in an imperfect form, may account for certain of its defects, such as
his failure to eliminate aesthetic classes and types, his retention of a
certain residue of abstract formalism, his definition of art as the
activity of difference. Had he better defined the moment of artistic
reproduction, realized the possibility of tasting the art of various
times and of other nations, and examined the true relation of art to
science, he would have seen that this difference is merely empirical and
to be surmounted. He failed also to recognize the identity of the
aesthetic activity, with language as the base of all other theoretic
activity.
But Schleiermacher's merits far outweigh these defects. He removed from
Aesthetic its _imperativistic_ character; he distinguished _a form of
thought_ different from logical thought. He attributed to our science a
_non-metaphysical, anthropological_ character. He _denied_ the concept
of the beautiful, substituting for it _artistic perfection_, and
maintaining the aesthetic equality of a small with a great work of art,
he looked upon the aesthetic fact as an exclusively _human
productivity_.
Thus Schleiermacher, the theologian, in this period of metaphysical
orgy, of rapidly constructed and as rapidly destroyed systems,
perceived, with the greatest philosophical acumen, what is really
characteristic of art, and distinguished its properties and relations.
Even where he fails to see clearly his way, he never abandons analysis
for mere guess-work.
Schleiermacher, thus exploring the obscure region of the _immediate
consciousness_, or of the aesthetic fact, can almost be heard crying out
to his straying contemporaries: _Hic Rhodus, hi salta_!
Speculation upon the origin and nature of language was rife at this time
in Germany. Many theories were put forward, among the most curious being
that of Schelling, who held language and mythology to be the product of
a pre-human consciousness, allegorically expressed as the diabolic
suggestions which had precipitated the Ego from the infinite to the
finite.
Even Wilhelm von Humboldt was unable to free himself altogether from the
intellectualistic prejudice of the substantial identity and the merely
historical and accidental diversity of logical thought and language. He
speaks of a _perfect_ language, broken up and diminished with the lesser
capacities of lesser peoples. He believed that language is something
standing outside the individual, independent of him, and capable of
being revived by use. But there were two men in Humboldt, an old man and
a young one. The latter was always suggesting that language should be
looked upon as a living, not as a dead thing, as an activity, not as a
word. This duality of thought sometimes makes his writing difficult and
obscure. Although he speaks of an internal form of speech, he fails to
identify this with art as expression. The reason is that he looks upon
the word in too unilateral a manner, as a means of developing logical
thought, and his ideas of Aesthetic are too vague and too inexact to
enable him to discover their identity. Despite his perception of the
profound truth that poetry precedes prose, Humboldt gives grounds for
doubt as to whether he had clearly recognized and firmly grasped the
fact that language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a
distinction, not of aesthetic form, but of content, that is, of logical
form.
Steinthal, the greatest follower of Humboldt, solved his master's
contradictions, and in 1855 sustained successfully against the Hegelian
Becker the thesis that words are necessary for thought. He pointed to
the deaf-mute with his signs, to the mathematician with his formulae, to
the Chinese language, where the figurative portion is an essential of
speech, and declared that Becker was wrong in believing that the
Sanskrit language was derived from twelve cardinal concepts. He showed
effectively that the concept and the word, the logical judgment and the
proposition, are not comparable. The proposition is not a judgment, but
the representation of a judgment; and all propositions do not represent
logical judgments. Several judgments can be expressed with one
proposition. The logical divisions of judgments (the relations of
concepts) have no correspondence in the grammatical division of
propositions. "If we speak of a logical form of the proposition, we fall
into a contradiction in terms not less complete than his who should
speak of the angle of a circle, or of the periphery of a triangle." He
who speaks, in so far as he speaks, has not thoughts, but language.
When Steinthal had several times solemnly proclaimed the independence of
language as regards Logic, and that it produces its forms in complete
autonomy, he proceeded to seek the origin of language, recognizing with
Humboldt that the question of Its origin is the same as that of its
nature. Language, he said, belongs to the great class of reflex
movements, but this only shows one side of it, not its true nature.
Animals, like men, have reflex actions and sensations, though nature
enters the animal by force, takes it by assault, conquers and enslaves
it. With man is born language, because he is resistance to nature,
governance of his own body, and liberty. "Language is liberation; even
to-day we feel that our soul becomes lighter, and frees itself from a
weight, when we speak." Man, before he attains to speech, must be
conceived of as accompanying all his sensations with bodily movements,
mimetic attitudes, gestures, and particularly with articulate sounds.
What is still lacking to him, that he may attain to speech? The
connexion between the reflex movements of the body and the state of the
soul. If his sentient consciousness be already consciousness, then he
lacks the consciousness of consciousness; if it be already intuition,
then he lacks the intuition of intuition. In sum, he lacks the _internal
form of language_. With this comes speech, which forms the connexion.
Man does not choose the sound of his speech. This is given to him and he
adopts it instinctively.
When we have accorded to Steinthal the great merit of having rendered
coherent the ideas of Humboldt, and of having clearly separated
linguistic from logical thought, we must note that he too failed to
perceive the _identity_ of the internal form of language, or "intuition
of the intuition," as he called it, with the aesthetic _imagination_.
Herbart's psychology, to which Steinthal adhered, did not afford him any
means for this identification. Herbart separated logic from psychology,
calling it a normative science; he failed to discern the exact limits
between feeling and spiritual formation, psyche or soul, and spirit, and
to see that one of these spiritual formations is logical thought or
activity, which is not a code of laws imposed from without. For Herbart,
Aesthetic, as we know, was a code of beautiful formal relations. Thus
Steinthal, following Herbart in psychology, was bound to look upon Art
as a beautifying of thought, Linguistic as the science of speech,
Rhetoric and Aesthetic as the science of beautiful speech.
Steinthal never realized that to speak is to speak well or beautifully,
under penalty of _not_ speaking, and that the revolution which he and
Humboldt had effected in the conception of language must inevitably
react upon and transform Poetic, Rhetoric, and Aesthetic.
Thus, despite so many efforts of conscientious analysis on the part of
Humboldt and of Steinthal, the unity of language and of poetry, and the
identification of the science of language and the science of poetry
still found its least imperfect expression in the prophetic aphorisms of
Vico.
The philosophical movement in Germany from the last quarter of the
eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth, notwithstanding
its many errors, is yet so notable and so imposing with the philosophers
already considered, as to merit the first place in the European thought
of that period. This is even more the case as regards Aesthetic than as
regards philosophy in general.
France was the prey of Condillac's sensualism, and therefore incapable
of duly appreciating the spiritual activity of art. We hardly get a
glimpse of Winckelmann's transcendental spiritualism in Quatremère de
Quincy, and the frigid academics of Victor Cousin were easily surpassed
by Theodore Jouffroy, though he too failed of isolating the aesthetic
fact. French Romanticism defined literature as "the expression of
society," admired under German influence the grotesque and the
characteristic, declared the independence of art in the formula of "art
for art's sake," but did not succeed in surpassing philosophically the
old doctrine of the "imitation of nature." F. Schlegel and Solger indeed
were largely responsible for the Romantic movement in France--Schlegel
with his belief in the characteristic or _interesting_ as the principle
of modern art, which led him to admire the cruel and the ugly; Solger
with his dialectic arrangement, whereby the finite or terrestrial
element is absorbed and annihilated in the divine and thus becomes the
tragic, or _vice versa_, and the result is the comic. Rosenkranz
published in Königsberg an Aesthetic of the Ugly, and the works of
Vischer and Zeising abound in subtleties relating to the Idea and to its
expression in the beautiful and sublime. These writers conceived of the
Idea as the Knight Purebeautiful, constrained to abandon his tranquil
ease through the machinations of the Ugly; the Ugly leads him into all
sorts of disagreeable adventures, from all of which he eventually
emerges victorious. The Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous, and so on, are
his Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. Another version of their knight's
adventures might be described as his conquest by his enemies, but at the
moment of conquest he transforms and irradiates his conquerors. To such
a mediocre and artificial mythology led the much-elaborated theory of
the Modifications of the Beautiful.
In England, the associationist psychology continued to hold sway, and
showed, with Dugald Stewart's miserable attempt at establishing two
forms of association, its incapacity to rise to the conception of the
imagination. With the poet Coleridge, England also showed the influence
of German thought, and Coleridge elaborated with Wordsworth a more
correct conception of poetry and of its difference from science. But the
most notable contribution in English at that period came from another
poet, P.B. Shelley, whose _Defence of Poetry_ contains profound, though
unsystematic views, as to the distinction between reason and
imagination, prose and poetry, on primitive language, and on the poetic
power of objectification.
In Italy, Francesco de Sanctis gave magnificent expression to the
independence of art. He taught literature in Naples from 1838 to 1848,
in Turin and Zurich from 1850 to 1860, and after 1870 he was a professor
in the University of Naples. His _Storia della letteratura italiana_ is
a classic, and in it and in monographs on individual writers he exposed
his doctrines.
Prompted by a natural love of speculation, he began to examine the old
grammarians and rhetoricians, with a view to systematize them. But very
soon he proceeded to criticize and to surpass their theories. The cold
rules of reason did not find favour with him, and he advised young men
to go direct to the original works.
The philosophy of Hegel began to penetrate Italy, and the study of Vico
was again taken up. De Sanctis translated the _Logic_ of Hegel in
prison, where the Bourbon Government had thrown him for his liberalism.
Benard had begun his translation of the _Aesthetic_ of Hegel, and so
completely in harmony was De Sanctis with the thought of this master,
that he is said to have guessed from a study of the first volume what
the unpublished volumes must contain, and to have lectured upon them to
his pupils. Traces of mystical idealism and of Hegelianism persist even
in his later works, and the distinction, which he always maintained,
between imagination and fancy certainly came to him from Hegel and
Schelling. He held fancy alone to be the true poetic faculty.
De Sanctis absorbed all the juice of Hegel, but rejected the husks of
his pedantry, of his formalism, of his apriority.
Fancy for De Sanctis was not the mystical transcendental apperception of
the German philosophers, but simply the faculty of poetic synthesis and
creation, opposed to the imagination, which reunites details and always
has something mechanical about it. Faith and poetry, he used to say, are
not dead, but transformed. His criticism of Hegel amounted in many
places to the correction of Hegel; and as regards Vico, he is careful to
point out, that when, in dealing with the Homeric poems, Vico talks of
generic types, he is no longer the critic of art, but the historian of
civilization. De Sanctis saw that, _artistically_, Achilles must always
be Achilles, never a force or an abstraction.
Thus De Sanctis succeeded in keeping himself free from the Hegelian
domination, at a moment when Hegel was the acknowledged master of
speculation.
But his criticism extended also to other German aestheticians. By a
curious accident, he found himself at Zurich in the company of Theodore
Vischer, that ponderous Hegelian, who laughed disdainfully at the
mention of poetry, of music, and of the decadent Italian race. De
Sanctis laughed at Vischer's laughter. Wagner appeared to him a
corrupter of music, and "nothing in the world more unaesthetic than the
Aesthetic of Theodore Vischer." His lectures on Ariosto and Petrarch,
before an international public at Zurich, were delivered with the desire
of correcting the errors of these and of other German philosophers and
learned men. He gave his celebrated definitions of French and German
critics. The French critic does not indulge in theories: one feels
warmth of impression and sagacity of observation in his argument. He
never leaves the concrete; he divines the quality of the writer's genius
and the quality of his work, and studies the man, in order to understand
the writer. His great fault is shown in substituting for criticism of
the actual art work a historical criticism of the author and of his
time. For the German, on the other hand, there is nothing so simple that
he does not contrive to distort and to confuse it. He collects shadows
around him, from which shoot vivid rays. He laboriously brings to birth
that morsel of truth which he has within him. He would seize and define
what is most fugitive and impalpable in a work of art. Although nobody
talks so much of life as he does, yet no one so much delights in
decomposing and generalizing it. Having thus destroyed the particular,
he is able to show you as the result of this process, final in
appearance, but in reality preconceived and apriorist, one measurement
for all feet, one garment for all bodies.
About this time he studied Schopenhauer, who was then becoming the
fashion. Schopenhauer said of this criticism of De Sanctis: "That
Italian has absorbed me _in succum et sanguinem_." What weight did he
attach to Schopenhauer's much-vaunted writings on art? Having exposed
the theory of Ideas, he barely refers to the third volume, "which
contains an exaggerated theory of Aesthetic."
In his criticism of Petrarch, De Sanctis finally broke with metaphysical
Aesthetic, saying of Hegel's school that it believed the beautiful to
become art when it surpassed form and revealed the concept or pure idea.
This theory and the subtleties derived from it, far from characterizing
art, represent its contrary: the impotent velleity for art, which cannot
slay abstractions and come in contact with life.
De Sanctis held that outside the domain of art all Is shapeless. The
ugly is of the domain of art, if art give it form. Is there anything
more beautiful than Iago? If he be looked upon merely as a contrast to
Othello, then we are in the position of those who looked upon the stars
as placed where they are to serve as candles for the earth.
Form was for De Sanctis the word which should be inscribed over the
entrance to the Temple of Art. In the work of art are form and content,
but the latter is no longer chaotic: the artist has given to it a new
value, has enriched it with the gift of his own personality. But if the
content has not been assimilated and made his own by the artist, then
the work lacks generative power: it is of no value as art or literature,
though as history or scientific document its value may be great. The
Gods of Homer's _Iliad_ are dead, but the _Iliad_ remains. Guelf and
Ghibelline have disappeared from Italy: not so the _Divine Comedy_,
which is as vigorous to-day as when Dante first took pen in hand. Thus
De Sanctis held firmly to the independence of art, but he did not accept
the formula of "art for art's sake," in so far as it meant separation of
the artist from life, mutilation of the content, art reduced to mere
dexterity.
For De Sanctis, form was identical with imagination, with the artist's
power of expressing or representing his artistic vision. This much must
be admitted by his critics. But he never attained to a clear definition
of art. His theory of Aesthetic always remained a sketch: wonderful
indeed, but not clearly developed and deduced. The reason for this was
De Sanctis' love of the concrete. No sooner had he attained from general
ideas a sufficient clarity of vision for his own purposes, than he
plunged again into the concrete and particular. He did not confine his
activity to literature, but was active also in politics and in the
prosecution and encouragement of historical studies.
As a critic of literature, De Sanctis is far superior to Sainte-Beuve,
Lessing, Macaulay, or Taine. Flaubert's genial intuition adumbrated what
De Sanctis achieved. In one of his letters to Georges Sand, Flaubert
speaks of the lack of an _artistic_ critic. "In Laharpe's time,
criticism was grammatical; in the time of Sainte-Beuve and of Taine, it
is historical. They analyse with great subtlety the historical
environment in which the work appeared and the causes which have
produced it. But the _unconscious_ element In poetry? Whence does It
come? And composition? And style? And the point of view of the author?
Of all that they never speak. For such a critic, great imagination and
great goodness are necessary. I mean an ever-ready faculty of
enthusiasm, and then _taste_, a quality so rare, even among the best,
that it is never mentioned."
De Sanctis alone fulfilled the conditions of Flaubert, and Italy has in
his writings a looking-glass for her literature unequalled by any other
country.
But with De Sanctis, the philosopher of art, the aesthetician, is not so
great as the critic of literature. The one is accessory to the other,
and his use of aesthetic terminology is so inconstant that a lack of
clearness of thought might be found in his work by anyone who had not
studied it with care. But his want of system is more than compensated by
his vitality, by his constant citation of actual works, and by his
intuition of the truth, which never abandoned him. His writings bear the
further charm of suggesting new kingdoms to conquer, new mines of
richness to explore.
While the cry of "Down with Metaphysic" was resounding in Germany, and a
furious reaction had set in against the sort of Walpurgisnacht to which
the later Hegelians had reduced science and history, the pupils of
Herbart came forward and with an insinuating air they seemed to say:
"What is this? Why, it is a rebellion against Metaphysic, the very thing
our master wished for and tried to achieve, half a century ago! But here
we are, his heirs and successors, and we want to be your allies! An
understanding between us will be easy. Our Metaphysic is in agreement
with the atomic theory, our Psychology with mechanicism, our Ethic and
Aesthetic with hedonism." Herbart, who died in 1841, would probably have
disdained and rejected his followers, who thus courted popularity and
cheapened Metaphysic, putting a literal interpretation on his realities,
his ideas and representations, and upon all his most lofty
excogitations.
The protagonist of these neo-Herbartians was Robert Zimmermann. He
constructed his system of Aesthetic out of Herbart, whom he perverted to
his own uses, and even employed the much-abused Hegelian dialectic in
order to introduce modifications of the beautiful into pure beauty. The
beautiful, he said, is a model which possesses greatness, fulness,
order, correction, and definite compensation. Beauty appears to us in a
characteristic form, as a copy of this model.
Vischer, against whom was directed this work of Zimmermann, found it
easy to reply. He ridiculed Zimmermann's meaning of the symbol as the
object around which are clustered beautiful forms. "Does an artist paint
a fox, simply that he may depict an object of animal nature. No, no, my
dear sir, far from it. This fox is a symbol, because the painter here
employs lines and colours, in order to express something different from
lines and colours. 'You think I am a fox,' cries the painted animal.
'You are mightily mistaken; I am, on the contrary, a portmanteau, an
exhibition by the painter of red, white, grey, and yellow tints.'"
Vischer also made fun of Zimmermann's enthusiasm for the aesthetic value
of the sense of touch. "What joy it must be to touch the back of the
bust of Hercules in repose! To stroke the sinuous limbs of the Venus of
Milo or of the Faun of Barberini must give a pleasure to the hand equal
to that of the ear as it listens to the puissant fugues of Bach or to
the suave melodies of Mozart." Vischer defined the formal Aesthetic of
Zimmermann as a queer mixture of mysticism and mathematic.
Lotze, in common with the great majority of thinkers, was dissatisfied
with Zimmermann, but could only oppose his formalism with a variety of
the old mystical Aesthetic. Who, he asked, could believe that the human
form pleases only by its external proportions, regardless of the spirit
within. Art, like beauty, should "enclose the world of values in the
world of forms." This struggle between the Aesthetic of the content and
the Aesthetic of the form attained its greatest height in Germany
between 1860 and 1870, with Zimmermann, Vischer, and Lotze as
protagonists.
These writers were followed by J. Schmidt, who in 1875 ventured to say
that both Lotze and Zimmermann had failed to see that the problem of
Aesthetic concerned, not the beauty or ugliness of the content or of the
form as mathematical relations, but their representation; Köstlin, who
erected an immense artificial structure with the materials of his
predecessors modified; Schasler, who is interesting as having converted
the old Vischer to his thesis of the importance of the Ugly, as
introducing modifications into the beautiful and being the principle of
movement there. Vischer confesses that at one time he had followed the
Hegelian method and believed that in the essence of beauty is born a
disquietude, a fermentation, a struggle: the Idea conquers, hurls the
image into the unlimited, and the Sublime is born; but the image,
offended in its finitude, declares war upon the Idea, and the Comic
appears. Thus the fight is finished and the Beautiful returns to itself,
as the result of these struggles. But now, he says, Schasler has
persuaded him that the Ugly is the leaven which is necessary to all the
special forms of the Beautiful.
E. von Hartmann is in close relation with Schasler. His Aesthetic (1890)
also makes great use of the Ugly. Since he insists upon appearance as a
necessary characteristic of the beautiful, he considers himself
justified in calling his theory concrete idealism. Hartmann considers
himself in opposition to the formalism of Herbart, inasmuch as he
insists upon the idea as an indispensable and determining element of
beauty. Beauty, he says, is truth, but it is not historical truth, nor
scientific nor reflective truth: it is metaphysical and ideal. "Beauty
is the prophet of idealistic truth in an age without faith, hating
Metaphysic, and acknowledging only realistic truth." Aesthetic truth is
without method and without control: it leaps at once from the subjective
appearance to the essence of the ideal. But in compensation for this, it
possesses the fascination of conviction, which immediate intuition alone
possesses. The higher Philosophy rises, the less need has she of passing
through the world of the senses and of science: she approaches ever more
nearly to art. Thus Philosophy starts on the voyage to the ideal, like
Baedeker's traveller, "without too much baggage." In the Beautiful is
immanent logicity, the microcosmic idea, the unconscious. By means of
the unconscious, the process of intellectual intuition takes place in
it. The Beautiful is a mystery, because its root is in the Unconscious.
No philosopher has ever made so great a use of the Ugly as Hartmann. He
divides Beauty into grades, of which the one below is ugly as compared
with that above it. He begins with the mathematical, superior to the
sensibly agreeable, which is unconscious. Thence to formal beauty of the
second order, the dynamically agreeable, to formal beauty of the third
order, the passive teleological; to this degree belong utensils, and
language, which in Hartmann's view is a dead thing, inspired with
seeming life, only at the moment of use. Such things did the philosopher
of the Unconscious dare to print in the country of a Humboldt during the
lifetime of a Steinthal! He proceeds in his list of things beautiful,
with formal beauty of the fourth degree, which is the active or living
teleological, with the fifth, which is that of species. Finally he
reaches concrete beauty, or the individual microcosm, the highest of
all, because the individual idea is superior to the specific, and is
beauty, no longer formal, but of content.
All these degrees of beauty are, as has been said, connected with one
another by means of the ugly, and even in the highest degree, which has
nothing superior to it, the ugly continues its office of beneficent
titillation. The outcome of this ultimate phase is the famous theory of
the Modifications of the Beautiful. None of these modifications can
occur without a struggle, save the sublime and the graceful, which
appear without conflict at the side of supreme beauty. Hartmann gives
four instances: the solution is either immanent, logical,
transcendental, or combined. The idyllic, the melancholy, the sad, the
glad, the elegiac, are instances of the immanent solution; the comic in
all its forms is the logical solution; the tragic is the transcendental
solution; the combined form is found in the humorous, the tragi-comic.
When none of these solutions is possible, we have the ugly; and when an
ugliness of content is expressed by a formal ugliness, we have the
maximum of ugliness, the true aesthetic devil.
Hartmann is the last noteworthy representative of the German
metaphysical school. His works are gigantic in size and appear
formidable. But if one be not afraid of giants and venture to approach
near, one finds nothing but a big Morgante, full of the most commonplace
prejudices, quite easily killed with the bite of a crab!
During this period, Aesthetic had few representatives in other
countries. The famous conference of the Academy of Moral and Political
Sciences, held in Paris in 1857, gave to the world the "Science du Beau"
of Lévèque. No one is interested in it now, but it is amusing to note
that Lévèque announced himself to be a disciple of Plato, and went on to
attribute eight characteristics to the beautiful. These he discovered by
closely examining the lily! No wonder he was crowned with laurels! He
proved his wonderful theory by instancing a child playing with its
mother, a symphony of Beethoven, and the life of Socrates! One of his
colleagues, who could not resist making fun of his learned friend,
remarked that he would be glad to know what part was played in the life
of a philosopher by the normal vivacity of colour!
Thus German theory made no way in France, and England proved even more
refractory.
J. Ruskin showed a poverty, an incoherence, and a lack of system in
respect to Aesthetic, which puts him almost out of court. His was the
very reverse of the philosophic temperament. His pages of brilliant
prose contain his own dreams and caprices. They are the work of an
artist and should be enjoyed as such, being without any value for
philosophy. His theoretic faculty of the beautiful, which he held to be
distinct alike from the intelligence and from feeling, is connected with
his belief in beauty as a revelation of the divine intentions, "the seal
which God sets upon his works." Thus the natural beauty, which is
perceived by the pure heart, when contemplating some object untouched by
the hand of man, is far superior to the work of the artist. Ruskin was
too little capable of analysis to understand the complicated
psychologico-aesthetic process taking place within him, as he
contemplated some streamlet, or the nest of some small bird.
At Naples flourished between 1861 and 1884 Antonio Tari, who kept
himself in touch with the movement of German thought, and followed the
German idealists in placing Aesthetic in a sort of middle kingdom, a
temperate zone, between the glacial, inhabited by the Esquimaux of
thought, and the torrid, dwelt in by the giants of action. He dethroned
the Beautiful, and put Aesthetic in its place, for the Beautiful is but
the first moment; the later ones are the Comic, the Humorous, and the
Dramatic. His fertile imagination found metaphors and similes in
everything: for instance, he called the goat the Devil, opposed to the
lamb, Jesus. His remarks on men and women are full of quaint fancies. He
granted to women grace, but not beauty, which resides in equilibrium.
This is proved by her falling down so easily when she walks; by her bow
legs, which have to support her wide hips, made for gestation; by her
narrow shoulders, and her opulent breast. She is therefore a creature
altogether devoid of equilibrium!
I wish that it were possible to record more of the sayings of the
excellent Tari, "the last joyous priest of an arbitrary Aesthetic,
source of confusion."
The ground lost to the German school of metaphysicians was occupied
during the second half of the nineteenth century by the evolutionary and
positivist metaphysicians, of whom Herbert Spencer is the most notable
representative. The peculiarity of this school lies in repeating at
second or third hand certain idealist views, deprived of the element of
pure philosophy, given to them by a Schelling or a Hegel, and in
substituting a quantity of minute facts and anecdotes, with a view to
providing the positivist varnish. These theories are dear to vulgar
minds, because they correspond to inveterate religious beliefs, and the
lustre of the varnish explains the good fortune of Spencerian positivism
in our time. Another notable trait of this school is its barbaric
contempt for history, especially for the history of philosophy, and its
consequent lack of all link with the series composed of the secular
efforts of so many thinkers. Without this link, there can be no fruitful
labour and no possibility of progress.
Spencer is colossal in his ignorance of all that has been written or
thought on the subject of Aesthetic (to limit ourselves to this branch
alone). He actually begins his work on the Philosophy of Style with
these words: "No one, I believe, has ever produced a complete theory of
the art of writing." This in 1852! He begins his chapter on aesthetic
feelings in the _Principles of Psychology_ by admitting that he has
heard of the observation made by a German author, whose name he forgets
(Schiller!), on the connexion between art and play. Had Spencer's
remarks on Aesthetic been written in the eighteenth century, they might
have occupied a humble place among the first rude attempts at aesthetic
speculation, but appearing in the nineteenth century, they are without
value, as the little of value they contain had been long said by others.
In his _Principles of Psychology_ Spencer looks upon aesthetic feelings
as arising from the discharge of the exuberant energy of the organism.
This he divides into degrees, and believes that we attain complete
enjoyment when these degrees are all working satisfactorily each on its
own plane, and when what is painful in excessive activity has been
avoided. His degrees are sensation, sensation accompanied by
representative elements, perception accompanied by more complex elements
of representation, then emotion, and that state of consciousness which
surpasses sensations and perceptions. But Spencer has no suspicion of
what art really is. His views oscillate between sensualism and moralism,
and he sees little in the whole art of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, or
of modern times, which can be looked upon as otherwise than imperfect!
The Physiology of Aesthetics has also had its votaries in Great Britain,
among whom may be mentioned J. Sully, A. Bain, and Allen. These at any
rate show some knowledge of the concrete fact of art. Allen harks back
to the old distinction between necessary and vital activities and
superfluous activities, and gives a physiological definition, which may
be read in his _Physiological Aesthetics_. More recent writers also look
upon the physiological fact as the cause of the pleasure of art; but for
them it does not alone depend upon the visual organ, and the muscular
phenomena associated with it, but also on the participation of some of
the most important bodily functions, such as respiration, circulation,
equilibrium, intimate muscular accommodation. They believe that art owes
its origin to the pleasure that some prehistoric man must have
experienced in breathing regularly, without having to re-adapt his
organs, when he traced for the first time on a bone or on clay regular
lines separated by regular intervals.
A similar order of physico-aesthetic researches has been made in
Germany, under the auspices of Helmholtz, Brücke, and Stumpf. But these
writers have succeeded better than the above-mentioned, by restricting
themselves to the fields of optic and acoustic, and have supplied
information as to the physical processes of artistic technique and as to
the pleasure of visual and auditive impressions, without attempting to
melt Aesthetic into Physic, or to deprive the former of its spiritual
character. They have even occasionally indicated the difference between
the two kinds of research. Even the degenerate Herbartians, converting
the metaphysical forms of their master into physiological phenomena,
made soft eyes at the new sensualists and aesthetico-physiologists.
The Natural Sciences have become in our day a sort of superstition,
allied to a certain, perhaps unconscious, hypocrisy. Not only have
chemical, physical, and physiological laboratories become a sort of
Sibylline grots, where resound the most extraordinary questions about
everything that can interest the spirit of man, but even those who
really do prosecute their researches with the old inevitable method of
internal observation, have been unable to free themselves from the
illusion that they are, on the contrary, employing _the method of the
natural sciences_.
Hippolyte Taine's Philosophy of Art represents such an illusion. He
declares that when we have studied the diverse manifestations of art in
all peoples and at all epochs, we shall then possess a complete
Aesthetic. Such an Aesthetic would be a sort of Botany applied to the
works of man. This mode of study would provide moral science with a
basis equally as sure as that which the natural sciences already
possess. Taine then proceeds to define art without regard to the natural
sciences, by analysing, like a simple mortal, what passes in the human
soul when brought face to face with a work of art. But what analysis and
what definitions!
Art, he says, is imitation, but of a sort that tries to express an
essential characteristic. Thus the principal characteristic of a lion is
to be "a great carnivore," and we observe this characteristic in all its
limbs. Holland has for essential characteristic that of being a land
formed of alluvial soil.
Now without staying to consider these two remarkable instances, let us
ask, what is this essential characteristic of Taine? It is the same as
the ideas, types, or concepts that the old aesthetic teaching assigned
to art as its object. Taine himself removes all doubt as to this, by
saying that this characteristic is what philosophers call the essence of
things, and for that reason they declare that the purpose of art is to
manifest things. He declares that he will not employ the word essence,
which is technical. But he accepts and employs the thought that the word
expresses. He believes that there are two routes by which man can attain
to the superior life: science and art. By the first, he apprehends
fundamental laws and causes, and expresses them in abstract terms; by
the second, he expresses these same laws and causes in a manner
comprehensible to all, by appealing to the heart and feeling, as well as
to the reason of man. Art is both superior and popular; it makes
manifest what is highest, and makes it manifest to all.
That Taine here falls into the old pedagogic theory of Aesthetic is
evident. Works of art are arranged for him in a scale of values, as for
the aesthetic metaphysicians. He began by declaring the absurdity of all
judgment of taste, "à chacun son goût," but he ends by declaring that
personal taste is without value, that we must establish a common measure
before proceeding to praise or blame. His scale of values is double or
triple. We must first fix the degree of importance of the
characteristic, that is, the greater or less generality of the idea, and
the degree of good in it, that is to say, its greater or lesser moral
value. These, he says, are two degrees of the same thing, strength, seen
from different sides. We must also establish the degree of convergence
of the effects, that is, the fulness of expression, the harmony between
the idea and the form.
This half-moral, half-metaphysical exposition is accompanied with the
usual protestations, that the matter in hand is to be studied
methodically, analytically, as the naturalist would study it, that he
will try to reach "a law, not a hymn." As if these protestations could
abolish the true nature of his thought! Taine actually went so far as to
attempt dialectic solutions of works of art! "In the primitive period of
Italian art, we find the soul without the body: Giotto. At the
Renaissance, with Verrocchio and his school, we find the body without
the soul. With Raphael, in the sixteenth century, we find expression and
anatomy in harmony: body and soul." Thesis, antithesis, synthesis!
With G.T. Fechner we find the like protestations and the like
procedure. He will study Aesthetic inductively, from beneath. He seeks
clarity, not loftiness. Proceeding thus inductively, he discovers a long
series of laws or principles of Aesthetic, such as unity in variety,
association and contrast, change and persistence, the golden mean, etc.
He exhibits this chaos with delight at showing himself so much of a
physiologist, and so inconclusive. Then he proceeds to describe his
experiments in Aesthetics. These consist of attempts to decide, for
instance, by methods of choice, which of certain rectangles of cardboard
is the most agreeable, and which the most disagreeable, to a large
number of people arbitrarily chosen. Naturally, these results do not
agree with others obtained on other occasions, but Fechner knows that
errors correct themselves, and triumphantly publishes long lists of
these valuable experiments. He also communicates to us the shapes and
measurements of a large number of pictures in museums, as compared with
their respective subjects! Such are the experiments of physiological
aestheticians.
But Fechner, when he comes to define what beauty and what art really
are, is, like everyone else, obliged to fall back upon introspection.
But his definition is trivial, and his comparison of his three degrees
of beauty to a family is simply grotesque in its _naïveté_. He terms
this theory the eudemonistic theory, and we are left wondering why, when
he had this theory all cut and dried in his mind, he should all the same
give himself the immense trouble of compiling his tables and of
enumerating his laws and principles, which do not agree with his theory.
Perhaps it was all a pastime for him, like playing at patience, or
collecting postage-stamps?
Another example of superstition in respect to the natural sciences
is afforded by Ernest Grosse. Grosse abounds in contempt for what
he calls speculative Aesthetic. Yet he desires a Science of Art
(Kunstwissenschaft), which shall formulate its laws from those
historical facts which have hitherto been collected.
But Grosse wishes us to complete the collection of historical evidence
with ethnographical and prehistoric materials, for we cannot obtain
really general laws of art from the exclusive study of cultivated
peoples, "just as a theory of reproduction exclusively based upon the
form it takes with mammifers, must necessarily be imperfect!"
He is, however, aware that the results of experiences among savages and
prehistoric races do not alone suffice to furnish us with an equipment
for such investigations as that concerning the nature of Art, and, like
any ordinary mortal, he feels obliged to interrogate, before starting,
the spirit of man. He therefore proceeds to define Aesthetic on
apriorist principles, which, he remarks, can be discarded when we shall
have obtained the complete theory, in like manner with the scaffolding
that has served for the erection of a house.
Words! Words! Vain words! He proceeds to define Aesthetic as the
activity which in its development and result has the immediate value of
feeling, and is, therefore, an end in itself. Art is the opposite of
practice; the activity of games stands intermediate between the two,
having also its end in its own activity.
The Aesthetics of Taine and of Grosse have been called sociological.
Seeing that any true definition of sociology as a science is impossible,
for it is composed of psychological elements, which are for ever
varying, we do not delay to criticize the futile attempts at definition,
but pass at once to the objective results attained by the sociologists.
This superstition, like the naturalistic, takes various forms in
practical life. We have, for instance, Proudhon (1875), who would hark
back to Platonic Aesthetic, class the aesthetic activity among the
merely sensual, and command the arts to further the cause of virtue, on
pain of judicial proceedings in case of contumacy.
But M. Guyau is the most important of sociological aestheticians. His
works, published in Paris toward the end of last century, and his
posthumous work, entitled _Les problèmes de l'Esthétique contemporaine_,
substitute for the theory of play, that of _life_, and the posthumous
work above-mentioned makes it evident that by life he means social life.
Art is the development of social sympathy, but the whole of art does not
enter into sociology. Art has two objects; the production of agreeable
sensations (colours, sounds, etc.) and of phenomena of psychological
induction, which include ideas and feelings of a more complex nature
than the foregoing, such as sympathy for the personages represented,
interest, piety, indignation, etc. Thus art becomes the expression of
life. Hence arise two tendencies: one for harmony, consonance, for all
that delights the ear and eye; the other transforming life, under the
dominion of art. True genius is destined to balance these two
tendencies; but the decadent and the unbalanced deprive art of its
sympathetic end, setting aesthetic sympathy against human sympathy. If
we translate this language into that with which we are by this time
quite familiar, we shall see that Guyau admits an art that is merely
hedonistic, and places above it another art, also hedonistic, but
serving the ends of morality.
M. Nordau wages war against the decadent and unbalanced, in much the
same manner as Guyau. He assigns to art the function of re-establishing
the integrity of life, so much broken up and specialized in our
industrial civilization. He remarks that there is such a thing as art
for art's sake, the simple expression of the internal states of the
individual, but it is the art of the cave-dweller.
C. Lombroso's theory of genius as degeneration may be grouped with the
naturalistic theories. His argument is in essence the following. Great
mental efforts, and total absorption in one dominant thought, often
produce physiological disorders or atrophy of important vital functions.
Now these disorders often lead to madness; therefore, genius may be
identified with madness. This proof, from the particular to the general,
does not follow that of traditional Logic. But with Lombroso, Büchner,
Nordau, and the like we have come to the boundary between specious and
vulgar error. They confuse scientific analysis with historical research.
Such inquiries may have value for history, but they have none for
Aesthetic. Thus, too, A. Lang maintains that the doctrine of the origin
of art as disinterested expression of the mimetic faculty is not
confirmed in what we know of primitive art, which is rather decorative
than expressive. But primitive art, which is a given fact to be
interpreted, cannot ever become its own criterion of interpretation.
The naturalistic misunderstanding has had a bad effect on linguistic
researches, which have not been carried out on the lofty plane to which
Humboldt and Steinthal had brought them.
Max Müller is popular and exaggerated. He fails clearly to distinguish
thought from logical thought, although in one place he remarks that the
formation of names has a more intimate connexion with wit than with
judgment. He holds that the science of language is not historical, but
natural, because language is not the invention of man, altogether
ignoring the science of the spirit, philosophy, of which language is a
part. For Max Müller, the natural sciences were the only sciences. The
consciousness of the science of the spirit becomes ever more obscured,
and we find the philologist W.D. Whitney combating Max Müller's
"miracles" and maintaining the separability of thought and speech.
With Hermann Paul (1880) we have an awakening of Humboldt's spirit. Paul
maintains that the origin of language is the speech of the individual
man, and that a language has its origin every time it is spoken. Paul
also showed the fallacies contained in the _Völkerpsychologie_ of
Steinthal and Lazarus, demonstrating that there is no such thing as a
collective soul, and that there is no language save that of the
individual.
W. Wundt (1886), on the other hand, commits the error of connecting
language with Ethnopsychology and other non-existent sciences, and
actually terms the glorious doctrine of Herder and of Humboldt
_Wundertheorie_, or theory of miracle, accusing them of mystical
obscurity. Wundt confuses the question of the historical appearance of
language with that of its internal nature and genesis. He looks upon the
theory of evolution as having attained to its complete triumph, in its
application to organic nature in general, and especially to man. He has
no suspicion whatever of the function of fancy, and of the true relation
between thought and expression, between expression in the naturalistic,
and expression in the spiritual and linguistic sense. He looks upon
speech as a specially developed form of psycho-physical vital
manifestations, of expressive animal movements. Language is developed
continuously from such facts, and thus is explained how, "beyond the
general concept of expressive movement, there is no specific quality
which delimits language in a non-arbitrary manner."
Thus the philosophy of Wundt reveals its weak side, showing itself
incapable of understanding the spiritual nature of language and of art.
In the _Ethic_ of the same author, aesthetic facts are presented as a
mixture of logical and ethical elements, a special normative aesthetic
science is denied, and Aesthetic is merged in Logic and Ethic.
The neo-critical and neo-Kantian movement in thought was not able to
maintain the concept of the spirit against the hedonistic, moralistic,
and psychological views of Aesthetic, in vogue from about the middle of
last century. Neo-criticism inherited from Kant his view as to the
slight importance of the creative imagination, and appears indeed to have
been ignorant of any form of knowledge, other than the intellective.
Kirchmann (1868) was one of the early adherents to psychological
Aesthetic, defining the beautiful as the idealized image of pleasure,
the ugly as that of pain. For him the aesthetic fact is the idealized
image of the real. Failing to apprehend the true nature of the aesthetic
fact, Kirchmann invented a new psychological category of ideal or
apparent feelings, which he thought were attenuated images from those
of real life.
The aged Theodore Fischer describes Aesthetic in his auto-criticism as
the union of mimetic and harmony, and the beautiful as the harmony of
the universe, which is never realized in fact, because it is infinite.
When we think to grasp the beautiful, we experience that exquisite
illusion, which is the aesthetic fact. Robert Fischer, son of the
foregoing, introduced the word _Einfühlung_, to express the vitality
which he believed that man inspired into things with the help of the
aesthetic process.
E. Siebeck and M. Diez, the former writing in 1875, the latter in 1892,
unite a certain amount of idealistic influence, derived from Kant and
Herbart, with the merely empirical and psychological views that have of
late been the fashion. Diez, for instance, would explain the artistic
function as the ideal of feeling, placing it parallel to science; the
ideal of thought, morality; the ideal of will and religion, the ideal of
the personality. But this ideal of feeling escapes definition, and we
see that these writers have not had the courage of their ideas: they
have not dared to push their thought to its logical conclusion.
The merely psychological and associationist view finds in Theodore Lipps
its chief exponent. He criticizes and rejects a series of aesthetic
theories, such as those of play, of pleasure, of art as recognition of
real life, even if disagreeable, of emotionality, of syncretism, which
attaches to art a number of other ends, in addition to those of play and
of pleasure.
The theory of Lipps does not differ very greatly from that of Jouffroy,
for he assumes that artistic beauty is the sympathetic. "Our ego,
transplanted, objectified, and recognized in others, is the object of
sympathy. We feel ourselves in others, and others in us." Thus the
aesthetic pleasure is entirely composed of sympathy. This extends even
to the pleasure derived from architecture, geometrical forms, etc.
Whenever we meet with the positive element of human personality, we
experience this feeling of beatitude, which is the aesthetic emotion.
But the value of the personality is an ethical value: the whole sphere
of ethic is included in it. Therefore all artistic or aesthetic pleasure
is the enjoyment of something which has ethical value, but this value is
not an element of a compound, but the object of aesthetic intuition.
Thus is aesthetic activity deprived of all autonomous existence and
reduced to a mere retainer of Ethic.
C. Groos (1895) shows some signs of recognizing aesthetic activity as a
theoretic value. Feeling and intellect, he says, are the two poles of
knowledge, and he recognizes the aesthetic fact as internal imitation.
Everything beautiful belongs to aestheticity, but not every aesthetic
fact is beautiful. The beautiful is the representation of sensible
pleasure, and the ugly of sensible displeasure. The sublime is the
representation of something powerful, in a simple form. The comic is the
representation of an inferiority, which provokes in us the pleasurable
feeling of "superiority." Groos very wisely makes mock of the supposed
function of the Ugly, which Hartmann and Schasler had inherited and
developed from a long tradition. Lipps and Groos agree in denying
aesthetic value to the comic, but Lipps, although he gives an excellent
analysis of the comic, is nevertheless in the trammels of his moralistic
thesis, and ends by sketching out something resembling the doctrine of
the overcoming of the ugly, by means of which may be attained a higher
aesthetic and (sympathetic) value.
Labours such as those of Lipps have been of value, since they have
cleared away a number of errors that blocked the way, and restrained
speculation to the field of the internal consciousness. Similar is the
merit of E. Véron's treatise (1883) on the double form of Aesthetic, in
which he combats the academic view of the absolute beauty, and shows
that Taine confuses Art and Science, Aesthetic and Logic. He acutely
remarks that if the object of art were to reveal the essence of things,
the greatest artists would be those who best succeeded in doing this,
and the greatest works would all be _identical_; whereas we know that
the very opposite is the case. Véron was a precursor of Guyau, and we
seek for scientific system in vain in his book. Véron looks upon art as
two things: the one _decorative_, pleasing eye and ear, the other
_expressive_, "l'expression émue de la personalité humaine." He thought
that decorative art prevailed in antiquity, expressive art in modern
times.
We cannot here dwell upon the aesthetic theories of men of letters, such
as that of E. Zola, developing his thesis of natural science and history
mixed, which is known as that of the human document or as the
experimental theory, or of Ibsen and the moralization of the art
problem, as presented by him and by the Scandinavian school. Perhaps no
French writer has written more profoundly upon art than Gustave
Flaubert. His views are contained in his Correspondence, which has been
published. L. Tolstoï wrote his book on art while under the influence of
Véron and his hatred of the concept of the beautiful. Art, he says,
communicates the feelings, as the word communicates the thoughts. But
his way of understanding this may be judged from the comparison which he
institutes between Art and Science. According to this, "Art has for its
mission to make assimilable and sensible what may not have been
assimilated in the form of argument. There is no science for science's
sake, no art for art's sake. Every human effort should be directed
toward increasing morality and suppressing violence." This amounts to
saying that well-nigh all the art that the world has hitherto seen is
false. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante, Tasso,
Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Bach, Beethoven, are all,
according to Tolstoï, "false reputations, made by the critics."
We must also class F. Nietzsche with the artists, rather than with the
philosophers. We should do him an injustice (as with J. Ruskin) were we
to express in intellectual terminology his aesthetic affirmations. The
criticism which they provoke would be too facile. Nowhere has Nietzsche
given a complete theory of art, not even in his first book, _Die Geburt
der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus_. What seems to be theory
there, is really the confession of the feelings and aspirations of the
writer. Nietzsche was the last, splendid representative of the romantic
period. He was, therefore, deeply preoccupied with the art problem and
with the relation of art to natural science and to philosophy, though he
never succeeded in definitely fixing those relations. From Romanticism,
rather than from Schopenhauer, he gathered those elements of thought out
of which he wove his conception of the two forms of art: the Apollonian,
all serene contemplation, as expressed in the epic and in sculpture; the
Dionysaïc, all tumult and agitation, as expressed in music and the
drama. These doctrines are not rigorously proved, and their power of
resistance to criticism is therefore but slender, but they serve to
transport the mind to a more lofty spiritual level than any others of
the second half of the nineteenth century.
The most noteworthy thought on aesthetic of this period is perhaps to be
found among the aestheticians of special branches of the arts, and since
we know that laws relating only to special branches are not conceivable,
this thought may be considered as bearing upon the general theory of
Aesthetic.
The Bohemian critic E. Hanslick (1854) is perhaps the most important of
these writers. His work _On Musical Beauty_ has been translated into
several languages. His polemic is chiefly directed against R. Wagner and
the pretension of finding in music a determined content of ideas and
feelings. He expresses equal contempt for those sentimentalists who
derive from music merely pathological effects, passionate excitement, or
stimulus for practical activity, in place of enjoying the musical works.
"If a few Phrygian notes sufficed to instil courage into the soldier
facing the enemy, or a Doric melody to assure the fidelity of a wife
whose husband was absent, then the loss of Greek music may cause pain to
generals and to husbands, but aestheticians and composers will have no
reason to deplore it." "If every Requiem, every lamenting Adagio,
possessed the power to make us sad, who would be able to support
existence in such conditions? But if a true musical work look upon us
with the clear and brilliant eyes of beauty, we feel ourselves bound by
its invincible fascination, though its theme be all the sorrows of the
century."
For Hanslick, the only end of music was form, or musical beauty. The
followers of Herbart showed themselves very tender towards this
unexpected and vigorous ally, and Hanslick, not to be behindhand in
politeness, returned their compliments, by referring to Herbart and to
R. Zimmermann, in the later editions of his work, as having "completely
developed the great aesthetic principle of form." Unfortunately Hanslick
meant something altogether different from the Herbartians by his use of
the word form. Symmetry, merely acoustic relations, and the pleasure of
the ear, did not constitute the musically beautiful for him. Mathematics
were in his view useless in the Aesthetic of music. "Sonorous forms are
not empty, but perfectly full; they cannot be compared to simple lines
enclosing a space; they are the spirit, which takes form, making its own
bodily configuration. Music is more of a picture than is an arabesque;
but it is a picture of which the subject is inexpressible in words, nor
is it to be enclosed in a precise concept. In music, there is a meaning
and a connexion, but of a specially musical nature: it is a language
which we speak and understand, but which it is impossible to translate."
Hanslick admits that music, if it do not render the quality of
sentiments, renders their tone or dynamic side; it renders adjectives,
if it fail to render substantives; if not "murmuring tenderness" or
"impetuous courage," at any rate the "murmuring" and the "impetuous."
The essence of his book is contained in the negation that it is possible
to separate form and content in music. "Take any motive you will, and
say where form begins and content ends. Are we to call the sounds
content? Very good, but they have already received form. What are we to
call form? Sounds again? But they are already form filled, that is to
say, possessing a content." These observations testify to an acute
penetration of the nature of art. Hanslick's belief that they were
characteristics peculiar to music, not common to every form of art,
alone prevented him from seeing further.
C. Fiedler, published in German (in 1887) an extremely luminous work on
the origin of artistic activity. He describes eloquently how the passive
spectator seems to himself to grasp all reality, as the shows of life
pass before him; but at the moment that he tries to realize this
artistically, all disappears, and leaves him with the emptiness of his
own thoughts. Yet by concentration alone do we attain to expression; art
is a language that we gradually learn to speak. Artistic activity is
only to be attained by limiting ourselves; it must consist of "forms
precisely determined, tangible, sensibly demonstrable, precisely because
it is spiritual." Art does not imitate nature, for what is nature, but
that vast confusion of perceptions and representations that were
referred to above? Yet in a sense art does imitate nature; it uses
nature to produce values of a kind peculiar to itself. Those values are
true visibility.
Fiedler's views correspond with those of his predecessor, Hanslick, but
are more rigorously and philosophically developed. The sculptor A.
Hildebrand may be mentioned with these, as having drawn attention to the
nature of art as architectonic rather than imitative, with special
application to the art of sculpture.
What we miss with these and with other specialists, is a broad view of
art and language, as one and the same thing, the inheritance of all
humanity, not of a few persons, specially endowed. H. Bergson in his
book on laughter (1900) falls under the same criticism. He develops his
theory of art in a manner analogous to Fiedler, and errs like him in
looking upon it as something different and exceptional in respect to the
language of every moment. He declares that in life the individuality of
things escapes us: we see only as much as suffices for our practical
ends. The influence of language aids this rude simplification: all but
proper names are abstractions. Artists arise from time to time, who
recover the riches hidden beneath the labels of ordinary life.
Amid the ruin of idealist metaphysics, is to be desired a healthy return
to the doctrine of Baumgarten, corrected and enriched with the
discoveries that have been made since his time, especially by
romanticism and psychology. C. Hermann (1876) announced this return, but
his book is a hopeless mixture of empirical precepts and of metaphysical
beliefs regarding Logic and Aesthetic, both of which, he believes, deal
not with the empirical thought and experience of the soul, but with the
pure and absolute.
B. Bosanquet (1892) gives the following definition of the beautiful, as
"that which has a characteristic or individual expressivity for the
sensible perception, or for the imagination, subject to the conditions
of general or abstract expressivity for the same means." The problem as
posed by this writer by the antithesis of the two German schools of form
and content, appears to us insoluble.
Though De Sanctis left no school in Italy, his teaching has been cleared
of the obscurities that had gathered round it during the last ten years;
and the thesis of the true nature of history, and of its nature,
altogether different from natural science, has been also dealt with in
Germany, although its precise relation to the aesthetic problem has not
been made clear. Such labours and such discussions constitute a more
favourable ground for the scientific development of Aesthetic than the
stars of mystical metaphysic or the stables of positivism and of
sensualism.
We have now reached the end of the inquiry into the history of aesthetic
speculation, and we are struck with the smallness of the number of those
who have seen clearly the nature of the problem. No doubt, amid the
crowd of artists, critics, and writers on other subjects, many have
incidentally made very just remarks, and if all these were added to the
few philosophers, they would form a gallant company. But if, as Schiller
truly observed, the rhythm of philosophy consist in a withdrawal from
public opinion, in order to return to it with renewed vigour, it is
evident that this withdrawal is essential, and indeed that in it lies
the whole progress of philosophy.
During our long journey, we have witnessed grave aberrations from the
truth, which were at the same time attempts to reach it; such were the
hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity, of the
sensualists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth
centuries; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes and the Stoics, of
the Roman eclectics, of the writers of the Middle Age and of the
Renaissance; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers
of the Church; the aesthetic mysticism of Plotinus, reborn to its
greatest triumphs, during the classic period of German thought.
Through the midst of these variously erroneous theories, that traverse
the field of thought in all directions, runs a tiny rivulet of golden
truth. Starting from the subtle empiricism of Aristotle, it flows in the
profound penetration of Vico to the nineteenth century, where it appears
again in the masterly analyses of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and De
Sanctis.
This brief list shows that the science of Aesthetic is no longer to be
discovered, but it also shows _that it is only at its beginning_.
The birth of a science is like the birth of a human being. In order to
live, a science, like a man, has to withstand a thousand attacks of all
sorts. These appear in the form of errors, which must be extirpated, if
the science is not to perish. And when one set has been weeded, another
crops up; when these have been dealt with, the former errors often
return. Therefore _scientific criticism_ is always necessary. No science
can repose on its laurels, complete, unchallenged. Like a human being,
it must maintain its position by constant efforts, constant victories
over error. The general errors which reveal a negation of the very
concept of art have already been dealt with in the Historical Summary.
The particular errors have been exposed in the Theory. They may be
divided under three heads: (i.) Errors as to the characteristic quality
of the aesthetic fact, or (ii.) as to its specific quality, or (iii.) as
to its generic quality. These are contradictions of the characteristics
of intuition, of theoretic contemplation, and of spiritual activity,
which constitute the aesthetic fact.
The principal bar to a proper understanding of the true nature of
language has been and still is Rhetoric, with the modern form it has
assumed, as style. The rhetorical categories are still mentioned in
treatises and often referred to, as having definite existence among the
parts of speech. Side by side with such phrases goes that of the double
form, or metaphor, which implies that there are two ways of saying the
same thing, the one simple, the other ornate.
Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and many minor personages, have been shown to be
victims of the rhetorical categories, and in our own day we have writers
in Italy and in Germany who devote much attention to them, such as R.
Bonghi and G. Gröber; the latter employs a phraseology which he borrows
from the modern schools of psychology, but this does not alter the true
nature of his argument. De Sanctis gave perhaps the clearest and most
stimulating advice in his lectures on Rhetoric, which he termed
Anti-rhetoric.
But even he failed to systematize his thought, and we may say that the
true critique of Rhetoric can only be made from the point of view of the
aesthetic activity, which is, as we know, _one_, and therefore does not
give rise to divisions, and _cannot express the same content now in one
form, now in another_. Thus only can we drive away the double monster of
naked form deprived of imagination, and of decorated form, which would
represent something more than imagination. The same remarks apply to
artistic and literary styles, and to their various laws or rules. In
modern times they have generally been comprised with rhetoric, and
although now discredited, they cannot be said to have altogether
disappeared.
J.C. Scaliger may be entitled the protagonist of the unities in
comparatively modern times: he it was who "laid the foundations of the
classical Bastille," and supplied tyrants of literature, like Boileau,
with some of their best weapons. Lessing opposed the French rules and
restrictions with German rules and restrictions, giving as his opinion
that Corneille and others had wrongly interpreted Aristotle, whose rules
did not really prevent Shakespeare from being included among correct
writers! Lessing undoubtedly believed in intellectual rules for poetry.
Aristotle was the tyrant, father of tyrants, and we find Corneille
saying "qu'il est aisé de s'accommoder avec Aristote," much in the same
way as Tartuffe makes his "accommodements avec le ciel." In the next
century, several additions were made to the admitted styles, as for
instance the "tragédie bourgeoise."
But these battles of the rules with one another are less interesting
than the rebellion against all the rules, which began with Pietro
Aretino in the sixteenth century, who makes mock of them in the
prologues to his comedies. Giordano Bruno took sides against the makers
of rules, saying that the rules came from the poetry, and "therefore
there are as many genuses and species of true rules as there are genuses
and species of true poets." When asked how the true poets are to be
known, he replies, "by repeating their verses, which either cause
delight, or profit, or both." Guarini, too, said that "the world judges
poetry, and its sentence is without appeal."
Strangely enough, it was priest-ridden Spain that all through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led the van of revolt against the
rules and precepts of the grammarians. While Torquato Tasso remained the
miserable slave of grammarians unworthy to lick the dust from his feet,
Lope de Vega slyly remarked that when he wrote his comedies, he locked
up the givers of precepts with six keys, that they might not reproach
him. J.B. Marino declared that he knew the rules better than all the
pedants in the world; "but the true rule is to know when to break the
rules, in accordance with the manners of the day and the taste of the
age." Among the most acute writers of the end of the seventeenth century
is to be mentioned Gravina, who well understood that a work of art must
be its own criterion, and said so clearly when praising a contemporary
for a work which did not enter any one of the admitted categories.
Unfortunately Gravina did not clearly formulate his views.
France of the eighteenth century produced several writers like Du Bos,
who declared that men will always prefer the poems that move them, to
those composed according to rule. La Motte combated the unities of place
and time, and Batteux showed himself liberal in respect to rules.
Voltaire, although he opposed La Motte and described the three unities
as the three great laws of good sense, was also capable of declaring
that all styles but the tiresome are good, and that the best style is
that which is best used. In England we find Home in his _Elements of
Criticism_ deriding the critics for asserting that there must be a
precise criterion for distinguishing epic poetry from all other forms of
composition. Literary compositions, he held, melt into one another, just
like colours.
The literary movement of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth centuries attacked rules of all sorts. We will not dwell
upon the many encounters of these periods, nor record the names of those
that conquered gloriously, or their excesses. In France the preface to
the _Cromwell_ of V. Hugo (1827), in Italy the _Lettera semiseria di
Grisostomo_, were clarions of rebellion. The principle first laid down
by A.W. Schlegel, that the form of compositions must be organic and not
mechanic, resulting from the nature of the subject, from its internal
development not from an external stamp, was enunciated in Italy. Art is
always a whole, a synthesis.
But it would be altogether wrong to believe that this empirical defeat
of the styles and rules implied their final defeat in philosophy. Even
writers who were capable of dispensing with prejudice when judging works
of art, once they spoke as philosophers, were apt to reassume their
belief in those categories which, empirically, they had discarded. The
spectacle of these literary or rhetorical categories, raised by German
philosophers to the honours of philosophical deduction, is even more
amusing than that which afforded amusement to Home. The truth is that
they were unable to free their aesthetic systems of intellectualism,
although they proclaimed the empire of the mystic idea. Schelling (1803)
at the beginning, Hartmann (1890) at the end of the century, furnish a
good example of this head and tail.
Schelling, in his Philosophy of Art, declares that, historically
speaking, the first place in the styles of poetry is due to Epic, but,
scientifically speaking, it falls to Lyric. In truth, if poetry be the
representation of the infinite in the finite, then lyric poetry, in
which prevails the finite, must be its first moment. Lyric poetry
corresponds to the first of the ideal series, to reflection, to
knowledge; epic poetry corresponds to the second power, to action. This
philosopher finally proceeds to the unification of epic and lyric
poetry, and from their union he deduces the dramatic form, which is in
his view "the supreme incarnation of the essence and of the _in-se_ of
every art."
With Hartmann, poetry is divided into poetry of declamation and poetry
for reading. The first is subdivided into Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic; the
Epic is divided into plastic epic, proper epic, pictorial epic, and
lyrical epic; Lyric is divided into epical lyric, lyrical lyric, and
dramatic lyric; Dramatic is divided into lyrical dramatic, epical
dramatic, and dramatical dramatic. The second (readable poetry) is
divided into poetry which is chiefly epical, lyrical, and dramatic, with
the tertiary division of moving, comic, tragic, and humoristic; and
poetry which can all be read at once, like a short story, or that
requires several sittings, like a romance.
These brief extracts show of what dialectic pirouettes and sublime
trivialities even philosophers are capable, when they begin to treat
of the Aesthetic of the tragic, comic, and humorous. Such false
distinctions are still taught in the schools of France and Germany, and
we find a French critic like Ferdinand Brunetière devoting a whole
volume to the evolution of literary styles or classes, which he really
believes to constitute literary history. This prejudice, less frankly
stated, still infests many histories of literature, even in Italy.
We believe that the falsity of these rules of classes should be
scientifically demonstrated. In our Theory of Aesthetic we have shown
how we believe that it should be demonstrated.
The proof of the theory of the limits of the arts has been credited to
Lessing, but his merit should rather be limited to having been the first
to draw attention to the problem. His solution was false, but his
achievement nevertheless great, in having posed the question clearly. No
one before him, in antiquity, in the Middle Age, or in modern times, had
seriously asked: What is the value of the distinctions between the arts?
Which of them comes first? Which second? Leonardo da Vinci had declared
his personal predilection for painting, Michael Angelo for sculpture,
but the question had not been philosophically treated before Lessing.
Lessing's attention was drawn to the problem, through his desire to
disprove the assertions of Spence and of the Comte de Caylus, the former
in respect to the close union between poetry and painting in antiquity,
the latter as believing that a poem was good according to the number of
subjects which it should afford the painter. Lessing argued thus:
Painting manifests itself in space, poetry in time: the mode of
manifestation of painting is through objects which coexist, that of
poetry through objects which are consecutive. The objects which coexist,
or whose parts are coexistent, are called bodies. Bodies, then, owing to
their visibility, are the true objects of painting. Objects which are
consecutive, or whose parts are consecutive, are called, in general,
actions. Actions, then, are the suitable object of poetry. He admitted
that painting might represent an action, but only by means of bodies
which make allusion to it; that poetry can represent bodies, but only by
means of actions. Returning to this theme, he explained the action or
movement in painting as added by our imagination. Lessing was greatly
preoccupied with the naturalness and the unnaturalness of signs, which
is tantamount to saying that he believed each art to be strictly limited
to certain modes of expression, which are only overstepped at the cost
of coherency. In the appendix to his _Laocoön_, he quotes Plutarch as
saying that one should not chop wood with a key, or open the door with
an axe. He who should do so would not only be spoiling both those
utensils, but would also be depriving himself of the utility of both. He
believed that this applied to the arts.
The number of philosophers and writers who have attempted empirical
classifications of the arts is enormous: it ranges in comparatively
recent times from Lessing, by way of Schasler, Solger, and Hartmann, to
Richard Wagner, whose theory of the combination of the arts was first
mooted in the eighteenth century.
Lotze, while reflecting upon the futility of these attempts, himself
adopts a method, which he says is the most "convenient," and thereby
incurs the censure of Schasler. This method is in fact suitable for his
studies in botany and in zoology, but useless for the philosophy of the
spirit. Thus both these thinkers maintained Lessing's wrong principle as
to the constancy, the limits, and the peculiar nature of each art.
Who among aestheticians has criticized this principle? Aristotle had a
glimpse of the truth, when he refused to admit that the distinction
between prose and poetry lay in an external fact, the metre.
Schleiermacher seems to have been the only one who was thoroughly aware
of the difficulty of the problem. In analysis, indeed, he goes so far as
to say that what the arts have in common is not the external fact, which
is an element of diversity; and connecting such an observation as this
with his clear distinction between art and what is called technique, we
might argue that Schleiermacher looked upon the divisions between the
arts as non-existent. But he does not make this logical inference, and
his thought upon the problem continues to be wavering and undecided.
Nebulous, uncertain, and contradictory as is this portion of
Schleiermacher's theory, he has yet the great merit of having doubted
Lessing's theory, and of having asked himself by what right are special
arts held to be distinct in art.
Schleiermacher _absolutely denied the existence of a beautiful in
nature_, and praised Hegel for having sustained this negation. Hegel did
not really deserve this praise, as his negation was rather verbal than
effective; but the importance of this thesis as stated by Schleiermacher
is very great, in so far as he denied the existence of an objective
natural beauty not produced by the spirit of man. This theory of the
beautiful in nature, when taken in a metaphysical sense, does not
constitute an error peculiar to aesthetic science. It forms part of a
fallacious general theory, which can be criticized together with its
metaphysic.
The theory of aesthetic senses, that is, of certain superior senses,
such as sight and hearing, being the only ones for which aesthetic
impressions exist, was debated as early as Plato. The _Hippias major_
contains a discussion upon this theme, which Socrates leads to the
conclusion that there exist beautiful things, which do not reach us
through impressions of eye or ear. But further than this, there exist
things which please the eye, but not the ear, and _vice versa_;
therefore the reason of beauty cannot be visibility or audibility, but
something different from, yet common to both. Perhaps this question has
never been so acutely and so seriously dealt with as in this Platonic
dialogue. Home, Herder, Hegel, Diderot, Rousseau, Berkeley, all dealt
with the problem, but in a more or less arbitrary manner. Herder, for
instance, includes touch with the higher aesthetic senses, but Hegel
removes it, as having immediate contact with matter as such, and with
its immediate sensible qualities.
Schleiermacher, with his wonted penetration, saw that the problem was
not to be solved so easily. He refuted the distinction between clear and
confused senses. He held that the superiority of sight and hearing over
the other senses lay in their free activity, in their capacity of an
activity proceeding from within, and able to create forms and sounds
without receiving external impressions. The eye and the ear are not
merely means of perception, for in that case there could be no visual
and no auditive arts. They are also functions of voluntary movements,
which fill the domain of the senses. Schleiermacher, however, considered
that the difference was rather one of quantity, and that we should allow
to the other senses a minimum of independence.
The sensualists, as we know, maintain that all the senses are aesthetic.
That is the hedonistic hypothesis, which has been dealt with and
disproved in this book. We have shown the embarrassment in which the
hedonists find themselves, when they have dubbed all the senses
"aesthetic," or have been obliged to differentiate in an absurd manner
some of the senses from the others. The only way out of the difficulty
lies in abandoning the attempt to unite orders of facts so diverse as
the representative form of the spirit and the conception of given
physical organs or of a given material of impressions.
The origin of classes of speech and of grammatical forms is to be found
in antiquity, and as regards the latter, the disputes among the
Alexandrian philosophers, the analogists, and the anomalists, resulted
in logic being identified with grammar. Anything which did not seem
logical was excluded from grammar as a deviation. The analogists,
however, did not have it all their own way, and grammar in the modern
sense of the word is a compromise between these extreme views, that is,
it contains something of the thought of Chrysippus, who composed a
treatise to show that the same thing can be expressed with different
sounds, and of Apollonius Discolus, who attempted to explain what the
rigorous analogists refused to admit into their schemes and
classifications. It is only of late years that we have begun to emerge
from the superstitious reverence for grammar, inherited from the Middle
Age. Such writers as Pott, in his introduction to Humboldt, and Paul in
his _Principien d. Sprachgeschichte_, have done good service in throwing
doubt upon the absolute validity of the parts of speech. If the old
superstitions still survive tenaciously, we must attribute this partly
to empirical and poetical grammar, partly to the venerable antiquity of
grammar itself, which has led the world to forget its illegitimate and
turbid origin.
The theory of the relativity of taste is likewise ancient, and it would
be interesting to know whether the saying "there's no accounting for
tastes" could be traced to a merely gustatory origin. In this sense, the
saying would be quite correct, as it is _quite wrong_ when applied to
aesthetic facts. The eighteenth century writers exhibit a piteous
perplexity of thought on this subject. Home, for instance, after much
debate, decides upon a common "standard of taste," which he deduces from
the necessity of social life and from what he calls "a final cause." Of
course it will not be an easy matter to fix this "standard of taste." As
regards moral conduct, we do not seek our models among savages, so with
regard to taste, we must have recourse to those few whose taste has not
been corrupted nor spoilt by pleasure, who have received good taste from
nature, and have perfected it by education and by the practice of life.
If after this has been done, there should yet arise disputes, it will be
necessary to refer to the principles of criticism, as laid down in his
book by the said Home.
We find similar contradictions and vicious circles in the _Discourse on
Taste_ of David Hume. We search his writings in vain for the distinctive
characteristics of the man of taste, whose judgments should be final.
Although he asserts that the general principles of taste are universal
in human nature, and admits that no notice should be accorded to
perversions and ignorance, yet there exist diversities of taste that are
irreconcilable, insuperable, and blameless.
But the criticism of the sensualist and relativist positions cannot be
made from the point of view of those who proclaim the absolute nature of
taste and yet place it among the intellectual concepts. It has been
shown to be impossible to escape from sensualism and relativity save by
falling into the intellectualist error. Muratori in the eighteenth
century is an instance of this. He was one of the first to maintain the
existence of a rule of taste and of universal beauty. André also spoke
of what appears beautiful in a work of art as being not that which
pleases at once, owing to certain particular dispositions of the
faculties of the soul and of the organs of the body, but that which has
the right of pleasing the reason and reflection through its own
excellence. Voltaire admitted an "universal taste," which was
"intellectual," as did many others. Kant appeared, and condemned alike
the intellectualist and the sensualistic error; but placing the
beautiful in a symbol of morality, he failed to discover the imaginative
absoluteness of taste. Later speculative philosophy did not attach
importance to the question.
The correct solution was slow in making its way. It lies, as we know, in
the fact that to judge a work of art we must place ourselves in the
position of the artist at the time of production, and that to judge is
to reproduce. Alexander Pope, in his _Essay on Criticism_, was among the
first to state this truth:
A perfect judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ.
Remarks equally luminous were made by Antonio Conti, Terrasson, and
Heydenreich in the eighteenth century, the latter with considerable
philosophical development. De Sanctis gave in his adhesion to this
formula, but a true theory of aesthetic criticism had not yet been
given, because for such was necessary, not only an exact conception of
nature in art, but also of the relations between the aesthetic fact and
its historical conditions. In more recent times has been denied the
possibility of aesthetic criticism; it has been looked upon as merely
individual and capricious, and historical criticism has been set up in
its place. This would be better called a criticism of extrinsic
erudition and of bad philosophical inspiration--positivist and
materialist. The true history of literature will always require the
reconstruction and then the judgment of the work of art. Those who have
wished to react against such emasculated erudition have often thrown
themselves into the opposite extreme, that is, into a dogmatic,
abstract, intellectualistic, or moralistic form of criticism.
This mention of the history of certain doctrines relating to Aesthetic
suffices to show the range of error possible in the theory. Aesthetic
has need to be surrounded by a vigilant and vigorous critical literature
which shall derive from it and be at once its safeguard and its source
of strength.