant must be very different. Like Vico in the serious tenacity with which he reflected upon æsthetic facts, more fortunate than he in having a much larger stock of material gathered from preceding discussion and argument, Kant was at once unlike and less successful than Vico in that he was unable to attain a doctrine substantially true, and unable also to give his thoughts the necessary system and unity.

Identity of the concept of art in Kant and Baumgarten.

In fact, what was Kant's idea of art? Strange as our reply may seem to those who recollect the explicit and insistent war waged by him against the school of Wolff, and the concept of beauty as a perfection confusedly perceived, we must assert that Kant's idea of art was fundamentally the same as that of Baumgarten and the Wolffian school.[2] In that school his mind had been trained; he always had a great respect for Baumgarten whom in the Critique of Pure Reason he calls "that excellent analyst"; he chose the text of Baumgarten for two of his University lectures on Metaphysics, and that of Meier for his lecture on Logic (Vernunftlehre). Kant, like them, therefore considered Logic and Æsthetic (or theory of art) as conjoined sciences. They were thus described by him in his Scheme of Lectures in 1765, when he proposed, while expounding the critique of reason, to "throw a glance at that of taste, that is to say, at Æsthetic, since the rules of one apply to the other and each throws light upon the other."

Kant's "Lectures."

In his University lectures he distinguished æsthetic truth from logical truth in the style of Meier; even citing the example of the beautiful rosy face of a girl which, when seen distinctly, i.e. through a microscope, ceases to be beautiful.[3] It is æsthetically true (said he) that a man once dead cannot come to life again, although this is in opposition to logic and moral truth: it is æsthetically true that the sun plunges into the sea, but it is false logically and objectively. To what degree it is necessary to combine logical truth with æsthetic the learned have never yet been able to decide; not even the greatest æstheticians. In order to become accessible, logical concepts must assume æsthetic forms; a garb to be abandoned only in the rational sciences which seek profundity. Æsthetic certainty is subjective: it is content with authority, i.e. the citation of the opinions of great men. On account of our weakness, for we are strongly attached to the sensible, æsthetic perfection often helps us to render our thoughts distinct. In this, examples and images co-operate; æsthetic perfection is the vehicle for logical perfection; taste is the analogue of intellect. There are logical truths which are not æsthetic truths: and on the other hand we must exclude from abstract philosophy exclamations and other sentimental commotions proper to the other truth. Poetry is a harmonious play of thoughts and sensations. Poetry and eloquence differ in this: in the former, thoughts adapt themselves to sensations; in the latter the contrary is the case. In these lectures Kant sometimes taught that poetry is anterior to eloquence because sensations come before thoughts; and he observed (perhaps under Herder's influence) that the poetry of Eastern peoples, lacking concepts, is wanting in unity and taste although rich in imaginative detail. Poetry formed out of the pure play of sensibility is doubtless a possibility, e.g. love-poems: but true poetry disdains such productions, concerned as they are with sensations which every one knows ought to be expelled from our breasts. True poetry must strive to present virtue and intellectual truth in sensible form, as has been done by Pope in his Essay on Man, in which he attempts to vivify poetry by means of reason. On other occasions Kant definitely says that logical perfection is the basis of every other, æsthetic perfection being merely an adornment of the logical; something of the latter may be omitted in order to appeal to the audience, but it must never be disguised or falsified.[4]

This is Baumgartenism pure and simple; unless we are prepared to look on these Lectures as representing a pre-critical period of thought, or an exoteric doctrine superseded eventually by Kant's own original esoteric ideas in his Critique of the Judgment (1790). Not to open such a controversy, let us put these Lectures on one side (although they often throw no little light on the signification of Kantian phrases and formulæ), and refuse to raise the question what pages of the Critique of the Judgment are derived from Baumgarten and Meier; he who reads the works of these disciples of Wolff and passes immediately to the Critique of Judgment often has the impression that the atmosphere surrounding him is unchanged. But if the Critique of Judgment itself be examined without prejudice it will be seen that Kant always adhered to Baumgarten's conception of art as the sensible and imaginative vesture of an intellectual concept.

Art in the "Critique of Judgment."

According to Kant, art is not pure beauty wholly detached from the concept, it is adherent beauty, which presupposes and attaches itself to a concept.[5] This is the work of genius, the faculty of representing æsthetic ideas. An æsthetic idea is "a representation of the imagination which accompanies a given concept: a representation conjoined with such truthful representation of particulars as to be unable to find for it any expression that may mark a determinate concept, thereby endowing the given concept with something of the ineffable; a feeling which stimulates the cognitive faculties and reinforcing the tongue, which is simply the letter, with the spirit." Genius, then, has two constitutive elements, imagination and intellect; it consists in "that happy disposition, which no science can teach or diligence attain, to find ideas for a given concept and, also, to select the expression by which the subjective commotion it excites as accompaniment to a concept may be communicated to others." No concept is adequate to the æsthetic idea, as no representation of the imagination can ever possibly be adequate to the concept. Examples of æsthetic attributes are found in the eagle of Jupiter with the thunderbolt in its claws, and the peacock of the proud Queen of Heaven: "they do not, like logical attributes, represent that which is contained in our concepts of the sublimity or majesty of creation, but something else which gives occasion to the imagination to run riot over a multitude of kindred representations which make us think more than we can express in a given concept by means of words, and give us an æsthetic idea, which serves to this rational idea instead of a logical representation, precisely with the aim of quickening our feelings by throwing open to them a view over a vast field of kindred representations." There are a modus logicos and a modus æstheticus of expressing our thoughts: the first consists in following determinate principles: the other in the mere feeling of the unity of the representation.[6] To imagination, to intellect and to spirit (Geist) we must add taste, the link between imagination and intellect.[7] Art may therefore represent natural ugliness: artistic beauty "is not a beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing": although the representation of ugliness has limits varying with the individual arts (a reminiscence of Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit at the disgusting and nauseating, which kill representation itself.[8] In natural things, too, there is adherent beauty which cannot be judged by the æsthetic judgement alone but demands a concept. Nature thus appears as a work of art, though superhuman art: "the teleological judgement is the basis and condition of the æsthetic." When we say "this is a beautiful woman," we merely mean that "nature beautifully represents in the form of this woman her purpose in the construction of the female body": it is necessary therefore, besides noting simple form, to aim at a concept, "so that the object may be apprehended through an æsthetic judgement logically conditioned."[9] By this means is formed the ideal of beauty in the human face, the expression of moral life.[10] Kant admits that there may also be artistic productions without a concept, comparable with the free beauties of nature, flowers and some birds (parrot, humming-bird, bird of paradise, etc.): ornamental drawings, cornice-mouldings, musical fantasies without words, represent nothing, no object reducible to a determined concept, and must be reckoned among free beauties.[11] But does not this necessitate their exclusion from true and proper art, from the operation of genius in which fancy and intellect must both, according to Kant, have a place?

Imagination in Kant's system.

This is Baumgartenism transposed into a higher key, more concentrated, more elaborated, more suggestive, until from moment to moment it seems about to burst into a wholly different conception of art. But it is still Baumgartenism, from whose intellectualistic bonds it never escapes. Nor was escape possible. A profound concept of imagination was entirely lacking to Kant's system and his philosophy of the spirit. Glancing over the table of faculties of the spirit which precedes his Critique of Judgment, we see that Kant co-ordinates with it the cognitive faculty, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the appetitive faculty; to the first corresponds intellect, to the second, judgement (teleological and æsthetic), to the third, reason;[12] he finds no place for imagination amongst powers of the spirit but places it among the facts of sensation. He knows a reproductive imagination and an associative, but he knows nothing of a genuinely productive imagination, imagination in the proper sense.[13] We have seen that, in his doctrine, genius is the co-operation of several faculties.

The forms of intuition and the Transcendental Æsthetic.

Yet sometimes Kant had an inkling that intellectual activity is preceded by something which is not mere sensational material, but is an independent non-intellectual theoretical form. He obtained a glimpse of this latter form not when he was reflecting on art in the strict sense but when he was examining the process of knowledge: he does not treat of it in his Critique of Judgment, but in the first section of his Critique of Pure Reason, in the first part of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. He says here that sensations only enter the spirit when the latter itself gives them form; a form not identical with that which intellect gives to sensations, but much simpler, namely pure intuition, the totality of the a priori principles of sensibility. There must therefore be "a science which forms the first part of the transcendental doctrine of elements, distinct from that which contains the principles of pure thought and is named transcendental Logic." Now, what name does Kant confer upon this science whose existence he has deduced? None other than Transcendental Æsthetic (die transcendentale Ästhetik). In a note he even insists that this is the right name for the new science of which he treats, and censures the Germans for their habit of applying it to the Critique of Taste, which, as he thought at that time, could never become a science. Thus, he concludes, we approach more closely to the usage of the ancients, among whom the distinction between αἰσθητὰ καὶ νοητά[14] was well known.

Nevertheless, after having so rightly postulated the necessity for a science of the forms of sensation or pure intuition, purely intuitive knowledge, Kant went on, simply because he had no exact idea of the nature of the æsthetic faculty and of art, to fall into an intellectualistic error by reducing the form of sensibility or pure intuition into the two categories or functions of space and time, and by asserting that the spirit emerges from the chaos of sensation by organizing its sensations in space and time.[15] But space and time as such are very far from being primitive categories; they are relatively late and complex formations.[16] As examples of the matter of sensation Kant quoted hardness, impenetrability, colour and so forth. But the mind only recognizes colour and hardness in so far as it has already given form to its sensations; considered as brute matter, sensations fall outside the cognitive spirit, they are a limit; colour, hardness, impenetrability and so on, when recognized, are already intuitions, spiritual elaborations, the æsthetic activity in its rudimentary manifestation. The characterizing or qualifying imagination which is æsthetic activity ought to have occupied in the Critique of Pure Reason the pages devoted to the discussion of space and time, and would thus have constituted a real Transcendental Æsthetic, a real prologue to the transcendental Logic. In this manner Kant would have achieved the truth aimed at by Leibniz and Baumgarten and would have joined hands with Vico.

Theory of Beauty distinguished by Kant from that of Art.

His repeatedly announced opposition to the school of Wolff concerns not the concept of art but that of Beauty; two concepts for Kant entirely distinct. First of all, he did not admit that sensation could be called "confused knowledge," a confused form, that is, of intellectual cognition; rightly judging this to be a false account of sensibility, since a concept, however confused, is always a concept or a rough sketch of a concept, never an intuition.[17] But he further denied that pure beauty contained a concept, and therefore denied that it was a perfection sensibly apprehended. These reflexions have no doubt some connexion with those concerning the nature of art in the Critique of Judgment; but the connexion is far from close, still less are they actually fused into a single whole. That Kant was minutely familiar with eighteenth-century writers who had discussed beauty and taste is shown by his Lectures, wherein they are all quoted and used.[18] Of these the greater part, especially the English, were sensationalists, others intellectualists; some few, as we have noted, were inclined towards mysticism. Kant began by tending towards sensationalism in æsthetic problems, then became the adversary of sensationalists and intellectualists alike. This development can be traced in his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, as well as in his Lectures; its final expression is reached in the Critique of Judgment.

Of the four moments, as he calls them, i.e. the four determinations, he accords to Beauty, the two negative are directed, one against the sensationalists, the other against the intellectualists. "That is beautiful which pleases without interest": "That is beautiful which pleases without concepts."[19] Here he asserts the existence of a spiritual region, distinct on one side from the pleasurable, the useful and the good, and on the other from truth. But this region, as we know very well, is not that of art, which Kant attaches to the concept: it is the region of a special activity of feeling which he calls judgement or, more exactly, æsthetic judgement.

Mystical features in Kant's theory of Beauty.

The other two moments give some kind of a definition of this region: "That is beautiful which has the form of finality without the representation of an end": "That is beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure."[20] What is this mysterious sphere? What this disinterested pleasure we experience in pure colours and tones, in flowers, and even in adherent beauty when we make abstraction from the concept to which it adheres?

Our answer is: there is no such sphere; it does not exist; the examples given are instances either of pleasure in general or of facts of artistic expression. Kant, who so emphatically criticizes the sensationalists and the intellectualists, does not show the same severity towards the neo-Platonic line of thought whose revival we remarked in the eighteenth century. Winckelmann in particular exercised strong influence over his mind. In one course of his Lectures we find him making a curious distinction between form and matter: in music melody is matter and harmony form: in a flower the scent is material and the shape (Gestalt) is form (Form).[21] This reappears slightly modified in the Critique of Judgment. "In painting, statuary and all the figurative arts in architecture and gardening, so far as they are fine arts, the drawing is the essential; in which the foundation of taste lies not in what gratifies (vergnügt) in sensation, but in that which pleases (gefällt) by its form. The colours which illuminate the drawing belong to sensuous stimulus (Reiz) and may bring the object more vividly before the senses, but do not render it worthy of contemplation as a thing of beauty; they are, moreover, often limited by the exigencies of the beautiful form, and even where their sensuous stimulus is legitimate, they are ennobled only by the beautiful form."[22] Continuing in pursuit of this phantasm of beauty which is not the beauty of art nor yet the pleasing, and is equally detached from expressiveness and pleasure, Kant loses himself in insoluble contradictions. Little inclined to submit himself to the charm of imagination, abhorring "poetic philosophers" like Herder,[23] he makes statements and refuses to commit himself to them, affirms and immediately criticizes his affirmations, and wraps up Beauty in a mystery which, at bottom, was nothing more than his own individual incertitude and inability to see clearly the existence of an activity of feeling which, in the spirit of his sane philosophy, represented a logical contradiction. "Necessary and universal pleasure" and "finality without the idea of an end" are the organized expression in words of this contradiction.

By way of clearing up the contradiction he arrives at the following thought: "The judgement of taste is founded on a concept (the concept of a general foundation of the subjective teleology of nature through judgement); but it is a concept by which it is impossible to know or demonstrate anything of the object, because the object in itself is indeterminable and unsuited to cognition; on the other hand, it has validity for every one (for every one, I say, in so far as it is an individual judgement, immediately accompanying intuition), since its determining reason reposes, perhaps, in the concept of that which may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of mankind." Beauty, then, is a symbol of morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is the indeterminate idea of the supersensible in us, can be considered the only key able to unlock this faculty springing from a source we cannot fathom: excepting by its aid, no comprehension of it can possibly be reached."[24] These cautious words, and all others here used by Kant to conceal his thoughts, do not hide his tendency to mysticism. A mysticism without conviction or enthusiasm, almost in spite of himself, but very evident nevertheless. His inadequate grasp of the æsthetic activity led him to see double, even triple, and caused the unnecessary multiplication of his explanatory principles. Although he was always ignorant of the genuine nature of the æsthetic activity, he was indebted to it for suggesting to him the pure categories of space and time as the Transcendental Æsthetic; it caused him to develop the theory of imaginative embellishment of intellectual concepts by the work of genius; finally it forced him to acknowledge a mysterious faculty of feeling, midway between theoretical and practical activity, cognitive and yet not cognitive, moral and indifferent to morality, pleasing yet wholly detached from the pleasure of the senses. Great use of this power was made by Kant's immediate successors in Germany who were delighted to find their daring speculations supported by that severe critic of experience, the philosopher of Königsberg.

IX

THE ÆSTHETIC OF IDEALISM: SCHILLER, SCHELLING, SOLGER, HEGEL

The "Critique of Judgment" and metaphysical idealism.

It is well known that Schelling held the Critique of Judgment to be the most important of the three Kantian Critiques, and that Hegel together with the great majority of the followers of metaphysical idealism had a special affection for the book. According to them the third Critique was the attempt to bridge the gulf, to resolve the antitheses between liberty and necessity, teleology and mechanism, spirit and nature: it was the correction Kant was preparing for himself, the concrete vision which dispelled the last traces of his abstract subjectivism.

F. Schiller.

The same admiration and an opinion even more favourable were extended by them to Friedrich Schiller, the first to elaborate that part of Kant's philosophy and to study the third sphere which united sensibility to reason. "It was the artistic sense dwelling in his also profoundly philosophical mind," says Hegel, "which, against the abstract infinity of Kant's thought, against his living for duty, against his conception of nature and reality, and of sense and feeling as utterly hostile to intellect, asserted the necessity and enunciated the principle of totality and reconciliation, even before it had been recognized by professed philosophers: to Schiller must be allowed the great merit of having been the first to oppose the subjectivity of Kant, and of having dared try to go beyond it."[1]

Relations between Schiller and Kant.

Discussion has raged around the true relation between Schiller and Kant, and it has lately been maintained that his Æsthetic was not, as would seem to be the case, derived from Kant, but from the pandynamism which, starting from Leibniz, had propagated itself in Germany through Creuzens, Ploucket and Reimarus down to Herder, who had conceived a wholly animated nature.[2] There can be no doubt that Schiller shared Herder's conception, as may be seen from the theosophical tone of the fragment of correspondence between Julius and Raphæl and in other writings. It cannot be denied, however, that whatever personal feelings Kant may have had towards Herder, or Herder towards his former teacher (against whose Critique of Judgment he published his Kaligone, as he had replied to the Critique of Pure Reason with his Metacritica), when Kant in a somewhat dubious manner made the first step towards a reconciliation, the breach was at all events partially healed. The dispute is therefore of small importance: we shall find it more useful to observe that Schiller introduced an important correction of Kant's views when he obliterated every trace of the double theory of art and the beautiful, giving no weight to the distinction drawn between pure and adherent beauty, and finally abandoning the mechanical conception of art as consisting in beauty joined to the intellectual concept. It was certainly his own experience of active artistic work that led him to this simplification.

The æsthetic sphere as the sphere of Play.

Schiller defined the æsthetic sphere as the sphere of play (Spiel); the unfortunate term, suggested to him partly by some phrases of Kant, partly, perhaps, by an article on card-games by one Weisshuhn which he published in his review The Hours (Die Horen),[3] has given rise to the belief that he anticipated certain modern doctrines of artistic activity as the overflow of exuberant spirits, analogous with the play of children and animals. Schiller did not fail to warn his readers against such a mistaken interpretation (to which, however, he lent himself) when he begged them not to think of "games in real life, which are usually concerned with wholly material things," nor yet of the idle dreaming of the imagination left to itself.[4] The activity of the play of which he treated held the mean between the material activity of the senses, of nature, of animal instinct or passion as it is called, and the formal activity of intellect and morality. The man who plays, i.e. contemplates nature æsthetically and produces art, sees all natural objects as animated; in such a phantasmagoria mere natural necessity gives place to the free determination of the faculties; spirit appears as spontaneously reconciled with nature, form with matter. Beauty is life, the living form (lebende Gestalt); not life in the physiological sense, since beauty does not extend throughout all physiological life, nor is it restricted to that alone: marble when worked by an artist may have a living form; and a man, although possessed of life and form, need not be a living form.[5] Wherefore art must conquer nature with form: "in an artistic work of true beauty the content ought to be nil, the form everything: by form man is influenced in his entirety; by content in his separate faculties only. The true secret of great artists is that they cancel matter through form (den Stoff durch die Form vertilgt); the more imposing, overwhelming or seductive the matter is in itself, the greater its obstinacy in striving to emphasize its own particular effect, the more the spectator inclines to lose himself immediately in the matter, so much the more triumphant is the art which brings it into subjection and enforces its own sovereign power. The mind of hearer or spectator should remain perfectly free and calm; from the magic circle of art it should issue as pure and perfect as when it left the hands of the Creator. The most frivolous object should be treated in such a manner as to enable us to pass at once to the most serious matters; and the most serious in such a way that we may pass from them to the lightest game." There is a fine art of passion; a passionate fine art would be a contradiction in terms.[6] "So long as man in his early physical state passively absorbs the world of senses and simply feels it, he is one with it; and precisely because he merely is a world there is for him as yet no world at all. Only when in his æsthetic state he places the world outside himself and contemplates it, does he detach his personality from the rest; then a world appears to him, since he is no longer one with the world."[7]

Æsthetic education.

Schiller ascribed high educational value to art thus conceived as at once sensible and rational, material and formal. Not that it teaches moral precepts or excites to good actions; if it acted thus, or when it acted thus, it would at once cease, as we have seen, to be art. Determination in whatsoever direction, to the good or the bad, to pleasure or to duty, destroys the character of the æsthetic sphere, which is rather indeterminism. By means of art man frees himself from the yoke of the senses; but before putting himself spontaneously under that of reason and duty, he takes as it were a little breathing-space by staying in a region of indifference and serene contemplation. "While having no claim to promote exclusively any special human faculty, the æsthetic condition is favourable to each and all without favouritism; and the reason why it favours none in particular is that it is the foundation of the possibility of all alike. Every other exercise gives some inclination to the soul, and therefore presupposes a special limit; æsthetic activity alone is unlimited." This indifference, which if not yet pure form is not pure matter, confers its educational value on art; it opens a way to morality, not by preaching and persuading, that is to say, determining, but by making determination possible. Such is the fundamental concept of his celebrated Letters on the Æsthetic Education of Man (1795), in which Schiller took his cue from the conditions of his times and from the necessity of finding a middle way between supine acquiescence in tyranny and savage rebellion as exemplified by the revolution then raging in France.

Vagueness and lack of precision in Schiller's Æsthetic.

The defects of Schiller's æsthetic doctrine are its lack of precision and its generality. Who has given a better description of certain aspects of art, the catharsis produced by artistic activity, the serenity and calm resulting from the domination over natural impressions? Equally just is his remark that art, although wholly independent of morality, is in some way connected with it. But what precisely this connexion may be, or what the exact nature of æsthetic activity, Schiller does not succeed in explaining. Conceiving the moral and intellectual as the only formal activities (Formtrieb) and denying as a convinced anti-sensationalist in opposition to Burke and philosophers of his type that art can belong to the passionate and sensuous nature (Stofftrieb), he cut himself off from the means of recognizing the general category to which artistic activity belongs. His own concept of the formal is too narrow: too narrow, also, his concept of the cognitive activity, in which he is able to see the logical or intellectual form, but not that of the imagination. What for him was this art he describes as an activity neither formal nor material, neither cognitive nor moral? Was it for him, as for Kant, an activity of feeling, a play of several faculties at once? It would seem so, since Schiller distinguishes four points of view or relations of man with things: the physical, in which these affect our senses: the logical, in which they excite knowledge: the moral, in which they appear to us as an object of rational volition: and the æsthetic "in which they refer to our powers in entirety without becoming the determinate object of any one faculty." For example, a man is pleased æsthetically when his feeling depends in no way on the pleasure of the senses and when he is not conscious of thinking about any law or end.[8] We look in vain for any more conclusive reply.

It must not be overlooked that Schiller delivered a course of lectures on Æsthetic in Jena University in 1792, and that his writings on the subject intended for reviews were couched in a popular style: no less popular, in his own opinion, was the style of the book quoted above, which grew out of a series of letters actually sent to his patron the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg. But the great work to be entitled Rallias, which he intended writing upon Æsthetic, was never completed; the only fragments which have reached us are contained in the correspondence with Körner (1793-1794). From the discussions between the two friends we gather that Körner was not satisfied with Schiller's formula and desired something objective, something more precise, a positive characteristic of the beautiful: and one day Schiller told him that he had definitely discovered such a characteristic. But what it was that he had discovered we do not know; no mention of it occurs in any further document, and we are left in doubt as to whether we have lost an integral part of his thought or merely the momentary illusion of a discovery.

Schiller's caution and the rashness of the Romanticists.

The uncertainty and vagueness of Schiller's theory seem almost a merit in contrast with that which followed. He had constituted himself guardian of the teaching of Kant and refused to abandon the realm of criticism; faithful disciple of his master, he conceived the third sphere not as real but as an ideal, a concept not constitutive but regulative, an imperative. "From transcendental motives, reason here demands that communion be established between formal and material activity; that is to say, there must be an activity of play, since the concept of humanity can be complete only by the union of reality with form, the accidental with the necessary, passivity with liberty. This demand must be made because reason, in conformity with her essence, aims at perfection and at sweeping away all obstacles; and every exclusive operation of one or other activity leaves humanity incomplete and confined within limits."[9] Schiller's thought, as it appears in his correspondence with Körner, has been well represented as follows:" The union of sensibility with liberty in the Beautiful, which does not actually take place but is supposed to do so, suggests to man an intuition of the union of these elements within himself: a union which does not take place actually but ought to do so."[10] The times which followed had no such nice scruples. Kant had given new vigour to the production of works on æsthetic, and, as in the days following Baumgarten, every new year saw a number of new treatises. It was the fashion. "Nothing swarms like æstheticians" (wrote Jean Paul Richter in 1804 when preparing his own book on the subject for publication): "it is rare for a youth who has paid his fees for a course of lectures on Æsthetic not to produce a book on some point of the science in the hope that the public may refund him his expenses by buying his book: some there are indeed who pay their professor's fees out of their author's royalties."[11] It was hoped, not unreasonably, that the exploration of the obscure region of æsthetic might throw some light on metaphysics, and the procedure of artists seemed to offer a good example to philosophers seeking to create a world for themselves: so philosophy modelled itself upon art and, as though to render the transition easier, the concept of art was brought as close as possible to that of philosophy. Romanticism, gaining vogue daily, was a renewal or continuation of that "age of genius" in which the youth of Goethe and Schiller had been passed; and as the period of Sturm und Drang had zealously worshipped the genius who breaks all rules and oversteps all limitations, so did Romanticism hail the domination of a faculty called Fancy, or more frequently Imagination, to which were attributed the most diverse characteristics and the most miraculous effects.

Ideas on Art: J. P. Richter.

The Romantic theorists, artists themselves for the most part, abounded in truthful and subtle observations concerning artistic procedure. Jean Paul Richter makes many excellent remarks about productive imagination, which he distinguishes clearly from the reproductive and asserts to be shared by all men as soon as they are able to say "This is beautiful"; for "how could a genius be acclaimed or even tolerated for a single month, not to mention thousands of centuries, by the common herd, if he had not a strong connecting-link of relationship with the herd?" He also describes how imagination is variously divided among individuals: as simple talent, as passive or feminine genius, and in the highest degree as the active or masculine genius, formed by reflexion and instinct, in which "all faculties flourish simultaneously and fancy is no isolated flower, but the goddess Flora herself who, in order to produce new combinations, crosses with each other those blossoms whose conjunction is fertile, and is, so to speak, a faculty full of faculties."[12] This latter sentence betrays a tendency on Richter's part to exaggerate the functions of imagination and to construct upon it a kind of mythology.

Romantic Æsthetic and idealistic Æsthetic.

Contemporary systems of philosophy are partly impregnated with, and partly the source of, such mythologies: the Romantic conception of art may be said to have found its most complete expression in German idealism, where this attained its most coherent and systematic form.

J. G. Fichte.

It did not attain this form with Fichte, the first great pupil of Kant; for though Fichte regarded imagination as the activity which creates the universe, effects the synthesis of the ego and the non-ego, posits the object and therefore precedes consciousness, he does not connect it with art.[13] In his æsthetic notions Fichte is influenced by Schiller, with the addition of a moralism imposed upon him by the general character of his system; hence the ethical sphere, midway between the cognitive and the æsthetic, becomes from his point of view a mere appurtenance of morality, as being the representation of, and hence reverence for, the moral ideal.[14] His subjective idealism eventually produced an æsthetic doctrine through the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck; the doctrine of Irony as the basis of art.