The question, as to whether Aesthetic should be looked upon as ancient
or modern, has often been discussed. The answer will depend upon the
view taken of the nature of Aesthetic.
Benedetto Croce has proved that Aesthetic is _the science of expressive
activity_. But this knowledge cannot be reached, until has been defined
the nature of imagination, of representation, of expression, or whatever
we may term that faculty which is theoretic, but not intellectual, which
gives knowledge of the individual, but not of the universal.
Now the deviations from this, the correct theory, may arise in two ways:
by _defect_ or by _excess_. Negation of the special aesthetic activity,
or of its autonomy, is an instance of the former. This amounts to a
mutilation of the reality of the spirit. Of the latter, the substitution
or superposition of another mysterious and non-existent activity is an
example.
These errors each take several forms. That which errs by defect may be:
(_a_) pure hedonism, which looks upon art as merely sensual pleasure;
(_b_) rigoristic hedonism, agreeing with (_a_), but adding that art is
irreconcilable with the loftiest activities of man; (_c_) moralistic or
pedagogic hedonism, which admits, with the two former, that art is mere
sensuality, but believes that it may not only be harmless, but of some
service to morals, if kept in proper subjection and obedience.
The error by excess also assumes several forms, but these are
indeterminable _a priori_. This view is fully dealt with under the name
of _mystic_, in the Theory and in the Appendix.
Graeco-Roman antiquity was occupied with the problem in all these forms.
In Greece, the problem of art and of the artistic faculty arose for the
first time after the sophistic movement, as a result of the Socratic
polemic.
With the appearance of the word _mimesis_ or _mimetic_, we have a first
attempt at grouping the arts, and the expression, allegoric, or its
equivalent, used in defence of Homer's poetry, reminds us of what Plato
called "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry."
But when internal facts were all looked upon as mere phenomena of
opinion or feeling, of pleasure or of pain, of illusion or of arbitrary
caprice, there could be no question of beautiful or ugly, of difference
between the true and the beautiful, or between the beautiful and the
good.
The problem of the nature of art assumes as solved those problems
concerning the difference between rational and irrational, material and
spiritual, bare fact and value, etc. This was first done in the Socratic
period, and therefore the aesthetic problem could only arise after
Socrates.
And in fact it does arise, with Plato, _the author of the only great
negation of art which appears in the history of ideas_.
Is art rational or irrational? Does it belong to the noble region of the
soul, where dwell philosophy and virtue, or does it cohabit with
sensuality and with crude passion in the lower regions? This was the
question that Plato asked, and thus was the aesthetic problem stated for
the first time.
His Gorgias remarks with sceptical acumen, that tragedy is a deception,
which brings honour alike to deceived and to deceiver, and therefore it
is blameworthy not to know how to deceive and not to allow oneself to be
deceived. This suffices for Gorgias, but Plato, the philosopher, must
resolve the doubt. If it be in fact deception, down with tragedy and the
other arts! If it be not deception, then what is the place of tragedy in
philosophy and in the righteous life? His answer was that art or mimetic
does not realize the ideas, or the truth of things, but merely
reproduces natural or artificial things, which are themselves mere
shadows of the ideas. Art, then, is but a shadow of a shadow, a thing of
third-rate degree. The artificer fashions the object which the painter
paints. The artificer copies the divine idea and the painter copies him.
Art therefore does not belong to the rational, but to the irrational,
sensual sphere of the soul. It can serve but for sensual pleasure, which
disturbs and obscures. Therefore must mimetic, poetry, and poets be
excluded from the perfect Republic.
Plato observed with truth, that imitation does not rise to the logical
or conceptual sphere, of which poets and painters, as such, are, in
fact, ignorant. But he _failed to realize_ that there could be any form
of knowledge other than the intellectual.
We now know that Intuition lies on this side or outside the Intellect,
from which it differs as much as it does from passion and sensuality.
Plato, with his fine aesthetic sense, would have been grateful to anyone
who could have shown him how to place art, which he loved and practised
so supremely himself, among the lofty activities of the spirit. But in
his day, no one could give him such assistance. His conscience and his
reason saw that art makes the false seem the true, and therefore he
resolutely banished it to the lower regions of the spirit.
The tendency among those who followed Plato in time was to find some
means of retaining art and of depriving it of the baleful influence
which it was believed to exercise. Life without art was to the
beauty-loving Greek an impossibility, although he was equally conscious
of the demands of reason and of morality. Thus it happened that art,
which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a
beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue.
Aristophanes and Strabo, and above all Aristotle, dwell upon the
didactic and moralistic possibility of poetry. For Plutarch, poetry
seems to have been a sort of preparation for philosophy, a twilight to
which the eyes should grow accustomed, before emerging into the full
light of day.
Among the Romans, we find Lucretius comparing the beauties of his great
poem to the sweet yellow honey, with which doctors are wont to anoint
the rim of the cup containing their bitter drugs. Horace, as so
frequently, takes his inspiration from the Greek, when he offers the
double view of art: as courtezan and as pedagogue. In his _Ad Pisones_
occur the passages, in which we find mingled with the poetic function,
that of the orator--the practical and the aesthetic. "Was Virgil a poet
or an orator?" The triple duty of pleasing, moving, and teaching, was
imposed upon the poet. Then, with a thought for the supposed
meretricious nature of their art, the ingenious Horace remarks that both
must employ the seductions of form.
The _mystic_ view of art appeared only in late antiquity, with Plotinus.
The curious error of looking upon Plato as the head of this school and
as the Father of Aesthetic assumes that he who felt obliged to banish
art altogether from the domain of the higher functions of the spirit,
was yet ready to yield to it the highest place there. The mystical view
of Aesthetic accords a lofty place indeed to Aesthetic, placing it even
above philosophy. The enthusiastic praise of the beautiful, to be found
in the _Gorgias_, _Philebus_, _Phaedrus_, and _Symposium_ is responsible
for this misunderstanding, but it is well to make perfectly clear that
the beautiful, of which Plato discourses in those dialogues, has nothing
to do with the _artistically_ beautiful, nor with the mysticism of the
neo-Platonicians.
Yet the thinkers of antiquity were aware that a problem lay in the
direction of Aesthetic, and Xenophon records the sayings of Socrates
that the beautiful is "that which is fitting and answers to the end
required." Elsewhere he says "it is that which is loved." Plato likewise
vibrates between various views and offers several solutions. Sometimes
he appears almost to confound the beautiful with the true, the good and
the divine; at others he leans toward the utilitarian view of Socrates;
at others he distinguishes between what is beautiful In itself and what
possesses but a relative beauty. At other times again, he is a hedonist,
and makes it to consist of pure pleasure, that is, of pleasure with no
shadow of pain; or he finds it in measure and proportion, or in the very
sound, the very colour itself. The reason for all this vacillation of
definition lay in Plato's exclusion of the artistic or mimetic fact from
the domain of the higher spiritual activities. The _Hippias major_
expresses this uncertainty more completely than any of the other
dialogues. What is the beautiful? That is the question asked at the
beginning, and left unanswered at the end. The Platonic Socrates and
Hippias propose the most various solutions, one after another, but
always come out by the gate by which they entered in. Is the beautiful
to be found in ornament? No, for gold embellishes only where it is in
keeping. Is the beautiful that which seems ugly to no man? But it is a
question of being, not of seeming. Is it their fitness which makes
things seem beautiful? But in that case, the fitness which makes them
appear beautiful is one thing, the beautiful another. If the beautiful
be the useful or that which leads to an end, then evil would also be
beautiful, because the useful may also end evilly. Is the beautiful the
helpful, that which leads to the good? No, for in that case the good
would not be beautiful, nor the beautiful good, because cause and effect
are different.
Thus they argued in the Platonic dialogues, and when we turn to the
pages of Aristotle, we find him also uncertain and inclined to vary his
definitions.[5] Sometimes for him the good and pleasurable are the
beautiful, sometimes it lies in actions, at others in things motionless,
or in bulk and order, or is altogether undefinable. Antiquity also
established canons of the beautiful, and the famous canon of
Polycleitus, on the proportions of the human body, fitly compares with
that of later times on the golden line, and with the Ciceronian phrase
from the Tusculan Disputations. But these are all of them mere empirical
observations, mere happy remarks and verbal substitutions, which lead to
unsurmountable difficulties when put to philosophical test.
One important identification is absent in all those early attempts at
truth. The beautiful is never identified with art, and the artistic fact
is always clearly distinguished from beauty, mimetic from its content.
Plotinus first identified the two, and with him the beautiful and art
are dissolved together in a passion and mystic elevation of the spirit.
The beauty of natural objects is the archetype existing in the soul,
which is the fountain of all natural beauty. Thus was Plato (he said) in
error, when he despised the arts for imitating nature, for nature
herself imitates the idea, and art also seeks her inspiration directly
from those ideas whence nature proceeds. We have here, with Plotinus and
with Neoplatonism, the first appearance in the world of mystical
Aesthetic, destined to play so important a part in later aesthetic
theory.
Aristotle was far more happy in his attempts at defining Aesthetic as
the science of representation and of expression than in his definitions
of the beautiful. He felt that some element of the problem had been
overlooked, and in attempting in his turn a solution, he had the
advantage over Plato of looking upon the ideas as simple concepts, not
as hypostases of concepts or of abstractions. Thus reality was more
vivid for Aristotle: it was the synthesis of matter and form. He saw
that art, or mimetic, was a theoretic fact, or a mode of contemplation.
"But if Poetry be a theoretic fact, in what way is it to be distinguished
from science and from historical knowledge?" Thus magnificently does the
great philosopher pose the problem at the commencement of his _Poetics_,
and thus alone can it be posed successfully. We ask the same question in
the same words to-day. But the problem is difficult, and the masterly
statement of it was not equalled by the method of solution then
available. He made an excellent start on his voyage of discovery, but
stopped half way, irresolute and perplexed. Poetry, he says, differs from
history, by portraying the possible, while history deals with what has
really happened. Poetry, like philosophy, aims at the universal, but in a
different way, which the philosopher indicates as something more (_mallon
tha katholon_) which differentiates poetry from history, occupied with the
particular (_malon tha kath ekaston_). What, then, is the possible, the
something more, and the particular of poetry? Aristotle immediately falls
into error and confusion, when he attempts to define these words. Since
art has to deal with the absurd and with the impossible, it cannot be
anything rational, but a mere imitation of reality, in accordance with
the Platonic theory--a fact of sensual pleasure. Aristotle does not,
however, attain to so precise a definition as Plato, whose erroneous
definition he does not succeed in supplanting. The truth is that he
failed of his self-imposed task; he failed to discern the true nature of
Aesthetic, although he restated and re-examined the problem with such
marvellous acumen.
After Aristotle, there comes a lull in the discussion, until Plotinus.
The _Poetics_ were generally little studied, and the admirable statement
of the problem generally neglected by later writers. Antique psychology
knew the fancy or imagination, as preserving or reproducing sensuous
impressions, or as an intermediary between the concepts and feeling: its
autonomous productive activity was not yet understood. In the _Life of
Apollonius of Tyana_, Philostratus is said to have been the first to
make clear the difference between mimetic and creative imagination. But
this does not in reality differ from the Aristotelian mimetic, which is
concerned, not only with the real, but also with the possible. Cicero
too, before Philostratus, speaks of a kind of exquisite beauty lying
hidden in the soul of the artist, which guides his hand and art.
Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the
belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist
Philostratus and the other protagonists of the imagination may have
meant to combat this error, but the shadows lie heavy until we reach
Plotinus.
We find already astir among the sophists the question as to the nature
of language. Admitting that language is a sign, are we to take that
as signifying a spiritual necessity (_phusis_) or as a psychological
convention (_nomos_)? Aristotle made a valuable contribution to this
difficult question, when he spoke of a kind of proposition other than
those which predicate truth or falsehood, that is, logic. With him
_euchae_ is the term proper to designate desires and aspirations,
which are the vehicle of poetry and of oratory. (It must be remembered
that for Aristotle words, like poetry, belonged to mimetic.) The
profound remark about the third mode of proposition would, one would
have thought, have led naturally to the separation of linguistic
from logic, and to its classification with poetry and art. But the
Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and formal character, which set
back the attainment of this position by many hundred years. Yet the
genius of Epicurus had an intuition of the truth, when he remarked
that the diversity of names for the same things arose, not from
arbitrary caprice, but from the diverse impression derived from the
same object. The Stoics, too, seem to have had an inkling of the
non-logical nature of speech, but their use of the word _lekton_
leaves it doubtful whether they distinguished by it the linguistic
representation from the abstract concept, or rather, generically, the
meaning from the sound.
[5] In the Appendix will be found further striking quotations from
and references to Aristotle.--(D.A.)