SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

The seventeenth century is remarkable for the ferment of thought upon

this difficult problem. Such words as genius, taste, imagination or

fancy, and feeling, appear in this literature, and deserve a passing

notice. As regards the word "genius," we find the Italian "ingegno"

opposed to the intellect, and Dialectic adorned with the attributes of

the latter, while Rhetoric has the advantage of "ingegno" in all its

forms, such as "concetti" and "acutezze." With these the English word

ingenious has an obvious connection, especially in its earlier use as

applied to men of letters. The French worked upon the word "ingegno" and

evolved from it in various associations the expressions "esprit," "beaux

Esprits." The manual of the Spanish Jesuit, Baltasar Gracian, became

celebrated throughout Europe, and here we find "ingegno" described as

the truly inventive faculty, and from it the English word "genius," the

Italian "genio," the French "génie," first enter into general use.

The word "gusto" or taste, "good taste," in its modern sense, also

sprang into use about this time. Taste was held to be a judicial

faculty, directed to the beautiful, and thus to some extent distinct

from the intellectual judgment. It was further bisected into active and

passive; but the former ran into the definition of "ingegno," the latter

described sterility. The word "gusto," or taste as judgment, was in use

in Italy at a very early period; and in Spain we find Lope di Vega and

his contemporaries declaring that their object is to "delight the taste"

of their public. These uses of the word are not of significance as

regards the problem of art, and we must return to Baltasar Gracian

(1642) for a definition of taste as a special faculty or attitude of the

soul. Italian writers of the period echo the praises of this laconic

moralist, who, when he spoke of "a man of taste," meant to describe what

we call to-day "a man of tact" in the conduct of life.

The first use of the word in a strictly aesthetic sense occurs in France

in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. La Bruyère writes in his

_Caractères_ (1688): "Il y a dans l'art un point de perfection, comme de

bonté ou de maturité dans la nature: celui qui le sent et qui l'aime, a

le goût parfait; celui qui ne le sent pas, et qui aime au deçà ou au

delà, a le goût défectueux. Il y a donc un bon et un mauvais goût, et

l'on dispute des goûts avec fondement." Delicacy and variability or

variety were appended as attributes of taste. This French definition of

the Italian word was speedily adopted in England, where it became "good

taste," and we find it used in this sense in Italian and German writers

of about this period.

The words "imagination" and "fancy" were also passed through the

crucible in this century. We find the Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino (1644)

blaming those who look for truth or falsehood, for the verisimilar or

for historical truth, in poetry. Poetry, he holds, has to do with the

primary apprehensions, which give neither truth nor falsehood. Thus the

fancy takes the place of the verisimilar of certain students of

Aristotle. The Cardinal continues his eloquence with the clinching

remark that if the intention of poetry were to be believed true, then

its real end would be falsehood, which is absolutely condemned by the

law of nature and by God. The sole object of poetic fables is, he says,

to adorn our intellect with sumptuous, new, marvellous, and splendid

imaginings, and so great has been the benefits accruing from this to the

human race, that poets have been rewarded with a glory superior to any

other, and their names have been crowned with divine honours. This, he

says in his treatise, _Del Bene_, has been the just reward of poets,

albeit they have not been bearers of knowledge, nor have they manifested

truth.

This throwing of the bridle on the neck of Pegasus seemed to Muratori

sixty years later to be altogether too risky a proceeding--although

advocated by a Prince of the Church! He reinserts the bit of the

verisimilar, though he talks with admiration of the fancy, that

"inferior apprehensive" faculty, which is content to "represent" things,

without seeking to know if they be true or false, a task which it leaves

to the "superior apprehensive" faculty of the intellect. The severe

Gravina, too, finds his heart touched by the beauty of poetry, when he

calls it "a witch, but wholesome."

As early as 1578, Huarte had maintained that eloquence is the work of

the imagination, not of the intellect; in England, Bacon (1605)

attributed knowledge to the intellect, history to memory, and poetry to

the imagination or fancy; Hobbes described the manifestations of the

latter; and Addison devoted several numbers of the _Spectator_ to the

analysis of "the pleasures of the imagination."

During the same period, the division between those who are accustomed "à

juger par le sentiment" and those who "raisonnent par les principes"

became marked in France, Du Bos (1719) is an interesting example of the

upholder of the feelings as regards the production of art. Indeed, there

is in his view no other criterion, and the feeling for art is a sixth

sense, against which intellectual argument is useless. This French

school of thought found a reflex in England with the position assigned

there to emotion in artistic work. But the confusion of such words as

imagination, taste, feeling, wit, shows that at this time there was a

suspicion that these words were all applicable to the same fact.

Alexander Pope thus distinguished wit and judgment:

For wit and judgment often are at strife,

Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.

But there was a divergence of opinion as to whether the latter should be

looked upon as part of the intellect or not.

There was the same divergence of opinion as to taste and intellectual

judgment. As regards the former, the opposition to the intellectual

principle was reinforced in the eighteenth century by Kant in his

_Kritik der Urtheilskraft_. But Voltaire and writers anterior to him

frequently fell back into intellectualist definitions of a word invented

precisely to avoid them. Dacier (1684) writes of taste as "Une harmonie,

un accord de l'esprit et de la raison." The difficulties surrounding a

true definition led to the creation of the expression _non so che_, or

_je ne sais quoi_, or _no se qué_, which throws into clear relief the

confusion between taste and intellectual judgment.

As regards imagination and feeling, or sentiment, there was a strong

tendency to sensualism. The Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino talks of poetry

as ignoring alike truth or falsehood and yet delighting the senses. He

approves of the remark that poetry should make us "raise our eyebrows,"

but in later life this keen-eyed prince seems to have fallen back from

the brilliant intuition of his earlier years into the pedagogic theory.

Muratori was convinced that fancy was entirely sensual, and therefore he

posted the intellect beside it, "to refrain its wild courses, like a

friend having authority." Gravina practically coincides in this view of

poetic fancy, as a subordinate faculty, incapable of knowledge, fit only

to be used by moral philosophy for the introduction into the mind of the

true, by means of novelty and the marvellous.

In England, also, Bacon held poetry to belong to the fancy, and assigned

to it a place between history and science. Epic poetry he awarded to the

former, "parabolic" poetry to the latter. Elsewhere he talks of poetry

as a dream, and affirms that it is to be held "rather as an amusement of

the intelligence than as a science." For him music, painting, sculpture,

and the other arts are merely pleasure-giving. Addison reduced the

pleasures of the imagination to those caused by visible objects, or by

ideas taken from them. These pleasures he held to be inferior to those

of the senses and less refined than those of the intellect. He looked

upon imaginative pleasure as consisting in resemblances discovered

between imitations and things imitated, between copies and originals, an

exercise adapted to sharpen the spirit of observation.

The sensualism of the writers headed by Du Bos, who looked upon art as a

mere pastime, like a tournament or a bull-fight, shows that the truth

about Aesthetic had not yet succeeded in emerging from the other

spiritual activities. Yet the new words and the new views of the

seventeenth century have great importance for the origins of Aesthetic;

they were the direct result of the restatement of the problem by the

writers of the Renaissance, who themselves took it up where Antiquity

had left it. These new words, and the discussions which arose from them,

were the demands of Aesthetic for its theoretical justification. But

they were not able to provide this justification, and it could not come

from elsewhere.

With Descartes, we are not likely to find much sympathy for such studies

as relate to wit, taste, fancy, or feelings. He ignored the famous _non

so che_; he abhorred the imagination, which he believed to result from

the agitation of the animal spirits. He did not altogether condemn

poetry, but certainly looked upon it as the _folle du logis_, which must

be strictly supervised by the reason. Boileau is the aesthetic

equivalent of Cartesian intellectualism, Boileau _que la raison à ses

règles engage_, Boileau the enthusiast for allegory. France was infected

with the mathematical spirit of Cartesianism and all possibility of a

serious consideration of poetry and of art was thus removed. Witness the

diatribes of Malebranche against the imagination, and listen to the

Italian, Antonio Conti, writing from France in 1756 on the theme of the

literary disputes that were raging at the time: "They have introduced

the method of M. Descartes into belles-lettres; they judge poetry and

eloquence independently of their sensible qualities. Thus they also

confound the progress of philosophy with that of the arts. The Abbé

Terrasson says that the moderns are greater geometricians than the

ancients; therefore they are greater orators and greater poets." La

Motte, Fontenelle, Boileau, and Malebranche carried on this battle,

which was taken up by the Encyclopaedists, and when Du Bos published his

daring book, Jean Jacques le Bel published a reply to it (1726), in

which he denied to sentiment its claim to judge of art. Thus

Cartesianism could not possess an Aesthetic of the imagination. The

Cartesian J.P. de Crousaz (1715) found the beautiful to consist in what

is approved of, and thereby reduced it to ideas, ignoring the pleasing

and sentiment.

Locke was as intellectualist in the England of this period as was

Descartes in France. He speaks of wit as combining ideas in an agreeable

variety, which strikes the imagination, while the intellect or judgment

seeks for differences according to truth. The wit, then, consists of

something which is not at all in accordance with truth and reason. For

Shaftesbury, taste is a sense or instinct of the beautiful, of order and

proportion, identical with the moral sense and with its "preconceptions"

anticipating the recognition of reason. Body, spirit, and God are the

three degrees of beauty. Francis Hutcheson proceeded from Shaftesbury

and made popular "the internal sense of beauty, which lies somewhere

between sensuality and rationality and is occupied with discussing unity

in variety, concord in multiplicity, and the true, the good, and the

beautiful in their substantial identity." Hutcheson allied the pleasure

of art with this sense, that is, with the pleasure of imitation and of

the likeness of the copy to the original. This he looked upon as

relative beauty, to be distinguished from absolute beauty. The same view

dominates the English writers of the eighteenth century, among whom may

be mentioned Reid, the head of the Scottish school, and Adam Smith.

With far greater philosophical vigour, Leibnitz in Germany opened the

door to that crowd of psychic facts which Cartesian intellectualism had

rejected with horror. His conception of reality as _continuous_ (_natura

non facit saltus_) left room for imagination, taste, and their

congeners. Leibnitz believed that the scale of being ascended from the

lowliest to God. What we now term aesthetic facts were then identified

with what Descartes and Leibnitz had called "confused" knowledge, which

might become "clear," but not distinct. It might seem that when he

applied this terminology to aesthetic facts, Leibnitz had recognized

their peculiar essence, as being neither sensual nor intellectual. They

are not sensual for him, because they have their own "clarity,"

differing from pleasure and sensual emotion, and from intellectual

"distinctio." But the Leibnitzian law of continuity and intellectualism

did not permit of such an interpretation. Obscurity and clarity are here

to be understood as quantitative grades of a _single_ form of knowledge,

the distinct or intellectual, toward which they both tend and reach at a

superior grade. Though artists judge with confused perceptions, which

are clear but not distinct, these may yet be corrected and proved true

by intellective knowledge. The intellect clearly and distinctly knows

the thing which the imagination knows confusedly but clearly. This view

of Leibnitz amounts to saying that the realization of a work of art can

be perfected by intellectually determining its concept. Thus Leibnitz

held that there was only one true form of knowledge, and that all other

forms could only reach perfection in that. His "clarity" is not a

specific difference; it is merely a partial anticipation of his

intellective "distinction." To have posited this grade is an important

achievement, but the view of Leibnitz is not fundamentally different

from that of the creators of the words and intuitions already studied.

All contributed to attract attention to the peculiarity of aesthetic

facts.

Speculation on language at this period revealed an equally determined

intellectualist attitude. Grammar was held to be an exact science, and

grammatical variations to be explainable by the ellipse, by

abbreviation, and by failure to grasp the typical logical form. In

France, with Arnauld (1660), we have the rigorous Cartesian

intellectualism; Leibnitz and Locke both, speculated upon this subject,

and the former all his life nourished the thought of a universal

language. The absurdity of this is proved in this volume.

A complete change of the Cartesian system, upon which Leibnitz based his

own, was necessary, if speculation were ever to surpass the Leibnitzian

aesthetic. But Wolff and the other German pupils of Leibnitz were as

unable to shake themselves free of the all-pervading intellectualism as

were the French pupils of Descartes.

Meanwhile a young student of Berlin, named Alexander Amedeus Baumgarten,

was studying the Wolffian philosophy, and at the same time lecturing in

poetry and Latin rhetoric. While so doing, he was led to rethink and

pose afresh the problem of how to reduce the precepts of rhetoric to a

rigorous philosophical system. Thus it came about that Baumgarten

published in September 1735, at the age of twenty-one, as the thesis for

his degree of Doctor, an opuscule entitled, _Meditationes philosophicae

de nonnullis ad poèma pertinentibus_, and in it we find written

_for the first time_ the word "Aesthetic," as the name of a special

science. Baumgarten ever afterwards attached great importance to his

juvenile discovery, and lectured upon it by request in 1742, at

Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and again in 1749. It is interesting to know that

in this way Emmanuel Kant first became acquainted with the theory of

Aesthetic, which he greatly altered when he came to treat of it in his

philosophy. In 1750, Baumgarten published the first volume of a more

ample treatise, and a second part in 1762. But illness, and death in

1762, prevented his completing his work.

What is Aesthetic for Baumgarten? It is the science of sensible

knowledge. Its objects are the sensible facts (_aisthaeta_),

which the Greeks were always careful to distinguish from the mental

facts (_noaeta_). It is therefore _scientia cognitionis

sensitivae, theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre

cogitandi, ars analogi rationis_. Rhetoric and Poetic are for him

special cases of Aesthetic, which is a general science, embracing both.

Its laws are diffused among all the arts, like the mariner's star

(_cynosura quaedam_), and they must be always referred to in all cases,

for they are universal, not empirical or merely inductive (_falsa regula

pejor est quam nulla_). Aesthetic must not be confounded with

Psychology, which supplies only suppositions. Aesthetic is an

independent science, which gives the rules for knowing sensibly, and is

occupied with the perfection of sensible knowledge, which is beauty. Its

contrary is ugliness. The beauty of objects and of matter must be

excluded from the beauty of sensible knowledge, because beautiful

objects can be badly thought and ugly objects beautifully thought.

Poetic representations are those which are confused or imaginative.

Distinction and intellectuality are not poetic. The greater the

determination, the greater the poetry; individuals absolutely determined

(_omnimodo determinata_) are very poetical, as are images or fancies,

and everything which refers to feeling. The judgment of sensible and

imaginative representations is taste.

Such are, in brief, the truths which Baumgarten stated in his

_Meditationes_, and further developed and exemplified in his

_Aesthetica_. Close study of the two works above-mentioned leads to the

conviction that Baumgarten did not succeed in freeing himself from the

unity of the Leibnitzian monadology. He obtained from Leibnitz his

conception of the poetic as consisting of the confused, but German

critics are wrong in believing that he attributed to it a positive, not

a negative quality. Had he really done this, he would have broken at a

blow the unity of the Leibnitzian monad, and conquered the science of

Aesthetic.

This giant's step he did not take: he failed to banish the

contradictions of Leibnitz and of the other intellectualists. To posit a

_perfection_ did not suffice. It was necessary to maintain it against

the _lex continui_ of Leibnitz and to proclaim its independence of all

intellectualism. Aesthetic truths for Baumgarten were those which did

not seem altogether false or altogether true: in fact, the verisimilar.

If it were objected to Baumgarten that one should not occupy oneself

with what, like poetry, he defines as confused and obscure, he would

reply that confusion is a condition of finding the truth, that we do not

pass at once from night to dawn. Thus he did not surpass the thought of

Leibnitz in this respect. Poor Baumgarten was always in suspense lest he

should be held to occupy himself with things unworthy of a philosopher!

"How can you, a professor of philosophy, dare to praise lying and the

mixture of truth and falsehood?" He imagined that some such reproach

might be addressed to him on account of his purely philosophical

speculations, and true enough he actually received a criticism of his

theory, in which it was argued, that if poetry consisted of sensual

perfection, then it was a bad thing for mankind. Baumgarten

contemptuously replied that he had not the time to argue with those

capable of confounding his _oratio perfecta sensitiva_ with an _oratio

perfecte (omnino!) sensitiva_.

The fact about Baumgarten is that apart from baptizing the new science

Aesthetic, and apart from his first definitions, he does not stray far

from the old ruts of scholastic thought. The excellent Baumgarten, with

all his ardour and all his convictions, is a sympathetic and interesting

figure in the history of Aesthetic not yet formed, but in process of

formation.

The revolutionary who set aside the old definitions of Aesthetic, and

for the first time revealed the true nature of art and poetry, is the

Italian, Giambattista Vico.

What were the ideas developed by Vico in his _Scienza nuova_ (1725)?

They were neither more nor less than the solution of the problem, posed

by Plato, attempted in vain by Aristotle, again posed and again unsolved

at the Renaissance.

Is poetry a rational or an irrational thing? Is it spiritual or animal?

If it be spiritual, what is its true nature, and in what way does it

differ from art and science?

Plato, we know, banished poetry to the inferior region of the soul,

among the animal spirits. Vico on the contrary raises up poetry, and

makes of it a period in the history of humanity. And since Vico's is an

ideal history, whose periods are not concerned with contingent facts,

but with spiritual forms, he makes of it a moment of the ideal history

of the spirit, a form of knowledge. Poetry comes before the intellect,

but _after_ feeling. Plato had _confused_ it with feeling, and for that

reason banished it from his Republic. "Men _feel_," says Vico, "before

observing, then they observe with perturbation of the soul, finally they

reflect with the pure intellect," He goes on to say, that poetry being

composed of passion and of feeling, the nearer it approaches to the

_particular_, the more _true_ it is, while exactly the reverse is true

of philosophy.

Imagination is independent and autonomous as regards the intellect. Not

only does the intellect fail of perfection, but all it can do is to

destroy it. "The studies of Poetry and Metaphysic are _naturally

opposed_. Poets are the feeling, philosophers the intellect of the human

race." The weaker the reason, the stronger the imagination. Philosophy,

he says, deals with abstract thought or universals, poetry with the

particular. Painters and poets differ only in their material. Homer and

the great poets appear in barbaric times. Dante, for instance, appeared

in "the renewed barbarism of Italy." The poetic ages preceded the

philosophical, and poetry is the father of prose, by "necessity of

nature," not by the "caprice of pleasure." Fables or "imaginary

universals" were conceived before "reasoned or philosophical

universals." To Homer, says Vico, belongs wisdom, but only poetic

wisdom. "His beauties are not those of a spirit softened and civilized

by any philosophy."

If any one make poetry in epochs of reflexion, he becomes a child again;

he does not reflect with his intellect, but follows his fancy and dwells

upon particulars. If the true poet make use of philosophic ideas, he

only does so that he may change logic into imagination.

Here we have a profound statement of the line of demarcation between

science and art. _They cannot be confused again_.

His statement of the difference between poetry and history is a trifle

less clear. He explains why to Aristotle poetry seemed more

philosophical than history, and at the same time he refutes Aristotle's

error that poetry deals with the universal, history with the particular.

Poetry equals science, not because it is occupied with the intellectual

concept, but because, like science, it is ideal. A good poetical fable

must be all ideal: "With the idea the poet gives their being to things

which are without it. Poetry is all fantastic, as being the art of

painting the idea, not icastic, like the art of painting portraits. That

is why poets, like painters, are called divine, because in that respect

they resemble God the Creator." Vico ends by identifying poetry and

history. The difference between them is posterior and accidental. "But,

as it is impossible to impart false ideas, because the false consists of

a vicious combination of ideas, so it is impossible to impart a

tradition, which, though it be false, has not at first contained some

element of truth. Thus mythology appears for the first time, not as the

invention of an individual, but as the spontaneous vision of the truth

as it appears to primitive man."

Poetry and language are for Vico substantially identical. He finds in

the origins of poetry the origins of languages and letters. He believed

that the first languages consisted in mute acts or acts accompanied by

bodies which had natural relations to the ideas that it was desired to

signify. With great cleverness he compared these pictured languages to

heraldic arms and devices, and to hieroglyphs. He observed that during

the barbarism of the Middle Age, the mute language of signs must return,

and we find it in the heraldry and blazonry of that epoch. Hence come

three kinds of languages: divine silent languages, heroic emblematic

languages, and speech languages.

Formal logic could never satisfy a man with such revolutionary ideas

upon poetry and language. He describes the Aristotelian syllogism as a

method which explains universals In their particulars, rather than

unites particulars to obtain universals, looks upon Zeno and the sorites

as a means of subtilizing rather than sharpening the intelligence, and

concludes that Bacon is a great philosopher, when he advocates and

illustrates _induction_, "which has been followed by the English to the

great advantage of experimental philosophy." Hence he proceeds to

criticize mathematics, which, had hitherto always been looked upon as

the type of the _perfect science_.

Vico is indeed a revolutionary, a pioneer. He knows very well that he is

in direct opposition to all that has been thought before about poetry.

"My new principles of poetry upset all that first Plato and then

Aristotle have said about the origin of poetry, all that has been said

by the Patrizzi, by the Scaligers, and by the Castelvetri. I have

discovered that It was through lack of human reason that poetry was born

so sublime that neither the Arts, nor the Poetics, nor the Critiques

could cause another equal to it to be born, I say equal, and not

superior." He goes as far as to express shame at having to report the

stupidities of great philosophers upon the origin of song and verse. He

shows his dislike for the Cartesian philosophy and its tendency to dry

up the imagination "by denying all the faculties of the soul which come

to it from the body," and talks of his own time as of one "which freezes

all the generous quality of the best poetry and thus precludes it from

being understood."

As regards grammatical forms, Vico may be described as an adherent of

the great reaction of the Renaissance against scholastic verbalism and

formalism. This reaction brought back as a value the experience of

feeling, and afterwards with Romanticism gave its right place to the

imagination. Vico, in his _Scienza nuova_, may be said to have been the

first to draw attention to the imagination. Although he makes many

luminous remarks on history and the development of poetry among the

Greeks, his work is not really a history, but a science of the spirit or

of the ideal. It is not the ethical, logical, or economic moment of

humanity which interests him, but the _imaginative_ moment. _He

discovered the creative imagination_, and it may almost be said of the

_Scienza nuova_ of Vico that it is Aesthetic, the discovery of a new

world, of a new mode of knowledge.

This was the contribution of the genius of Vico to the progress of

humanity: he showed Aesthetic to be an autonomous activity. It remained

to distinguish the science of the spirit from history, the modifications

of the human spirit from the historic vicissitudes of peoples, Aesthetic

from Homeric civilization.

But although Goethe, Herder, and Wolf were acquainted with the _Scienza

nuova_, the importance of this wonderful book did not at first dawn upon

the world. Wolf, in his prolegomena to Homer, thought that he was

dealing merely with an ingenious speculator on Homeric themes. He did

not realize that the intellectual stature of Vico far surpassed that of

the most able philologists.

The fortunes of Aesthetic after Vico were very various, and the list of

aestheticians who fell back into the old pedagogic definition, or

elaborated the mistakes of Baumgarten, is very long. Yet with C.H.

Heydenreich in Germany and Sulzer in Switzerland we find that the truths

contained in Baumgarten have begun to bear fruit. J.J. Herder (1769) was

more important than these, and he placed Baumgarten upon a pedestal,

though criticizing his pretension of creating an _ars pulchre cogitandi_

instead of a simple _scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice

cogitans_. Herder admitted Baumgarten's definition of poetry as _oratio

sensitiva perfecta_, perfect sensitived speech, and this is _probably

the best definition of poetry that has ever been given_. It touches the

real essence of poetry and opens to thought the whole of the philosophy

of the beautiful. Herder, although he does not cite Vico upon aesthetic

questions, yet praises him as a philosopher. His remarks about poetry as

"the maternal language of humanity, as the garden is more ancient than

the cultivated field, painting than writing, song than declamation,

exchange than commerce," are replete with the spirit of the Italian

philosopher.

But despite similar happy phrases, Herder is philosophically the

inferior of the great Italian. He is a firm believer in the Leibnitzian

law of continuity, and does not surpass the conclusions of Baumgarten.

Herder and his friend Hamann did good service as regards the philosophy

of language. The French encyclopaedists, J.J. Rousseau, d'Alembert, and

many others of this period, were none of them able to get free of the

idea that a word is either a natural, mechanical fact, or a sign

attached to a thought. The only way out of this difficulty is to look

upon the imagination as itself active and expressive in _verbal

imagination_, and language as the language of _intuition_, not of the

intelligence. Herder talks of language as "an understanding of the soul

with itself." Thus language begins to appear, not as an arbitrary

invention or a mechanical fact, but as a primitive affirmation of human

activity, as a _creation_.

But all unconscious of the discoveries of Vico, the great mass of

eighteenth century writers try their hands at every sort of solution.

The Abbé Batteux published in 1746 _Les Beaux-arts réduits a un seul

principe_, which is a perfect little bouquet of contradictions. The Abbé

finds himself confronted with difficulties at every turn, but with "un

peu d'esprit on se tire de tout," and when for instance he has to

explain artistic enjoyment of things displeasing, he remarks that the

imitation never being perfect like reality, the horror caused by reality

disappears.

But the French were equalled and indeed surpassed by the English in

their amateur Aesthetics. The painter Hogarth was one day reading in

Italian a speech about the beauty of certain figures, attributed to

Michael Angelo. This led him to imagine that the figurative arts depend

upon a principle which consists of conforming to a given line. In 1745

he produced a serpentine line as frontispiece of his collection of

engravings, which he described as "the line of beauty." Thus he

succeeded in exciting universal curiosity, which he proceeded to satisfy

with his "Analysis of Beauty." Here he begins by rightly combating the

error of judging paintings by their subject and by the degree of their

imitation, instead of by their form, which is the essential in art. He

gives his definition of form, and afterwards proceeds to describe the

waving lines which are beautiful and those which are not, and maintains

that among them all there is but one that is really worthy to be called

"the line of beauty," and one definite serpentine line "the line of

grace." The pig, the bear, the spider, and the frog are ugly, because

they do not possess serpentine lines. E. Burke, with a like assurance in

his examples, was equally devoid of certainty in his general principles.

He declares that the natural properties of an object cause pleasure or

pain to the imagination, but that the latter also procures pleasure from

their resemblance to the original. He does not speak further of the

second of these, but gives a long list of the natural properties of the

sensible, beautiful object. Having concluded his list, he remarks that

these are in his opinion the qualities upon which beauty depends and

which are the least liable to caprice and confusion. But "comparative

smallness, delicate structure, colouring vivid but not too much so," are

all mere empirical observations of no more value than those of Hogarth,

with whom Burke must be classed as an aesthetician. Their works are

spoken of as "classics." Classics indeed they are, but of the sort that

arrive at no conclusion.

Henry Home (Lord Kaimes) is on a level a trifle above the two just

mentioned. He seeks "the true principles of the beaux-arts," in order to

transform criticism into "a rational science." He selects facts and

experience for this purpose, but in his definition of beauty, which he

divides into two parts, relative and intrinsic, he is unable to explain

the latter, save by a final cause, which he finds in the Almighty.

Such theories as the three above mentioned defy classification, because

they are not composed by any scientific method. Their authors pass from

physiological sensualism to moralism, from imitation of nature to

finalism, and to transcendental mysticism, without consciousness of the

incongruity of their theses, at variance each with itself.

The German, Ernest Platner, at any rate did not suffer from a like

confusion of thought. He developed his researches on the lines of

Hogarth, but was only able to discover a prolongation of sexual pleasure

in aesthetic facts. "Where," he exclaims, "is there any beauty that does

not come from the feminine figure, the centre of all beauty? The

undulating line is beautiful, because it is found in the body of woman;

essentially feminine movements are beautiful; the notes of music are

beautiful, when they melt into one another; a poem is beautiful, when

one thought embraces another with lightness and facility."

French sensualism shows itself quite incapable of understanding

aesthetic production, and the associationism of David Hume is not more

fortunate in this respect.

The Dutchman Hemsterhuis (1769) developed an ingenious theory, mingling

mystical and sensualist theory with some just remarks, which afterwards,

in the hands of Jacobi, became sentimentalism. Hemsterhuis believed

beauty to be a phenomenon arising from the meeting by the

sentimentalism, which gives multiplicity, with the internal sense, which

tends to unity. Consequently the beautiful will be that which presents

the greatest number of ideas in the shortest space of time. To man is

denied supreme unity, but here he finds approximative unity. Hence the

joy arising from the beautiful, which has some analogy with the joy of

love.

With Winckelmann (1764) Platonism or Neo-platonism was vigorously

renewed. The creator of the history of the figurative arts saw in the

divine indifference and more than human elevation of the works of Greek

sculpture a beauty which had descended from the seventh heaven and

become incarnate in them. Mendelssohn, the follower of Baumgarten, had

denied beauty to God: Winckelmann, the Neoplatonician, gave it back to

Him. He holds that perfect beauty is to be found only in God. "The

conception of human beauty becomes the more perfect in proportion as it

can be thought as in agreement with the Supreme Being, who is

distinguished from matter by His unity and indivisibility." To the other

characteristics of supreme beauty, Winckelmann adds "the absence of any

sort of signification" (Unbezeichnung). Lines and dots cannot explain

beauty, for it is not they alone which form it. Its form is not proper

to any definite person, it expresses no sentiment, no feeling of

passion, for these break up unity and diminish or obscure beauty.

According to Winckelmann, beauty must be like a drop of pure water taken

from the spring, which is the more healthy the less it has of taste,

because it is purified of all foreign elements.

A special faculty is required to appreciate this beauty, which

Winckelmann is inclined to call intelligence, or a delicate internal

sense, free of all instinctive passions, of pleasure, and of friendship.

Since it becomes a question of perceiving something immaterial,

Winckelmann banishes colour to a secondary place. True beauty, he says,

is that of form, a word which describes lines and contours, as though

lines and contours could not also be perceived by the senses, or could

appear to the eye without any colour.

It is the destiny of error to be obliged to contradict itself, when it

does not decide to dwell in a brief aphorism, in order to live as well

as may be with facts and concrete problems. The "History" of Winckelmann

dealt with historic concrete facts, with which it was necessary to

reconcile the idea of a supreme beauty. His admission of the contours of

lines and his secondary admission of colours is a compromise. He makes

another with regard to the principle of expression. "Since there is no

intermediary between pain and pleasure in human nature, and since a

human being without these feelings is inconceivable, we must place the

human figure in a moment of action and of passion, which is what is

termed expression in art." So Winckelmann studied expression after

beauty. He makes a third compromise between his one, indivisible,

supreme, and constant beauty and individual beauties. Winckelmann

preferred the male to the female body as the most complete incarnation

of supreme beauty, but he was not able to shut his eyes to the

indisputable fact that there also exist beautiful bodies of women and

even of animals.

Raphael Mengs, the painter, was an intimate friend of Winckelmann and

associated himself with him in his search for a true definition of the

beautiful. His ideas were generally in accordance with those of

Winckelmann. He defines beauty as "the visible idea of perfection, which

is to perfection what the visible is to the mathematical point." He

falls under the influence of the argument from design. The Creator has

ordained the multiplicity of beauties. Things are beautiful according to

our ideas of them, and these ideas come from the Creator. Thus each

beautiful thing has its own type, and a child would appear ugly if it

resembled a man. He adds to his remarks in this sense: "As the diamond

is alone perfect among stones, gold among metals, and man among living

creatures, so there is distinction in each species, and but little is

perfect." In his _Dreams of Beauty_, he looks upon beauty as "an

intermediate disposition," which contains a part of perfection and a

part of the agreeable, and forms a _tertium quid_, which differs from

the other two and deserves a special name. He names four sources of the

art of painting: beauty, significant or expressive character, harmony,

and colouring. The first of these he finds among the ancients, the

second with Raphael, the third with Correggio, the fourth with Titian.

Mengs does not succeed in rising above this empiricism of the studio,

save to declaim about the beauty of nature, virtue, forms, and

proportions, and indeed everything, including the First Cause, which is

the most beautiful of all.

The name of G.E. Lessing (1766) is well known to all concerned with art

problems. The ideas of Winckelmann reappear in Lessing, with less of a

metaphysical tinge. For Lessing, the end of art is the pleasing, and

since this is "a superfluous thing," he thought that the legislator

should not allow to art the liberty indispensable to science, which

seeks the truth, necessary to the soul. For the Greeks painting was, as

it should always be, "imitation of beautiful bodies." Everything

disagreeable or ill-formed should be excluded from painting. "Painting,

as clever imitation, may imitate deformity. Painting, as a fine art,

does not permit this." He was more inclined to admit deformity in

poetry, as there it is less shocking, and the poet can make use of it to

produce in us certain feelings, such as the ridiculous or the terrible.

In his _Dramaturgie_ (1767), Lessing followed the Peripatetics, and

believed that the rules of Aristotle were as absolute as the theorems of

Euclid. His polemic against the French school is chiefly directed to

claiming a place in poetry for the verisimilar, as against absolute

historical exactitude. He held the universal to be a sort of mean of

what appears in the individual, the catharsis was in his view a

transformation of the passions into virtuous dispositions, and he held

the duty of poetry to be inspiration of the love of virtue. He followed

Winckelmann in believing that the expression of physical beauty was the

supreme object of painting. This beauty exists only as an ideal, which

finds its highest expression in man. Animals possess it to a slighter

extent, vegetable and inanimate nature not at all. Those mistaken enough

to occupy themselves with depicting the latter are imitating beauties

deprived of all ideal. They work only with eye and hand; genius has

little if any share in their productions. Lessing found the physical

ideal to reside chiefly in form, but also in the ideal of colour, and in

permanent expression. Mere colouring and transitory expression were for

him without ideal, "because nature has not imposed upon herself anything

definite as regards them." At bottom he does not care for colouring,

finding in the pen drawings of artists "a life, a liberty, a delicacy,

lacking to their pictures." He asks "whether even the most wonderful

colouring can make up for such a loss, and whether it be not desirable

that the art of oil-painting had never been invented."

This "ideal beauty," wonderfully constructed from divine quintessence

and subtle pen and brush strokes, this academic mystery, had great

success. In Italy it was much discussed in the environment of Mengs and

of Winckelmann, who were working there.

The first counterblast to their aesthetic Neo-platonism came from an

Italian named Spalletti, and took the form of a letter addressed to

Mengs. He represents the _characteristic_ as the true principle of art.

The pleasure obtained from beauty is intellectual, and truth is its

object. When the soul meets with what is characteristic, and what really

suits the object to be represented, the work is held to be beautiful. A

well-made man with a woman's face is ugly. Harmony, order, variety,

proportion, etc.--these are elements of beauty, and man enjoys the

widening of his knowledge before disagreeable things characteristically

represented. Spalletti defines beauty as "that modification inherent to

the object observed, which presents it, as it should appear, with an

infallible characteristic."

Thus the Aristotelian thesis found a supporter in Italy, some years

before any protestation was heard in Germany. Louis Hirt, the historian

of art (1797) observed that ancient monuments represented all sorts of

forms, from the most beautiful and sublime to the most ugly and most

common. He therefore denied that ideal beauty was the principle of art,

and for it substituted the _characteristic_, applicable equally to gods,

heroes, and animals.

Wolfgang Goethe, in 1798, forgetting the juvenile period, during which

he had dared to raise a hymn to Gothic architecture, now began seriously

to seek a middle term between beauty and expression. He believed that he

had found it, in certain characteristic contents presenting to the

artist beautiful shapes, which the artist would then develop and reduce

to perfect beauty. Thus for Goethe at this period, the characteristic

was simply the _starting-point_, or framework, from which the beautiful

arose, through the power of the artist.

But these writers mentioned after J.B. Vico are not true philosophers.

Winckelmann, Mengs, Hogarth, Lessing, and Goethe are great in other

ways. Meier called himself a historian of art, but he was inferior both

to Herder and to Hamann. From J.B. Vico to Emmanuel Kant, European

thought is without a name of great importance as regards this subject.

Kant took up the problem, where Vico had left it, not in the historical,

but in the ideal sense. He resembled the Italian philosopher, in the

gravity and the tenacity of his studies in Aesthetic, but he was far

less happy in his solutions, which did not attain to the truth, and to

which he did not succeed in giving the necessary unity and

systematization. The reader must bear in mind that Kant is here

criticized solely as an aesthetician: his other conclusions do not enter

directly into the discussion.

What was Kant's idea of art? The answer is: the same in substance as

Baumgarten's. This may seem strange to those who remember his sustained

polemic against Wolf and the conception of beauty as confused

perception. But Kant always thought highly of Baumgarten. He calls him

"that excellent analyst" in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and he used

Baumgarten's text for his University lectures on Metaphysic. Kant looked

upon Logic and Aesthetic as cognate studies, and in his scheme of

studies for 1765, and in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, he proposes to

cast a glance at the Critique of Taste, that is to say, Aesthetic,

"since the study of the one is useful for the other and they are

mutually illuminative." He followed Meier in his distinctions between

logical and aesthetic truth. He even quoted the Instance of the young

girl, whose face when distinctly seen, i.e. with a microscope, is no

longer beautiful. It is true, aesthetically, he said, that when a man is

dead he cannot come to life, although this be opposed both to logical

and to moral truth. It is aesthetically true that the sun plunges into

the sea, although that is not true logically or objectively.

No one, even among the greatest, can yet tell to what extent logical

truth should mingle with aesthetic truth. Kant believed that logical

truth must wear the habit of Aesthetic, in order to become _accessible_.

This habit, he thought, was discarded only by the rational sciences,

which tend to depth. Aesthetic certainly is subjective. It is satisfied

with authority or with an appeal to great men. We are so feeble that

Aesthetic must eke out our thoughts. Aesthetic is a vehicle of Logic.

But there are logical truths which are not aesthetic. We must exclude

from philosophy exclamations and other emotions, which belong to

aesthetic truth. For Kant, poetry is the harmonious play of thought and

sensation, differing from eloquence, because in poetry thoughts are

fitted to suggestions, in eloquence the reverse is true. Poetry should

make virtue and intellect visible, as was done by Pope in his _Essay on

Man_. Elsewhere, he says frankly that logical perfection is the

foundation of all the rest.

The confirmation of this is found in his _Critique of Judgment_, which

Schelling looked upon as the most important of the three _Critiques_,

and which Hegel and other metaphysical idealists always especially

esteemed.

For Kant art was always "a sensible and imaged covering for an

intellectual concept." He did not look upon art as pure beauty without a

concept. He looked upon it as a beauty adherent and fixed about a

concept. The work of genius contains two elements: imagination and

intelligence. To these must be added taste, which combines the two. Art

may even represent the ugly in nature, for artistic beauty "is not a

beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing." But this

representation of the ugly has its limits in the arts (here Kant

remembers Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit in the

disgusting and the repugnant, which kills the representation itself. He

believes that there may be artistic productions without a concept, such

as are flowers in nature, and these would be ornaments to frameworks,

music without words, etc., etc., but since they represent nothing

reducible to a definite concept, they must be classed, like flowers,

with free beauties. This would certainly seem to exclude them from

Aesthetic, which, according to Kant, should combine imagination and

intelligence.

Kant is shut in with intellectualist barriers. A complete definition of

the _imagination_ is _wanting_ to his system. He does not admit that the

imagination belongs to the powers of the mind. He relegates it to the

facts of sensation. He is aware of the reproductive and combinative

imagination, but he does not recognize _fancy_ (_fantasia_), which is

the true productive imagination.

Yet Kant was aware that there exists an activity other than the

intellective. Intuition is referred to by him as preceding intellective

activity and differing from sensation. He does not speak of it, however,

in his critique of art, but in the first section of the _Critique of

Pure Reason_. Sensations do not enter the mind, until it has given them

_form_. This is neither sensation nor intelligence. It is _pure

intuition_, the sum of the _a priori_ principles of sensibility. He

speaks thus: "There must, then, exist a science that forms the first

part of the transcendental doctrine of the elements, distinct from that

which contains the principles of pure thought and is called

transcendental Logic."

What does he call this new science? He calls it _Transcendental

Aesthetic_, and refuses to allow the term to be used for the Critique of

Taste, which could never become a science.

But although he thus states so clearly the necessity of a science of the

form of the sensations, that is of _pure intuition_, Kant here appears

to fall into grave error. This arises from _his inexact idea_ of the

_essence of the aesthetic faculty or of art_, which, as we now know, is

pure intuition. He conceives the form of sensibility to be reducible to

the _two categories of space and time_.

Benedetto Croce has shown that space and time are far from being

categories or functions: they are complex posterior formations. Kant,

however, looked upon density, colour, etc., as material for sensations;

but the mind only observes colour or hardness when it has _already_

given a form to its sensations. Sensations, in so far as they are _crude

matter_, are _outside_ the mind: they are a _limit_. Colour, hardness,

density, etc., are _already_ intuitions. _They are the aesthetic

activity in its rudimentary manifestation._

Characterizing or qualifying imagination, that is, _aesthetic activity_,

should therefore _take the place occupied by the study of space and

time_ in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and constitute the true

_Transcendental Aesthetic_, prologue to Logic.

Had Kant done this, he would have surpassed Leibnitz and Baumgarten; he

would have equalled Vico.

Kant did not identify the Beautiful with art. He established what he

called "the four moments of Beauty," amounting to a definition of it.

The two negative moments are, "That is beautiful which pleases _without

interest_"; this thesis was directed against the sensualist school of

English writers, with whom Kant had for a time agreed; and "That is

beautiful which pleases without a concept," directed against the

intellectualists. Thus he affirmed the existence of a spiritual domain,

distinct from that of organic pleasure, of the useful, the good, and the

true. The two other moments are, "That is beautiful which has the form

of finality without the representation of an end," and "That is

beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure." What is this

disinterested pleasure that we experience before pure colours, pure

sounds, and flowers? Benedetto Croce replies that this mysterious domain

has no existence; that the instances cited represent, either instances

of organic pleasure, or are artistic facts of expression.

Kant was less severe with the Neoplatonicians than with the two schools

of thought above mentioned. His _Critique of Judgment_ contains some

curious passages, in one of which he gives his distinction of form from

matter: "In music, the melody is the matter, harmony the form: in a

flower, the scent is the matter, the shape or configuration the form."

In the other arts, he found that the design was the essential. "Not what

pleases in sensation, but what is approved for its form, is the

foundation of taste."

In his pursuit of the phantom of a beauty, which is neither that of art

nor of sensual pleasure, exempt alike from expression and from

enjoyment, he became enveloped in inextricable contradictions. Little

disposed as he was to let himself be carried away by the imagination, he

expressed his contempt for philosopher-poets like Herder, and kept

saying and unsaying, affirming and then immediately criticizing his own

affirmations as to this mysterious beauty. The truth is that _this

mystery is simply his own individual uncertainty before a problem which

he could not solve_, owing to his having no clear idea of an activity of

sentiment. Such an activity represented for him a logical contradiction.

Such expressions as "necessary universal pleasure," "finality without

the idea of end," are verbal proofs of his uncertainty.

How was he to emerge from this uncertainty, this contradiction? He fell

back upon the concept of a base of subjective finality as the base of

the judgment of taste, that is of the subjective finality of nature by

the judgment. But nothing can be known or disclosed to the object by

means of this concept, which is indeterminate in itself and not adapted

for knowledge. Its determining reason is perhaps situated in "the

suprasensible substratum of humanity." Thus beauty becomes a symbol of

morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is, the indeterminate

idea of the suprasensible in us, can be indicated as the sole key to

reveal this faculty, which remains unknown to us in its origin. Nothing

but this principle can make that hidden faculty comprehensible."

Kant had a tendency to mysticism, which this statement does not serve to

conceal, but it was a mysticism without enthusiasm, a mysticism almost

against the grain. His failure to penetrate thoroughly the nature of the

aesthetic activity led him to see double and even triple, on several

occasions. Art being unknown to him in its essential nature, he invents

the functions of _space_ and _time_ and terms this _transcendental

aesthetic_; he develops the theory of the imaginative beautifying of the

intellectual concept by genius; he is finally forced to admit a

mysterious power of feeling, intermediate between the theoretic and the

practical activity. This power is cognoscitive and non-cognoscitive,

moral and indifferent to morality, agreeable and yet detached from the

pleasure of the senses. His successors hastened to make use of this

mysterious power, for they were glad to be able to find some sort of

justification for their bold speculations in the severe philosopher of

Königsberg.

In addition to Schelling and Hegel, for whom, as has been said, the

_Critique of Judgment_ seemed the most important of the three Critiques,

we must now mention the name of a poet who showed himself as great in

philosophical as in aesthetic achievement.

_Friedrich Schiller_ first elaborated that portion of the Kantian

thought contained in the _Critique of Judgment_. Before any professional

philosopher, Schiller studied that sphere of activity which unites

feeling with reason. Hegel talks with admiration of this artistic

genius, who was also so profoundly philosophical and first announced the

principle of reconciliation between life as duty and reason on the one

hand, and the life of the senses and feeling on the other.

To Schiller belongs the great merit of having opposed the subjective

idealism of Kant and of having made the attempt to surpass it.

The exact relations between Kant and Schiller, and the extent to which

the latter may have been influenced by Leibnitz and Herder, are of less

importance to the history of Aesthetic than the fact that Schiller

_unified_ once for all art and beauty, which had been separated by Kant,

with his distinctions between adherent and pure beauty. Schiller's

artistic sense must doubtless have stood him here in good stead.

Schiller found a very unfortunate and misleading term to apply to the

aesthetic sphere. He called it the sphere of _play_ (Spiel). He strove

to explain that by this he did not mean ordinary games, nor material

amusement. For Schiller, this sphere of play lay intermediate between

thought and feeling. Necessity in art gives place to a free disposition

of forces; mind and nature, matter and form are here reconciled. The

beautiful is life, but not physiological life. A beautiful statue may

have life, and a living man be without it. Art conquers nature with

form. The great artist effaces matter with form. The less we are

sensible of the material in a work of art, the greater the triumph of

the artist. The soul of the spectator should leave the magic sphere of

art as pure and as perfect as when it left the hands of the Creator. The

most frivolous theme should be so treated that we can pass at once from

it to the most rigorous, and _vice versa_. Only when man has placed

himself outside the world and contemplates it aesthetically, can he know

the world. While he is merely the passive receiver of sensations, he is

one with the world, and therefore cannot realize it. Art is

indeterminism. With the help of art, man delivers himself from the yoke

of the senses, and is at the same time free of any rational or moral

duty: he may enjoy for a moment the luxury of serene contemplation.

Schiller was well aware that the moment art is employed to teach morals

directly, it ceases to be art. All other teachings give to the soul a

special imprint. Art alone is favourable to all without prejudice. Owing

to this indifference of art, it possesses a great educative power, by

opening the path to morality without preaching or persuasion; without

determining, it produces determinability. This was the main theme of the

celebrated "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man," which Schiller

wrote to his patron the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg. Here, and in his

lectures at the University of Jena, it is clear that Schiller addresses

himself to a popular audience. He began a work, on scientific Aesthetic,

which he intended to entitle "Kallias," but unfortunately died without

completing it. We possess only a few fragments, contained in his

correspondence with his friend Körner. Körner did not feel satisfied

with the formula of Schiller, and asks for some more precise and

objective mark of the beautiful. Schiller tells him that he has found

it, but what he had found we shall never know, as there is no document

to inform us.

The fault of Schiller's aesthetic theory was its lack of precision. His

artistic faculty enabled him to give unsurpassable descriptions of the

catharsis and of other effects of art, but he fails to give a precise

definition of the aesthetic function. True, he disassociates it from

morality, yet admits that it may in a measure be associated with it. The

only formal activities that he recognizes are the moral and the

intellectual, and he denies altogether (against the sensualists) that

art can have anything to do with passion or sensuality. His intellectual

world consisted only of the logical and the intellectual, leaving out

the imaginative activity.

What is art for Schiller? He admits four modes of relation between man

and external things. They are the physical, the logical, the moral, and

the aesthetic. He describes this latter as a mode by which things affect

the whole of our different forces, without being a definite object for

any one in particular. Thus a man may be said to please aesthetically,

"when he does so without appealing to any one of the senses directly,

and without any law or end being thought of in connection with him."

Schiller cannot be made to say anything more definite than this. His

general position was probably much like Kant's (save in the case above

mentioned, where he made a happy correction), and he probably looked

upon Aesthetic as a mingling of several faculties, as a play of

sentiment.

Schiller was faithful to Kant's teaching in its main lines, and his

uncertainty was largely due to this. The existence of a _third sphere_

uniting form and matter was for Schiller rather an ideal conformable to

reason than a _definite_ activity; it was supposititious, rather than

effective.

But the Romantic movement in literature, which was at that time gaining

ground, with its belief in a superhuman faculty called imagination, in

genius breaker of rules, found no such need for restraint. Schiller's

modest reserve was set aside, and with J.P. Richter we approach a

mythology of the imagination. Many of his observations are, however,

just, and his distinction between productive and reproductive

imagination is excellent. How could humanity appreciate works of genius,

he asks, were it without some common measure? All men who can go as far

as saying "this is beautiful" before a beautiful thing, are capable of

the latter. He then proceeds to establish to his own satisfaction

categories of the imagination, leading from simple talent to the supreme

form of male genius in which all faculties flourish together: a faculty

of faculties.

The Romantic conception of art is, in substance, that of idealist German

philosophy, where we find it in a more coherent and systematic form. It

is the conception of Schelling, Solger, and Hegel.

Fichte, Kant's first great pupil, cannot be included with these, for his

view of Aesthetic, largely influenced by Schiller, is transformed in the

Fichtian system to a moral activity, to a representation of the ethical

ideal. The subjective idealism of Fichte, however, generated an

Aesthetic: that of irony as the base of art. The I that has created the

universe can also destroy it. The universe is a vain appearance, smiled

at by the Ego its creator, who surveys it as an artist his work, from

without and from above. For Friedrich Schlegel, art was a perpetual

farce, a parody of itself; and Tieck defined irony as a force which

allows the poet to dominate his material.

Novalis, that Romantic Fichtian, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art

of creating by an instantaneous act of the Ego. But Schelling's "system

of transcendental idealism" was the first great philosophical

affirmation of Romanticism and of conscious Neo-platonism reborn in

Aesthetic.

Schelling has obviously studied Schiller, but he brings to the problem a

mind more purely philosophical and a method more exactly scientific. He

even takes Kant to task for faultiness of method. His remarks as to

Plato's position are curious, if not conclusive. He says that Plato

condemned the art of his time, because it was realistic and

naturalistic: like all antique art, it exhibited a _finite_ character.

Plato's judgment would have been quite different had he known Christian

art, of which the character is _infinity_.

Schelling held firm to the fusion of art and beauty effected by

Schiller, but he combated Winckelmann's theory of abstract beauty with

its negative conception of the characteristic, assigning to art the

limits of the individual. Art is characteristic beauty; it is not the

individual, but the living conception of the individual. When the artist

recognizes the eternal idea in an individual, and expresses it

outwardly, he transforms the individual into a world apart, into a

species, into an eternal idea. Characteristic beauty is the fulness of

form which slays form: it does not silence passion, but restrains it as

the banks of a river the waters that flow between them, but do not

overflow.

Schelling's starting-point is the criticism of teleological judgment, as

stated by Kant in his third Critique. Teleology is the union of

theoretic with practical philosophy. But the system would not be

complete, unless we could show the identity of the two worlds, theoretic

and practical, in the subject itself. He must demonstrate the existence

of an activity, which is at once unconscious as nature and conscious as

spirit. This activity we find in Aesthetic, which is therefore "the

general organ of philosophy, the keystone of the whole building."

Poetry and philosophy alone possess the world of the ideal, in which the

real world vanishes. True art is not the impression of the moment, but

the representation of infinite life: it is transcendental intuition

objectified. The time will come when philosophy will return to poetry,

which was its source, and on the new philosophy will arise a new

mythology. Philosophy does not depict real things, but their ideas; so

too, art. Those same ideas, of which real things are, as philosophy

shows, the imperfect copies, reappear in art objectified as ideas, and

therefore in their perfection. Art stands nearest to philosophy, which

itself stands nearest to the Idea, and therefore nearest to perfection.

Art differs from philosophy only by its _specialization_: in all other

ways it is the ideal world in its most complete expression. The three

Ideas of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty correspond to the three powers of

the ideal and of the real world. Beauty is not the universal whole,

which is truth, nor is it the only reality, which is action: it is the

perfect mingling of the two. "Beauty exists where the real or particular

is so adequate to its concept that this infinite thing enters into the

finite, and is contemplated in the concrete." Philosophy unites truth,

morality, and beauty, in what they possess in common, and deduces them

from their unique Source, which is God. If philosophy assume the

character of science and of truth, although it be superior to truth, the

reason for this lies in the fact that science and truth are simply the

formal determination of philosophy.

Schelling looked upon mythology as a necessity for every art. Ideas are

Gods, considered from the point of view of reality; for the essence of

each is equal to God in a _particular_ form. The characteristics of all

Gods, including the Christian, are _pure limitation and absolute

indivisibility_. Minerva has wisdom and strength, but lacks womanly

tenderness; Juno has power and wisdom, but is without amorous charm,

which she borrows with the girdle of Venus, who in her turn is without

the wisdom of Minerva. What would these Gods become without their

limitations? They would cease to be the objects of Fancy. Fancy is a

faculty, apart from the pure intellect and from the reason. Distinct

from imagination, which develops the products of art, Fancy has

intuitions of them, grasps them herself, and herself represents them.

Fancy is to imagination as intellectual intuition is to reason. Fancy,

then, is intellectual intuition in art. In the thought of Schelling,

fancy, the new or artistic intuition, sister of intellectual intuition,

came to dominate alike the intellect and the old conception of the fancy

and the imagination, in a system for which reason alone did not suffice.

C.G. Solger followed Schelling and agreed with him in finding but little

truth in the theories of Kant, and especially of Fichte. He held that

their dialectic had failed to solve the difficulty of intellectual

intuition. He too conceived of fancy as distinct from imagination, and

divided the former into three degrees. Imagination he held to appertain

to ordinary knowledge, "which re-establishes the original intuition to

infinity." Fancy "originates from the original antithesis in the idea,

and so operates that the opposing elements which are separated from the

idea become perfectly united in reality. By means of fancy, we are able

to understand things more lofty than those of common knowledge, and in

them we recognize the idea itself as real. In art, fancy is the faculty

of transforming the idea into reality."

For Solger as for Schelling, beauty belongs to the region of Ideas,

which are inaccessible to common knowledge. Art is nearly allied to

religion, for as religion is the abyss of the idea, into which our

consciousness plunges, that it may become essential, so Art and the

Beautiful resolve, in their way, the world of distinctions, the

universal and the particular. Artistic activity is more than

theoretical: it is practical, realized and perfect, and therefore

belongs to practical, not to theoretic philosophy, as Kant wrongly

believed. Since art must touch infinity on one side, it cannot have

ordinary nature for its object. Art therefore _ceases_ in the portrait,

and this explains why the ancients generally chose Gods or Heroes as

models for sculpture. Every deity, even in a limited and particular

form, expresses a definite modification of the Idea.

G.G.F. Hegel gives the same definition of art as Solger and Schelling,

All three were mystical aestheticians, and the various shades of

mystical Aesthetic, presented by these three writers, are not of great

interest. Schelling forced upon art the abstract Platonic ideas, while

Hegel reduced it to the _concrete idea_. This concrete idea was for

Hegel the first and lowest of the three forms of the liberty of the

spirit. It represented immediate, sensible, objectified knowledge; while

Religion filled the second place, as representative consciousness with

adoration, which is an element foreign to art alone. The third place was

of course occupied by Philosophy, the free thought of the absolute

spirit. Beauty and Truth are one for Hegel; they are united in the Idea.

The beautiful he defined as _the sensible appearance of the Idea_.

Some writers have erroneously believed that the views of the three

philosophers above mentioned lead back to those of Baumgarten. But that

is not correct. They well understood that art cannot be made a medium

for the expression of philosophic concepts. Not only are they opposed to

the moralistic and intellectualistic view, but they are its active

opponents. Schelling says that aesthetic production is in its essence

absolutely free, and Hegel that art does not contain the universal as

such.

Hegel accentuated the _cognoscitive_ character of art, more than any of

his predecessors. We have seen that he placed it with Philosophy and

Religion in the sphere of the absolute Spirit. But he does not allow

either to Art or to Religion any difference of function from that of

Philosophy, which occupies the highest place in his system. They are

therefore inferior, necessary, grades of the Spirit. Of what use are

they? Of none whatever, or at best, they merely represent transitory and

historical phases of human life.

Thus we see that the tendency of Hegelianism is _anti-artistic_, as it

is rationalistic and anti-religious.

This result of thought was a strange and a sad thing for one who loved

art so fervently as Hegel. Our memories conjure up Plato, who also loved

art well, and yet found himself logically obliged to banish the poet

from his ideal Republic, after crowning him with roses. But the German

philosopher was as staunch to the (supposed) command of reason as the

Greek, and felt himself obliged to announce the death of art. Art, he

says, occupies a lofty place in the human spirit, but not the most

lofty, for it is limited to a restricted content and only a certain

grade of truth can be expressed in art. Such are the Hellenic Gods, who

can be transfused in the sensible and appear in it adequately. The

Christian conception of truth is among those which cannot be so

expressed. The spirit of the modern world, and more precisely the spirit

of our religion and rational development, seem to have gone beyond the

point at which art is the chief way of apprehending the Absolute. The

peculiarity of artistic production no longer satisfies our highest

needs. Thought and reflexion have surpassed art, the beautiful. He goes

on to say that the reason generally given for this is the prevalence of

material and political interests. But the true reason is the inferiority

in degree of art as compared with pure thought. Art is dead, and

Philosophy can therefore supply its complete biography.

Hegel's _Vorlesungen Über Aesthetik_ amounts therefore to a funeral

oration upon Art.

Romanticism and metaphysical idealism had placed art, sometimes above

the clouds, sometimes within them, and believing that it was no good

there to anyone, Hegel provided a decent burial.

Nothing perhaps better shows how well this fantastic conception of art

suited the spirit of the time, than the fact that even the adversaries

of Schelling, Solger, and Hegel either admit agreement with that

conception, or find themselves involuntarily in agreement with it, while

believing themselves to be very remote. They too are mystical

aestheticians.

We all know with what virulence Arthur Schopenhauer attacked and

combated Schelling, Hegel, and all the "charlatans" and "professors" who

had divided among them the inheritance of Kant.

Well, Schopenhauer's theory of art starts, just like Hegel's, from the

difference between the abstract and the concrete concept, which is the

_Idea_. Schopenhauer's ideas are the Platonic ideas, although in the

form which he gives to them, they have a nearer resemblance to the Ideas

of Schelling than to the Idea of Hegel.

Schopenhauer takes much trouble to differentiate his ideas from

intellectual concepts. He calls the idea "unity which has become

plurality by means of space and time. It is the form of our intuitive

apperception. The concept is, on the contrary, unity extracted from

plurality by means of abstraction, which is an act of our intellect. The

concept may be called _unitas post rem_, the idea _unitas ante rem_."

The origin of this psychological illusion of the ideas or types of

things is always to be found in the changing of the empirical

classifications created for their own purposes by the natural sciences,

into living realities.

Thus each art has for its sphere a special category of ideas.

Architecture and its derivatives, gardening (and strange to say

landscape-painting is included with it), sculpture and animal-painting,

historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture, etc., all possess

their special ideas. Poetry's chief object is man as idea. Music, on the

contrary, does not belong to the hierarchy of the other arts. Schelling

had looked upon music as expressing the rhythm of the universe itself.

For Schopenhauer, music does not express ideas, but the _Will itself_.

The analogies between music and the world, between fundamental notes and

crude matter, between the scale and the scale of species, between melody

and conscious will, lead Schopenhauer to the conclusion that music is

not only an arithmetic, as it appeared to Leibnitz, but indeed a

metaphysic: "the occult metaphysical exercise of a soul not knowing that

it philosophizes."

For Schopenhauer, as for his idealist predecessors, art is beatific. It

is the flower of life; he who is plunged in artistic contemplation

ceases to be an individual; he is the conscious subject, pure, freed

from will, from pain, and from time.

Yet in Schopenhauer's system exist elements for a better and a more

profound treatment of the problem of art. He could sometimes show

himself to be a lucid and acute analyst. For instance, he continually

remarks that the categories of space and time are not applicable to art,

_but only the general form of representation_. He might have deduced

from this that art is the most immediate, not the most lofty grade of

consciousness, since it precedes even the ordinary perceptions of space

and time. Vico had already observed that this freeing oneself from

ordinary perception, this dwelling in imagination, does not really mean

an ascent to the level of the Platonic Ideas, but, on the contrary, a

redescending to the sphere of immediate intuition, a return to

childhood.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer had begun to submit the Kantian

categories to impartial criticism, and finding the two forms of

intuition insufficient, added a third, causality.

He also drew comparisons between art and history, and was more

successful here than the idealist excogitators of a philosophy of

history. Schopenhauer rightly saw that history was irreducible to

concepts, that it is the contemplation of the individual, and therefore

not a science. Having proceeded thus far, he might have gone further,

and realized that the material of history is always the particular in

its particularity, that of art what is and always is identical. But he

preferred to execute a variation on the general motive that was in

fashion at this time.

The fashion of the day! It rules in philosophy as elsewhere, and we are

now about to see the most rigid and arid of analysts, the leader of the

so-called _realist_ school, or school of _exact science_ in Germany in

the nineteenth century, plunge headlong into aesthetic mysticism.

G.F. Herbart (1813) begins his Aesthetic by freeing it from the

discredit attaching to Metaphysic and to Psychology. He declares that

the only true way of understanding art is to study particular examples

of the beautiful and to note what they reveal as to its essence.

We shall now see what came of Herbart's analysis of these examples of

beauty, and how far he succeeded in remaining free of Metaphysic.

For Herbart, beauty consists of _relations_. The science of Aesthetic

consists of an enumeration of all the fundamental relations between

colours, lines, tones, thoughts, and will. But for him these relations

are not empirical or physiological. They cannot therefore be studied in

a laboratory, because thought and the will form part of them, and these

belong as much to Ethics as to the external world. But Herbart

explicitly states that no true beauty is sensible, although sensation

may and does often precede and follow the intuition of beauty. There is

a profound distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable or

pleasant: the latter does not require a representation, while the former

consists in representations of relations, which are immediately followed

by a judgment expressing unconditioned approval. Thus the merely

pleasurable becomes more and more indifferent, but the beautiful appears

always as of more and more permanent value. The judgment of taste is

universal, eternal, immutable. The complete representation of the same

relations always carries with it the same judgment. For Herbart,

aesthetic judgments are the general class containing the sub-class of

ethical judgments. The five ethical ideas, of internal liberty, of

perfection, of benevolence, of equity, and of justice, are five

aesthetic ideas; or better, they are aesthetic concepts applied to the

will in its relations.

Herbart looked upon art as a complex fact, composed of an external

element possessing logical or psychological value, the content, and of a

true aesthetic element, which is the form. Entertainment, instruction,

and pleasure of all sorts are mingled with the beautiful, in order to

obtain favour for the work in question. The aesthetic judgment, calm and

serene in itself, may be accompanied by all sorts of psychic emotions,

foreign to it. But the content is always transitory, relative, subject

to moral laws, and judged by them. The form alone is perennial,

absolute, and free. The true catharsis can only be effected by

separating the form from the content. Concrete art may be the sum of two

values, _but the aesthetic fact is form alone_.

For those capable of penetrating beneath appearances, the aesthetic

doctrines of Herbart and of Kant will appear very similar. Herbart is

notable as insisting, in the manner of Kant, on the distinction between

free and adherent beauty (or adornment as sensuous stimulant), on the

existence of pure beauty, object of necessary and universal judgments,

and on a certain mingling of ethical with his aesthetic theory. Herbart,

indeed, called himself "a Kantian, but of the year 1828." Kant's

aesthetic theory, though it be full of errors, yet is rich in fruitful

suggestions. Kant belongs to a period when philosophy is still young and

pliant. Herbart came later, and is dry and one-sided. The romantics and

the metaphysical idealists had unified the theory of the beautiful and

of art. Herbart restored the old duality and mechanism, and gave us an

absurd, unfruitful form of mysticism, void of all artistic inspiration.

Herbart may be said to have taken all there was of false in the thought

of Kant and to have made it into a system.

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany is notable for the

great number of philosophical theories and of counter-theories, broached

and rapidly discussed, before being discarded. None of the most

prominent names in the period belong to philosophers of first-rate

importance, though they made so much stir in their day.

The thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher was obscured and misunderstood

amid those crowding mediocrities; yet it is perhaps the most interesting

and the most noteworthy of the period.

Schleiermacher looked upon Aesthetic as an altogether modern form of

thought. He perceived a profound difference between the "Poetics" of

Aristotle, not yet freed from empirical precepts, and the tentative of

Baumgarten in the eighteenth century. He praised Kant as having been the

first to include Aesthetic among the philosophical disciplines. He

admitted that with Hegel it had attained to the highest pinnacle, being

connected with religion and with philosophy, and almost placed upon

their level.

But he was dissatisfied with the absurdity of the attempt made by the

followers of Baumgarten to construct a science or theory of sensuous

pleasure. He disapproved of Kant's view of taste as being the principle

of Aesthetic, of Fichte's art as moral teaching, and of the vague

conception of the beautiful as the centre of Aesthetic.

He approved of Schiller's marking of the moment of spontaneity in

productive art, and he praised Schelling for having drawn attention to

the figurative arts, as being less liable than poetry to be diverted to

false and illusory moralistic ends. Before he begins the study of the

place due to the artistic activity in Ethic, he carefully excludes from

the study of Aesthetic all practical rules (which, being empirical, are

incapable of scientific demonstration).

For Schleiermacher, the sphere of Ethic included the whole Philosophy of

the Spirit, in addition to morality. These are the two forms of human

activity--that which, like Logic, is the same in all men, and is called

activity of identity, and the activity of difference or individuality.

There are activities which, like art, are internal or immanent and

individual, and others which are external or practical. _The true work

of art is the internal picture_. Measure is what differentiates the

artist's portrayal of anger on the stage and the anger of a really angry

man. Truth is not sought in poetry, or if it be sought there, it is

truth of an altogether different kind. The truth of poetry lies in

coherent presentation. Likeness to a model does not compose the merit of

a picture. Not the smallest amount of knowledge comes from art, which

expresses only the truth of a particular consciousness. Art has for its

field the immediate consciousness of self, which must be carefully

distinguished from the thought of the Ego. This last is the

consciousness of identity in the diversity of moments as they pass; the

immediate consciousness of self is the diversity itself of the moments,

of which we should be aware, for life is nothing but the development of

consciousness. In this field, art has sometimes been confused with two

facts which accompany it there: these are sentient consciousness (that

is, the feelings of pleasure and of pain) and religion. Schleiermacher

here alludes to the sensualistic aestheticians of the eighteenth

century, and to Hegel, who had almost identified art and religion. He

refutes both points of view by pointing out that sentient pleasure and

religious sentiment, however different they may be from other points of

view, are yet both determined by an objective fact; while art, on the

contrary, is free productivity.

Dream is the best parallel and proof of this free productivity. All the

essential elements of art are found in dream, which is the result of

free thoughts and of sensible intuitions, consisting simply of images.

But dream, as compared with art, is chaotic: when measure and order is

established in dream, it becomes art. Thoughts and images are alike

essential to art, and to both is necessary ponderation, reflexion,

measure, and unity, because otherwise every image would be confused with

every other image. Thus the moments of inspiration and of ponderation

are both necessary to art.

Schleiermacher's thought, so firm and lucid up to this point, begins to

become less secure, with the discussion of typicity and of the extent to

which the artist should follow Nature. He says that ideal figures, which

Nature would give, were she not impeded by external obstacles, are the

products of art. He notes that when the artist represents something

really given, such as a portrait or a landscape, he renounces freedom of

production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency,

toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of

natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type,

nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels

all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several

ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the

sphere of art, and we may ask whether the poet is to represent only the

ideal, or whether he should also deal with those obstacles to it that

impede Nature in her efforts to attain. Both views contain half the

truth. To art belongs the representation of the ideal as of the real, of

the subjective and of the objective alike. The representation of the

comic, that is of the anti-ideal and of the imperfect ideal, belongs to

the domain of art. For the human form, both morally and physically,

oscillates between the ideal and caricature.

He arrives at a most important definition as to the independence of art

in respect to morality. The nature of art, as of philosophic

speculation, excludes moral and practical effects. Therefore, _there is

no other difference between works of art than their respective artistic

perfection (Vollkommenheit in der Kunst)_. If we could correctly

predicate volitional acts in respect of works of art, then we should

find ourselves admiring only those works which stimulated the will, and

there would thus be established a difference of valuation, independent

of artistic perfection. The true work of art depends upon the degree of

perfection with which the external in it agrees with the internal.

Schleiermacher rightly combats Schiller's view that art is in any sense

a game. That, he says, is the view held by mere men of business, to whom

business alone is serious. But artistic activity is universal, and a man

completely deprived of it unthinkable, although the difference here

between man and man, is gigantic, ranging from the simple desire to

taste of art to the effective tasting of it, and from this, by infinite

gradations, to productive genius.