DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT (133-175).
[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence
of Matter and Plastic Form 133
2. Part I.--The Ideal 141
3. Part II.--The Types of Art 144
([Greek: a]) Symbolic Art 145
([Greek: b]) Classical Art 148
([Greek: g]) Romantic Art 151
4. Part III.--The Several Arts 157
([Greek: a]) Architecture 160
([Greek: b]) Sculpture 162
([Greek: g]) Romantic Art, comprising 164
(i.) Painting 167
(ii.) Music 169
(iii.) Poetry 171
5. Conclusion] 173
PREFATORY ESSAY BY THE TRANSLATOR.
ON THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF ANOTHER WORLD.
"With such barren forms of thought, that are always in a world beyond,
Philosophy has nothing to do. Its object always something concrete,
and in the highest sense present."--HEGEL'S _Logic_, Wallace's
translation, p. 150.
It will surprise many readers to be told that the words which I have
quoted above embody the very essence of Hegelian thought. The Infinite,
the supra-sensuous, the divine, are so connected in our minds with
futile rackings of the imagination about remote matters which only
distract us from our duties, that a philosophy which designates its
problems by such terms as these seems self-condemned as cloudy and
inane. But, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Hegel
is faithful to the present and the concrete. In the study of his
philosophy we are always dealing with human experience. "My stress
lay," says Mr. Browning,[5] "on the incidents in the development of a
soul; little else is worth study." For "a soul" read "the mind," and
you have the subject-matter to which Hegel's eighteen close-printed
volumes are devoted. The present introductory remarks are meant to
insist on this neglected point of view. I wish to point out, in two or
three salient instances, the transformation undergone by speculative
notions when sedulously applied to life, and restrained from generating
an empty "beyond." By so doing I hope to pave the way for a due
appreciation of Hegel's philosophy of fine art. That the world of mind,
or the world above sense, exists as an actual and organized whole, is a
truth most easily realized in the study of the beautiful. And to grasp
this principle as Hegel applies it is nothing less than to acquire a
new contact with spiritual life. The spiritual world, which is present,
actual, and concrete, contains much besides beauty. But to apprehend
one element of such a whole constitutes and presupposes a long step
towards apprehending the rest. It is for this reason that I propose, in
the first place, to explain, by prominent examples, the conception of
a spiritual world which is present and actual, and then to let Hegel
speak for himself on the particular sphere of art. So closely connected
indeed are all the embodiments of mind, that the Introduction to the
"Philosophy of Fine Art" is almost a microcosm of his entire system.
We know, to our cost, the popular conception of the supra-sensuous
world. Whatever that world is, it is, as commonly thought of, not here
and not now. That is to say, if here and now, it is so by a sort of
miracle, at which we are called upon to wonder, as when angels are
said to be near us, or the dead to know what we do. Again, it is a
counterpart of our present world, and rather imperceptible to _our_
senses, than in its nature beyond contact with sense as such. It is
peopled by persons, who live eternally, which means through endless
ages, and to whose actual communion with us, as also to our own
with God, we look forward in the future. It even perhaps contains a
supra-sensuous original corresponding to every thing and movement in
this world of ours. And it does _not_ necessarily deepen our conception
of life, but only reduplicates it.
Such a world, whatever we may think about its actual existence, is
_not_ the "other world" of philosophy. The "things not seen" of Plato
or of Hegel are not a double or a projection of the existing world.
Plato, indeed, wavered between the two conceptions in a way that should
have warned his interpreters of the divergence in his track of thought.
But in Hegel, at least, there is no ambiguity. The world of spirits
with him is no world of ghosts. When we study the embodiments of mind
or spirit in his pages, and read of law, property, and national unity;
of fine art, the religious community, and the intellect that has
attained scientific self-consciousness, we may miss our other world
with its obscure "beyond," but we at any rate feel ourselves to be
dealing with something real, and with the deepest concerns of life.
We may deny to such matters the titles which philosophy bestows upon
them; we may say that this is no "other world," no realm of spirits,
nothing infinite or divine: but this matters little so long as we know
what we are talking about, and are talking about the best we know. And
what we discuss when Hegel is our guide, will _always_ be some great
achievement or essential attribute of the human mind. He never asks,
"Is it?" but always "What is it?" and therefore has instruction, drawn
from experience, even for those to whom the titles of his inquiries
seem fraudulent or bombastic.
These few remarks are not directed to maintaining any thesis about
the reality of nature and of sense. Their object is to enforce a
distinction which falls _within_ the world which we know, and not
_between_ the world we know and another which we do not know. This
distinction is real, and governs life. I am not denying any other
distinction, but I am insisting on this. No really great philosopher,
nor religious teacher,--neither Plato, nor Kant, nor St. Paul--can
be understood unless we grasp this antithesis in the right way. All
of these teachers have pointed men to another world. All of them,
perhaps, were led at times by the very force and reality of their own
thought into the fatal separation that cancels its meaning. So strong
was their sense of the gulf between the trifles and the realities
of life, that they gave occasion to the indolent imagination--in
themselves and in others--to transmute this gulf from a measure of
moral effort into an inaccessibility that defies apprehension. But
their purpose was to overcome this inaccessibility, not to heighten it.
The hardest of all lessons in interpretation is to believe that great
men mean what they say. We are below their level, and what they
actually say seems impossible to us, till we have adulterated it to
suit our own imbecility. Especially when they speak of the highest
realities, we attach _our_ notion of reality to what _they_ pronounce
to be real. And thus we baffle every attempt to deepen our ideas of the
world in which we live. The work of intelligence is hard; that of the
sensuous fancy is easy; and so we substitute the latter for the former.
We are told, for instance, by Plato, that goodness, beauty, and truth
are realities, but not visible or tangible. Instead of responding to
the call so made on our intelligence by scrutinizing the nature and
conditions of these intellectual facts--though we know well how tardily
they are produced by the culture of ages--we apply forthwith our idea
of reality as something separate in space and time, and so "refute"
Plato with ease, and remain as wise as we were before. And it is true
that Plato, handling ideas of vast import with the mind and language
of his day, sometimes by a similar error refutes himself.[6] He makes,
for instance, the disembodied soul see the invisible ideas. Thus he
travesties his things of the mind as though they were things of sense,
only not of _our_ sense--thereby destroying the deeper difference
of kind that alone enables them to find a place in our world. That
his doctrine of ideas was really rooted, not in mysticism, but in
scientific enthusiasm, is a truth that is veiled from us partly by his
inconsistencies, but far more by our own erroneous preconceptions.[7]
There is, however, a genuine distinction between "this" world and
the "other" world, which is merely parodied by the vulgar antitheses
between natural and supernatural, finite and infinite, phenomenal and
noumenal. We sometimes hear it said, "The world is quite changed to
me since I knew such a person," or "studied such a subject," or "had
suggested to me such an idea." The expression may be literally true;
and we do not commonly exaggerate, but vastly underrate its import. We
read, for instance, in a good authority, "These twenty kinds of birds
(which Virgil mentions) do not correspond so much to our species as to
our genera; for the Greeks and Romans, I need hardly say, had only very
rough-and-ready methods of classification, just as is the case with
uneducated people at the present day."[8] Any one may verify the same
fact as regards the observation of flowers. Every yellow ranunculus
is called a "butter-cup," every large white umbellifer a "hemlock."
These, with hundreds of other differences of perception, affect the
surroundings in which men consciously live, at least as much as a
considerable degree of deafness or blindness. It is no metaphor, but
literal fact, to say that man's whole environment is transformed by the
training even of his mere apprehension of natural objects. But there
is more in the matter than this. Without going into metaphysics, which
I wish to avoid, I cannot, indeed, maintain that mind "makes" natural
objects, although by enabling us to perceive them it unquestionably
makes our immediate conscious world. My individual consciousness does
not make or create the differences between the species of ranunculus,
although it does create my knowledge of them. But when we come to speak
of the world of morals or art or politics, we may venture much further
in our assertions. The actual facts of this world do directly arise
out of and are causally sustained by conscious intelligence; and these
facts form the world above sense. The unity of a Christian church or
congregation is a governing fact of life; so is that of a family or a
nation; so, we may hope, will that of humanity come to be. What is this
unity? Is it visible and tangible, like the unity of a human body? No,
the unity is "ideal;" that is, it exists in the medium of thought only;
it is made up of certain sentiments, purposes, and ideas. What even of
an army? Here, too, an ideal unity is the mainspring of action. Without
mutual intelligence and reciprocal reliance you may have a mob, but
you cannot have an army. But all these conditions exist and can exist
in the mind only. An army, _qua_ army, is not a mere fact of sense;
for not only does it need mind to perceive it--a heap of sand does
that--but it also needs mind to _make_ it.
The world of these governing facts of life is the world of the things
not seen, the object of reason, the world of the truly infinite and
divine. It is, of course, a false antithesis to contrast seeing with
the bodily eye and seeing with the mind's eye. The seeing eye is always
the mind's eye. The distinction between sense and spirit or intellect
is a distinction _within the mind_ just as is St. Paul's opposition
between the spirit and the flesh. Nevertheless, the mind that only sees
colour--sense or sense-perception--is different from the mind that sees
beauty, the self-conscious spirit. The latter includes the former, but
the former does not include the latter. To the one the colour is the
ultimate fact; to the other it is an element in a thing of beauty. This
relation prevails throughout between the world of sense and the world
above sense. The "things not seen," philosophically speaking, are no
world of existences or of intelligences co-ordinate with and severed
from this present world. They are a value, an import, a significance,
superadded to the phenomenal world, which may thus be said, though with
some risk of misunderstanding, to be degraded into a symbol. The house,
the cathedral, the judge's robe, the general's uniform, are ultimate
facts for the child or the savage; but for the civilized man they are
symbols of domestic life, of the Church, and of the State. Even where
the supra-sensuous world has its purest expression, in the knowledge
and will of intelligent beings, it presupposes a sensuous world as
the material of ideas and of actions. "This" world and the "other"
world are continuous and inseparable, and all men must live in some
degree for both. But the completion of the Noumenal world, and the
apprehension of its reality and completeness, is the task by fulfilling
which humanity advances.
I pass to the interpretation, neither technical nor controversial, of
one or two of Hegel's most alarming phrases.
The "infinite" seems to practical minds the very opposite of anything
real, present, or valuable. As the description of life, it is the
mere negation of the life we know; as the description of a purpose,
it is the very antithesis of any purpose that we can conceive to be
attainable; as the description of a being, it appears to be formed
by denying every predicate which we attach to personality. And I
could wish that Hegel had not selected this much-abused term as the
distinctive predicate of what is most real and most precious in life.
He adhered to it, no doubt, because his infinity, though different in
nature to that of common logic, yet rightly fills the place and meets
the problem of that conception. I will attempt to explain how this
can be, and what we are discussing when we read about infinity in the
Hegelian philosophy.
It is an obvious remark, that infinity was a symbol of evil in
Hellenic speculation, whereas to Christian and modern thought it is
identified with good. Much idle talk has arisen on this account, as to
the limitation of the Hellenic mind. For in fact, the Finite ascribed
to Pythagoras, and the idea of limit and proportion in Plato or in
Aristotle, are far more nearly akin to true infinity than is the
Infinite of modern popular philosophy. Infinite means the negation of
limit. Now, common infinity, which may be identified in general with
enumeration _ad infinitum_,--the _false_ infinity of Hegel--is the
attempt to negate or transcend a limit which inevitably recurs. It
arises from attempting a task or problem in the wrong way, so that we
may go on for ever without making any advance towards its achievement.
All quantitative infinity--which of course has its definite uses,
subject to proper reservations--is of this nature. A process does
not change its character by mere continuance, and the aggregate of a
million units is no more free from limitation than the aggregate of
ten. A defect in kind cannot be compensated by mere quantity. We see
the fallacious attempt in savage, barbaric, or vulgar art. Meaningless
iteration, objectless labour, enormous size, extravagant costliness,
indicate the effort to satisfy man's need of expression by the mere
accumulation of work without adequate idea or purpose. But such
efforts, however stupendous, never attain their goal. They constitute a
recurrent failure to transcend a recurrent limit, precisely analogous
to enumeration _ad infinitum_. A hundred thousand pounds' worth of
bricks and mortar comes no nearer to the embodiment of mind than
a thousand pounds' worth. To attempt adequate expression by mere
aggregation of cost or size is therefore to fall into the infinite
process or the false infinity.
Another well-known instance is the pursuit of happiness in the form
of "pleasure for pleasure's sake." The recurrence of unchanging units
leaves us where we were. A process which does not change remains the
same, and if it did not bring satisfaction at first, will not do so at
last.[9] We might as well go on producing parallels to infinity, in the
hope that somehow or somewhere they may meet. An infinite straight line
may serve as a type of the kind of infinity we are considering.
Infinity in the Hegelian sense does not partake in any way of this
endlessness, or of the unreality which attaches to it. Its root-idea is
self-completeness or satisfaction. That which is "infinite" is without
boundary, because it does not refer beyond itself for explanation, or
for justification; and therefore, in all human existence or production
infinity can only be an aspect or element. A picture, for instance,
regarded as a work of fine art, justifies itself, gives satisfaction
directly and without raising questions of cause or of comparison,
and is in this sense--_i.e._ in respect of its beauty--regarded as
"infinite." When, on the other hand, we consider this same work of art
as an historical phenomenon, as a link in a chain of causation--_e.g._
as elucidating the development of a school, or proving the existence
of a certain technical process at a certain date--then we go beyond
itself for its interest and explanation, and depress it at once
into a finite object. The finite is that which presents itself as
incomplete; the infinite that which presents itself as complete, and
which, therefore, does not force upon us the fact of its limitation.
This character belongs in the highest degree to self-conscious mind,
as realized in the world above sense; and in some degree to all
elements of that world--for instance, to the State--in as far as they
represent man's realized self-consciousness. It is the nature of
self-consciousness to be infinite, because it is its nature to take
into itself what was opposed to it, and thus to make itself into an
organized sphere that has value and reality within, and not beyond
itself. If false infinity was represented by an infinite straight line,
true infinity may be compared to a circle or a sphere.
The distinction between true and false infinity is of the profoundest
moral import. The sickly yearning that longs only to escape from the
real, rooted in the antithesis between the infinite and the actual or
concrete, or in the idea of the monotonous "_infini_" which is one with
the "_abîme_" or the "_gouffre_," is appraised by this test at its true
value. It is seen to rest on a mere pathetic fallacy of thought and
sentiment. So far from the infinite being remote, abstract, unreal,
nothing but the infinite can be truly present, concrete, and real.
The finite always refers us away and away through an endless series of
causes, of effects, or of relations. The infinite is individual, and
bears the character of knowledge, achievement, attainment. In short,
the actual realities which we have in mind when, in philosophy, we
speak of the infinite, are such as a nation that is conscious of its
unity and general will, or the realm of fine art as the recognition of
man's higher nature, or the religious community with its conviction of
an indwelling Deity.
Now, whether we like the term Infinite or not, whether or no we think
that man's life can be explained and justified within the limits of
these aims and these phenomena, there is no doubt that these matters
are real, and are the most momentous of realities. In acquainting
ourselves with their structure, evolution, and relation to individual
life, we are at least not wasting time, nor treating of matters beyond
human intelligence.
There is a very similar contrast in the conception of human Freedom.
"Free will" is so old a vexed question, that though the conflict still
rages fitfully round it, the world hardly conceives that much can
turn upon its decision. But when in place of the abstract, "Is man
free?" we are confronted with the concrete inquiry, "When, in what,
and as what, does man carry out his will with least hindrance and with
fullest satisfaction?" then we have before us the actual phenomena of
civilization, instead of an idle and abstract Yes or No.
Man's Freedom, in the sense thus contemplated, lies in the spiritual or
supra-sensuous world by which his humanity is realized, and in which
his will finds fulfilment. The family, for example, property, and law
are the first steps of man's freedom. In them the individual's will
obtains and bestows recognition as an agent in a society whose bond
of union is ideal--_i.e._ existing only in consciousness; and this
recognition develops into duties and rights. It is in these that man
finds something to live for, something in which and for the sake of
which to assert himself. As society develops he lives on the whole
more in the civilized or spiritual world, and less in the savage
or purely natural world. His will, which is himself, expands with
the institutions and ideas that form its purpose, and the history
of this expansion is the history of human freedom. Nothing is more
shallow, more barbarously irrational, than to regard the progress of
civilization as the accumulation of restrictions. Laws and rules are a
necessary aspect of extended capacities. Every power that we gain has a
positive nature, and therefore involves positive conditions, and every
positive condition has negative relations. To accomplish a particular
purpose you must go to work in a particular way, and in no other way.
To complain of this is like complaining of a house because it has a
definite shape. If freedom means absence of attributes, empty space
is "freer" than any edifice. Of course a house may be so ugly that we
may say we would rather have none at all. Civilization may bring such
horrors that we may say "rather savagery than this;" but in neither
case are we serious. Great as are the vices of civilization, it is only
in civilization that man becomes human, spiritual, and free.
The effort to grasp and apply such an idea as this can hardly be
barren. It brings us face to face with concrete facts of history,
and of man's actual motives and purposes. True philosophy here, as
everywhere, plunges into the concrete and the real; it is the indolent
abstract fancy that thrusts problems away into the remote "beyond"
or into futile abstraction. Plato, the philosopher, knows well that
the mind is free when it achieves what as a whole it truly wills. But
Plato, the allegorist and imaginative preacher, refers the soul's
freedom to a fleeting moment of ante-natal choice, which he vainly
strives to exempt from causal influence. Pictorial imagination, with
its ready reference to occurrences in past and future, is the great foe
to philosophic intelligence.
Finally, it is impossible to omit all reference to the notion of an
immanent Deity, which forms the very centre of Hegel's thought. When
an unspeculative English reader first meets with Hegel's passionate
insistence that God is not unknowable, that He necessarily reveals
himself as a Trinity of persons, and that to deny this is to represent
men as "the heathen who know not God," he feels as if he had taken
sand into his mouth. He is inclined to ask what these Neo-Platonic or
mediæval doctrines are doing in the nineteenth century, and why we
should resuscitate dead logomachies that can have no possible value for
life or conduct. Now, I must not attempt here to discuss the difficult
question of Hegel's ultimate conception of the being of God, and I am
bound to warn any one who may read these pages that I only profess
to reproduce one--though by far the most prominent--side of that
conception. But, subject to this reservation, I have no hesitation in
saying, that our own prejudices form the only hindrance to our seeing
that Hegel's subject-matter is here, as elsewhere, human life. He
gives us what he takes to be the literal truth, and we will have it
to be metaphor. Verbally contradicting Kant, he accepts, completes,
and enforces Kant's thought. "Revelation can never be the true ground
of religion," said Kant; "for revelation is an historical accident,
and religion is a rational necessity of man's intelligent nature."
"Revelation is the only true knowledge of God and ground of religion,"
says Hegel, "because _revelation consists in the realization of God in
man's intelligent nature_." We are, however, not unaccustomed to such
phrases, and our imagination is equal to its habitual task of evading
their meaning. We take them to be a strong metaphor, meaning that God,
who is a sort of ghostly being a long way off, is, notwithstanding,
more or less within the knowledge of our minds, and so is "in" them,
as a book which is actually in London may be in my memory when I am
in Scotland. Now, right or wrong, this is not what Hegel means. He
means what he says; that God is spirit or mind,[10] and exists in the
medium of mind, _which is actual as intelligence, for us at any rate,
only in the human self-consciousness_. The thought is hard from its
very simplicity, and we struggle, as always, to avoid grasping it. We
imagine spirits as made of a sort of thin matter, and so as existing
just like bodies, although we call them disembodied. And then we think
of this disembodied form as an alternative to human form, and suppose
spirit to have somehow a purer existence apart from human body. This
error really springs from imagining the two as existences of the same
kind, and so conflicting, and from not realizing the notion of spirit
as mind or self-consciousness, which is the only way of conceiving its
actual presence in our world.
Mind uses sensuous existence as its symbol; perhaps even needs it. The
poet who has hit Hegel's thought so nearly,[11] fails here:--
"This weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?"
Here we leave the track of the higher Pantheism for that of vulgar
mysticism. Spiritual being is conceived as somehow incompatible with
bodily shape, either because incapable of any concrete embodiment, or
because it has a quasi-material shape of its own. Now, this is just the
reverse of the Hegelian idea. According to Hegel, it is only in the
human form that intelligence can for us find its full expression. The
notion of a spiritual body other than and incompatible with the natural
body does not arise. Spirit exists in the medium of consciousness, not
in a peculiar kind of matter. The spiritualization of the natural body
is not to be looked for in an astral or angel body, but in the gait
and gesture, the significance and dignity, that make the body of the
civilized man the outward image of his soul, and distinguish him from
the savage as from the animal. The human soul becomes actual itself,
and visible to others, only by moulding the body into its symbol
and instrument. It ought to have been an axiom of physiology, Hegel
says, that the series of animated forms must necessarily lead up to
that of man. For this is the only sensuous form in which mind could
attain adequate manifestation. Thus anthropomorphism in fine art is
no accident, nor an unworthy portrayal of divinity. If the Deity is
to be symbolized to sense, it must be in the image of man. The symbol
is not indeed the reality, as the sensuous image is not conscious
thought; but this is a defect inherent in artistic presentation, and
not attributable to anthropomorphism in particular.
It is obvious that in the light of such a conception, a speculative
import can be attached to the doctrine of the Incarnation, and Hegel's
reading of Christian ideas is, in fact, to be interpreted entirely in
this sense. This is not the place to go deeper into such views, which,
however profound, may perhaps continue to seem non-natural expositions
of Christian dogma. I am only concerned to show how here, also, the
speculative idea, operating upon the concrete and actual, generates
a fresh and inspiring insight into life and conduct. Few chapters of
anthropology are more thorough, profound, and suggestive than Hegel's
account of the "actual soul;" _i.e._ of the habits and attributes which
make the body distinctively human by stamping it with the impress of
mind. Nor has philosophic insight ever done better service to the
history of religion than in grasping the essence of Christianity as the
_unity_, (not merely the _union_) of the divine and human nature.
Among the things which are spiritually discerned, an important place
belongs to beauty. As a boundary and transition between sense and
thought, it is peculiarly fitted to illustrate the reality which we
claim, in contradistinction to mere sensuous appearance, for what
is best in life. Many who distrust Hegelian formulæ are convinced
that beauty at least is real. They will admit that fine art and the
recognition of beauty are not trifles, not amusements, but rank high
among the interests that give life its value. All such will find
themselves in sympathy with the purpose of a great philosopher who has
bent all the power of his genius and his industry to vindicating a
place for art as an embodiment of the divine nature. The Introduction
to Hegel's "Æsthetic," which is all that it was possible to reproduce
in the present volume, lacks, of course, the solidity and detailed
elaboration of the treatise. Yet to all who care for thorough and noble
thought on a great subject, and for a defence of their faith in the
true spiritual realities, I have hope that the ensuing pages, however
marred by imperfect translation, will be welcome.
HEGEL'S ÆSTHETIC.
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.
THE RANGE OF ÆSTHETIC DEFINED, AND SOME OBJECTIONS REFUTED.
The present course of lectures deals with "Æsthetic." Their subject
is the wide _realm of the beautiful_, and, more particularly, their
province is _Art_--we may restrict it, indeed, to _Fine Art_.
The name "Æsthetic" in its natural sense is not quite appropriate to
this subject. "Æsthetic" means more precisely the science of sensation
or feeling. Thus understood, it arose as a new science, or rather as
something that was to become a branch of philosophy for the first
time,[12] in the school of Wolff, at the epoch when works of art
were being considered in Germany in the light of the feelings which
they were supposed to evoke--feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear,
pity, etc. The name was so inappropriate, or, strictly speaking, so
superficial, that for this reason it was attempted to form other
names, _e.g._ "Kallistic." But this name, again, is unsatisfactory,
for the science to be designated does not treat of beauty in general,
but merely of _artistic_ beauty. We shall, therefore, permit the
name Æsthetic to stand, because it is nothing but a name, and so is
indifferent to us, and, moreover, has up to a certain point passed into
common language. As a name, therefore, it may be retained. The proper
expression, however, for our science is the "Philosophy of Art," or,
more definitely, the "Philosophy of Fine Art."
[Greek: a.] By the above expression we at once exclude the _beauty
of Nature_. Such a limitation of our subject may appear to be an
arbitrary demarcation, resting on the principle that every science has
the prerogative of marking out its boundaries at pleasure. But this is
not the sense in which we are to understand the limitation of Æsthetic
to _the beauty of art_. It is true that in common life we are in the
habit of speaking of beautiful colour, a beautiful sky, a beautiful
river, and, moreover, of beautiful flowers, beautiful animals, and,
above all, of beautiful human beings. We will not just now enter into
the controversy how far such objects can justly have the attribute
of beauty ascribed to them, or how far, speaking generally, natural
beauty ought to be recognized as existing besides artistic beauty. We
may, however, begin at once by asserting that artistic beauty stands
_higher_ than nature. For the beauty of art is the beauty that is
born--born again, that is--of the mind;[13] and by as much as the mind
and its products are higher than nature and its appearances, by so
much the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature. Indeed,
if we look at it _formally_--i.e. only considering in what way it
exists, not what there is in it,--even a silly fancy such as may pass
through a man's head is _higher_ than any product of nature; for such
a fancy must at least be characterized by intellectual being and by
freedom.[14] In respect of its content, on the other hand, the sun,
for instance, appears to us to be an absolutely necessary factor in
the universe, while a blundering notion passes away as accidental and
transient; but yet, in its own being, a natural existence such as the
sun is indifferent,[15] is not free or self-conscious, while if we
consider it in its necessary connection with other things we are not
regarding it by itself or for its own sake, and, therefore, not as
beautiful.
To say, as we have said, in general terms, that mind and its artistic
beauty stand _higher_ than natural beauty, is no doubt to determine
almost nothing. For "higher" is an utterly indefinite expression, which
designates the beauty of nature and that of art as if merely standing
side by side in the space of the imagination, and states the difference
between them as purely quantitative, and, therefore, purely external.
But the mind and its artistic beauty, in being "_higher_" as compared
with nature, have a distinction which is not simply relative. Mind, and
mind only, is capable of truth, and comprehends in itself all that is,
so that whatever is beautiful can only be really and truly beautiful as
partaking in this higher element and as created thereby. In this sense
the beauty of nature reveals itself as but a reflection of the beauty
which belongs to the mind, as an imperfect, incomplete mode of being,
as a mode whose really substantial element is contained in the mind
itself.
Moreover, we shall find the restriction to fine art very natural, for
however much has been and is said--though less by the ancients than by
ourselves--of the beauties of nature, yet no one has taken it into his
head to emphasize the point of view of the _beauty_ of natural objects,
and to attempt to make a science, a systematic account of these
beauties. The aspect of _Utility_, indeed, has been accentuated, and a
science, _e.g._ of natural things useful against diseases a _materia
medica_, has been compiled, consisting in a description of minerals,
chemical products, plants, and animals that are of use for curative
purposes. But the realm of nature has not been arrayed and estimated
under the aspect of beauty. In dealing with natural beauty we find
ourselves too open to _vagueness_, and too destitute of a _criterion_;
for which reason such a review would have little interest.
The above prefatory remarks upon beauty in nature and in art, upon the
relation between the two, and the exclusion of the former from the
region of the subject proper, are meant to remove any idea that the
limitation of our science is owing merely to choice and to caprice.
But this is not the place to _demonstrate_ the above relation, for the
consideration of it falls within our science itself, and therefore it
cannot be discussed and demonstrated till later.
Supposing that for the present we have limited ourselves to the beauty
of art, this first step brings us at once into contact with fresh
difficulties.
[Greek: b.] The first thing that may suggest itself to us is the
difficulty whether fine art shows itself to _deserve_ a scientific
treatment. Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all the business of
life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our
surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of
our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in
entertaining fashion, and where there is nothing good to be achieved,
occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.
Yet although art presses in with its pleasing shapes on every possible
occasion, from the rude adornments of the savage to the splendour of
the temple with its untold wealth of decoration, still these shapes
themselves appear to fall outside the real purposes of life. And
even if the creations of art do not prove detrimental to our graver
purposes, if they appear at times actually to further them by keeping
evil at a distance, still it is so far true that art belongs rather to
the relaxation and leisure of the mind, while the substantive interests
of life demand its exertion. Hence it may seem unsuitable and pedantic
to treat with scientific seriousness what is not in itself of a serious
nature. In any case, upon such a view art appears as a superfluity,
even if the softening of the mental temper which preoccupation with
beauty has power to produce, does not turn out a detrimental, because
effeminating influence. In this aspect of the matter, the fine
arts being granted to be a _luxury_, it has been thought necessary
in various ways to take up their defence with reference to their
relation towards _practical_ necessities, and more especially towards
morality and piety; and, as it is impossible to demonstrate their
harmlessness, at least to make it credible that the mental luxury in
question afforded a larger sum of _advantages_ than of _disadvantages_.
With this view very serious aims have been ascribed to art, and it
has been recommended in various ways as a mediator between reason
and sensuousness, between inclination and duty, as the reconciler of
these elements in the obstinate conflict and repulsion which their
collision generates. But the opinion may be maintained that, assuming
such aims of art, more serious though they are, nothing is gained for
reason and duty by the attempt at mediation, because these principles,
as essentially incapable of intermixture, can be parties to no such
compromise, but demand in their manifestation the same purity which
they have in themselves. And it might be said that art itself is not
made any more worthy of scientific discussion by such treatment, seeing
that it is still doubly a servant--to higher aims, no doubt, on the
one hand, but none the less to vacuity and frivolity on the other; and
in such service can at best only display itself as a means, instead of
being an end pursued for its own sake. Finally, art, considered as a
means, seems to labour under this defect of form, that, supposing it to
be subordinated to serious ends, and to produce results of importance,
still the means employed by art for such purposes is _deception_.
For beauty has its being in appearance.[16] Now, it will readily be
admitted that an aim which is real and true in itself ought not to
be attained by deception, and if it does here and there achieve some
success in this way, that can only be the case to a limited extent, and
even then deception cannot approve itself as the right means. For the
means should correspond to the dignity of the end, and only what is
real and true, not semblance or deception, has power to create what is
real and true; just as science, for instance, has to consider the true
interests of the mind in accordance with the truth of reality and the
true way of conceiving it.
In all these respects it may appear as if fine art were _unworthy_
of scientific consideration; because, as is alleged, it is at best a
pleasing amusement, and even if it pursues more serious aims is in
contradiction with their nature, but is at best the mere servant alike
of amusement and of serious aims, and yet has at command, whether as
the element of its being or as the vehicle of its action, nothing
beyond deception and semblance.
[Greek: g]. But, in the second place, it is a still more probable
aspect of the question that, even if fine art were to form a subject
of philosophical reflections in a general way, it would be no
_appropriate_ matter for strictly scientific treatment. The beauty
of art presents itself to sense, to feeling, to perception, to
imagination; its sphere is not that of thought, and the apprehension
of its activity and its productions demand another organ than that of
the scientific intelligence. Moreover, what we enjoy in the beauty of
art is precisely the _freedom_ of its productive and plastic energy. In
the origination, as in the contemplation, of its creations we appear
to escape wholly from the fetters of rule and regularity. In the forms
of art we seek for repose and animation in place of the austerity
of the reign of law and the sombre self-concentration of thought;
we would exchange the shadowland of the idea for cheerful vigorous
reality. And lastly, the source of artistic creations is the free
activity of fancy, which in her imagination is more free than nature's
self. Not only has art at command the whole wealth of natural forms
in the brilliant variety of their appearance, but also the creative
imagination has power to expatiate inexhaustibly beyond their limit in
products of _its own_. It may be supposed that, in presence of this
immeasurable abundance of inspiration and its free creations, thought
will necessarily lose the courage to bring them _completely_ before it,
to criticize them, and to array them under its universal formulæ.
Science, on the contrary, every one admits, is compelled by its form to
busy itself with thought which abstracts from the mass of particulars.
For this reason, on the one hand, imagination with its contingency and
caprice--that is, the organ of artistic activity and enjoyment--is of
necessity excluded from science. And on the other hand, seeing that art
is what cheers and animates the dull and withered dryness of the idea,
reconciles with reality its abstraction and its dissociation therefrom,
and supplies out of the real world what is lacking to the notion,
it follows, we may think, that a _purely_ intellectual treatment of
art destroys this very means of supplementation, annihilates it, and
reduces the idea once more to its simplicity devoid of reality, and to
its shadowy abstractness. And further, it is objected that science,
as a matter of _content_, occupies itself with what is _necessary_.
Now, if Æsthetic puts aside the beauty of nature, we not only gain
nothing in respect of necessity, but to all appearance have got further
away from it. For the expression _Nature_ at once gives us the idea
of Necessity and Uniformity,[17] that is to say, of a behaviour which
may be hoped to be akin to science, and capable of submitting thereto.
But in the mind, generally, and more particularly in the imagination,
compared with nature, caprice and lawlessness are supposed to be
peculiarly at home; and these withdraw themselves as a matter of course
from all scientific explanation.
Thus in all these aspects--in origin, in effect, and in range--fine
art, instead of showing itself fitted for scientific study, seems
rather in its own right to resist the regulating activity of thought,
and to be unsuitable for strict scientific discussion.
These and similar objections against a genuinely scientific treatment
of fine art are drawn from common ideas, points of view, and
considerations, which may be read _ad nauseam_ in full elaboration in
the older writers upon beauty and the fine arts, especially in the
works of French authors. And in part they contain facts which have a
certain truth; in part, too, the argumentation[18] based upon these
facts appears plausible at first sight. Thus, _e.g._, there is the
fact that the forms of beauty are as manifold as the phenomenon of
beauty is omnipresent; and from this, if we choose, we may proceed
to conclude to a universal _impulse of Beauty_ in human nature, and
then go on to the further inference: that because ideas of beauty are
so endlessly various, and therefore, as seems obvious, are something
_particular_,[19] it follows that there can be no universal laws of
beauty and of taste.
Before it is possible for us to turn from such considerations to our
subject proper, it is our business to devote a brief introductory
discussion to the objections and doubts which have been raised. In the
first place, as regards the _worthiness_ of art to be scientifically
considered, it is no doubt the case that art can be employed as a
fleeting pastime, to serve the ends of pleasure and entertainment,
to decorate our surroundings, to impart pleasantness to the external
conditions of our life, and to emphasize other objects by means of
ornament. In this mode of employment art is indeed not independent, not
free, but servile. But what _we_ mean to consider, is the art which is
_free_ in its end as in its means.
That art is in the abstract capable of serving other aims, and
of being a mere pastime, is moreover a relation which it shares
with thought. For, on the one hand, science, in the shape of the
subservient understanding, submits to be used for finite purposes,
and as an accidental means, and in that case is not self-determined,
but determined by alien objects and relations; but, on the other
hand, science liberates itself from this service to rise in free
independence to the attainment of truth, in which medium, free from all
interference, it fulfils itself in conformity with its proper aims.
Fine art is not real art till it is in this sense free, and only
achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same
sphere with religion and philosophy, and has become simply a mode
of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the Divine
Nature,[20] the deepest interests of humanity, and the most
comprehensive truths of the mind. It is in works of art that nations
have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts;
and fine art is frequently the key--with many nations there is no
other--to the understanding of their wisdom and of their religion.
This is an attribute which art shares with religion and philosophy,
only in this peculiar mode, that it represents even the highest ideas
_in sensuous forms_, thereby bringing them nearer to the character
of natural phenomena, to the senses, and to feeling. The world, into
whose depths _thought_ penetrates, is a supra-sensuous world, which
is thus, to begin with, erected as a _beyond_ over against immediate
consciousness and present sensation; the power which thus rescues
itself from the _here_, that consists in the actuality and finiteness
of sense, is the freedom of thought in cognition. But the mind is able
to heal this schism which its advance creates; it generates out of
itself the works of fine art as the first middle term of reconciliation
between pure thought and what is external, sensuous, and transitory,
between nature with its finite actuality and the infinite freedom of
the reason that comprehends.
[Greek: d]. The _element_ of art was said to be in its general nature
an _unworthy_ element, as consisting in appearance and deception. The
censure would be not devoid of justice, if it were possible to class
appearance as something that ought not to exist. An appearance or
show, however, is essential to existence. Truth could not be, did it
not appear and reveal itself,[21] were it not truth _for_ some one or
something, _for_ itself as also _for_ Mind. Therefore there can be no
objection against appearance in general, but, if at all, against the
particular mode of appearance in which art gives actuality to what is
in itself real and true. If, in this aspect, the _appearance_ with
which art gives its conceptions life as determinate existences is to
be termed a _deception_, this is a criticism which primarily receives
its meaning by comparison with the external world of phenomena and
its immediate contact with us as _matter_, and in like manner by
the standard of our own world of feeling, that is, the inner world
of _sense_. These are the two worlds to which, in the life of daily
experience, in our own phenomenal[22] life, we are accustomed to
attribute the value and the title of actuality, reality, and truth, in
contrast to art, which we set down as lacking such reality and truth.
Now, this whole sphere of the empirical inner and outer world is just
what is not the world of genuine reality, but is to be entitled a mere
appearance more strictly than is true of art, and a crueller deception.
Genuine reality is only to be found beyond the immediacy of feeling
and of external objects. Nothing is genuinely real but that which is
actual in its own right,[23] that which is the substance of nature
and of mind, fixing itself indeed in present and definite existence,
but in this existence still retaining its essential and self-centred
being, and thus and no otherwise attaining genuine reality. The
dominion of these universal powers is exactly what art accentuates and
reveals. The common outer and inner world also no doubt present to us
this essence of reality, but in the shape of a chaos of accidental
matters, encumbered by the immediateness of sensuous presentation, and
by arbitrary states, events, characters, etc. Art liberates the real
import of appearances from the semblance and deception of this bad and
fleeting world, and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality,
born of mind. The appearances of art, therefore, far from being mere
semblances, have the higher reality and the more genuine existence in
comparison with the realities of common life.
Just as little can the representations of art be called a deceptive
semblance in comparison with the representations of historical
narrative, as if that had the more genuine truth. For history has not
even immediate existence, but only the intellectual presentation of it,
for the element of its portrayals, and its content remains burdened
with the whole mass of contingent matter formed by common reality
with its occurrences, complications, and individualities. But the
work of art brings before us the eternal powers that hold dominion in
history, without any such superfluity in the way of immediate sensuous
presentation and its unstable semblances.
Again, the mode of appearance of the shapes produced by art may be
called a deception in comparison with philosophic thought, with
religious or moral principles. Beyond a doubt the mode of revelation
which a content attains in the realm of thought is the truest reality;
but in comparison with the show or semblance of immediate sensuous
existence or of historical narrative, the artistic semblance has the
advantage that in itself it points beyond itself, and refers us away
from itself to something spiritual which it is meant to bring before
the mind's eye. Whereas immediate appearance does not give itself
out to be deceptive, but rather to be real and true, though all the
time its truth is contaminated and infected by the immediate sensuous
element. The hard rind of nature and the common world give the mind
more trouble in breaking through to the idea than do the products of
art.
But if, on the one side, we assign this high position to art, we must
no less bear in mind, on the other hand, that art is not, either in
content or in form, the supreme and absolute mode of bringing the
mind's genuine interests into consciousness. The form of art is enough
to limit it to a restricted content. Only a certain circle and grade of
truth is capable of being represented in the medium of art. Such truth
must have in its own nature the capacity to go forth into sensuous form
and be adequate to itself therein, if it is to be a genuinely artistic
content, as is the case with the gods of Greece. There is, however, a
deeper form of truth, in which it is no longer so closely akin and so
friendly to sense as to be adequately embraced and expressed by that
medium. Of such a kind is the Christian conception of truth; and more
especially the spirit of our modern world, or, to come closer, of our
religion and our intellectual culture, reveals itself as beyond the
stage at which art is the highest mode assumed by man's consciousness
of the absolute. The peculiar mode to which artistic production and
works of art belong no longer satisfies our supreme need. We are
above the level at which works of art can be venerated as divine,
and actually worshipped; the impression which they make is of a more
considerate kind, and the feelings which they stir within us require
a higher test and a further confirmation. Thought and reflection have
taken their flight above fine art. Those who delight in grumbling and
censure may set down this phenomenon for a corruption, and ascribe it
to the predominance of passion and selfish interests, which scare away
at once the seriousness and the cheerfulness of art. Or we may accuse
the troubles of the present time and the complicated condition of civil
and political life as hindering the feelings, entangled in minute
preoccupations, from freeing themselves, and rising to the higher
aims of art, the intelligence itself being subordinate to petty needs
and interests, in sciences which only subserve such purposes and are
seduced into making this barren region their home.
However all this may be, it certainly is the case, that art no longer
affords that satisfaction of spiritual wants which earlier epochs
and peoples have sought therein, and have found therein only; a
satisfaction which, at all events on the religious side, was most
intimately and profoundly connected with art. The beautiful days of
Greek art, and the golden time of the later middle ages are gone by.
The reflective culture of our life of to-day, makes it a necessity for
us, in respect of our will no less than of our judgment, to adhere to
general points of view, and to regulate particular matters according
to them, so that general forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims are what
have validity as grounds of determination and are the chief regulative
force. But what is required for artistic interest as for artistic
production is, speaking generally, a living creation, in which the
universal is not present as law and maxim, but acts as if one with
the mood and the feelings, just as, in the imagination, the universal
and rational is contained only as brought into unity with a concrete
sensuous phenomenon. Therefore, our present in its universal condition
is not favourable to art. As regards the artist himself, it is not
merely that the reflection which finds utterance all round him, and the
universal habit of having an opinion and passing judgment about art
infect him, and mislead him into putting more abstract thought into his
works themselves; but also the whole spiritual culture of the age is of
such a kind that he himself stands within this reflective world and its
conditions, and it is impossible for him to abstract from it by will
and resolve, or to contrive for himself and bring to pass, by means of
peculiar education or removal from the relations of life, a peculiar
solitude that would replace all that is lost.
In all these respects art is, and remains for us, on the side of its
highest destiny, a thing of the past. Herein it has further lost for
us its genuine truth and life, and rather is transferred into our
_ideas_ than asserts its former necessity, or assumes its former
place, in reality. What is now aroused in us by works of art is over
and above our immediate enjoyment, and together with it, our judgment;
inasmuch as we subject the content and the means of representation
of the work of art and the suitability or unsuitability of the two to
our intellectual consideration. Therefore, the _science_ of art is a
much more pressing need in our day, than in times in which art, simply
as art, was enough to furnish a full satisfaction. Art invites us to
consideration of it by means of thought, not to the end of stimulating
art production, but in order to ascertain scientifically what art is.
[Greek: e]. As soon as we propose to accept this invitation we are
met by the difficulty which has already been touched upon in the
suggestion that, though art is a suitable subject for philosophical
reflection in the general sense, yet it is not so for systematic and
scientific discussion. In this objection there lies the false idea
that a philosophical consideration may, nevertheless, be unscientific.
On this point it can only be remarked here with brevity, that,
whatever ideas others may have of philosophy and philosophizing, I
regard the pursuit of philosophy as utterly incapable of existing
apart from a scientific procedure. Philosophy has to consider its
object in its necessity, not, indeed, in its subjective necessity or
external arrangement, classification, etc., but it has to unfold and
demonstrate the object out of the necessity of its own inner nature.
Until this evolution[24] is brought to pass the scientific element
is lacking to the treatment. In as far, however, as the objective
necessity of an object lies essentially in its logical and metaphysical
nature, the isolated treatment of art must be conducted with a certain
relaxation of scientific stringency. For art involves the most complex
pre-suppositions, partly in reference to its content, partly in respect
of its medium[25] and element,[26] in which art is constantly on the
borders of the arbitrary or accidental. Thus it is only as regards
the essential innermost progress of its content and of its media of
expression that we must call to mind the outline prescribed by its
necessity.
The objection that works of fine art elude the treatment of scientific
thought because they originate out of the unregulated fancy and out
of the feelings, are of a number and variety that defy the attempt
to gain a conspectus, and therefore take effect only on feeling and
imagination, raises a problem which appears still to have importance.
For the beauty of art does in fact appear in a form which is expressly
contrasted with abstract thought, and which the latter is forced
to destroy in exerting the activity which is its nature. This idea
coheres with the opinion that reality as such, the life of nature and
of mind, is disfigured and slain by comprehension; that, so far from
being brought close to us by the thought which comprehends, it is by
it that such life is absolutely dissociated from us, so that, by the
use of thought as the _means_ of grasping what has life, man rather
cuts himself off from this his purpose. We cannot speak fully on this
subject in the present passage, but only indicate the point of view
from which the removal of this difficulty, or impossibility depending
on maladaptation, might be effected.
It will be admitted, to begin with, that the mind is capable of
contemplating itself, and of possessing a consciousness, and that
a _thinking_ consciousness, of itself and all that is generated by
itself. Thought--to think--is precisely that in which the mind has its
innermost and essential nature. In gaining this thinking consciousness
concerning itself and its products, the mind is behaving according
to its essential nature, however much freedom and caprice those
products may display, supposing only that in real truth they have
mind in them. Now art and its works as generated and created by the
mind (spirit), are themselves of a spiritual nature, even if their
mode of representation admits into itself the semblance of sensuous
being, and pervades what is sensuous with mind. In this respect art
is, to begin with, nearer to mind and its thinking activity than is
mere external unintelligent nature; in works of art, mind has to do
but with its own. And even if artistic works are not abstract thought
and notion, but are an evolution of the notion _out of_ itself, an
alienation from itself towards the sensuous, still the power of the
thinking spirit (mind) lies herein, _not merely_ to grasp _itself only_
in its peculiar form of the self-conscious spirit (mind), but just as
much to recognize itself in its alienation in the shape of feeling
and the sensuous, in its other form, by transmuting the metamorphosed
thought back into definite thoughts, and so restoring it to itself.
And in this preoccupation with the other of itself the thinking spirit
is not to be held untrue to itself as if forgetting or surrendering
itself therein, nor is it so weak as to lack strength to comprehend
what is different from itself, but it comprehends both itself and its
opposite. For the notion is the universal, which preserves itself
in its particularizations, dominates alike itself and its "other,"
and so becomes the power and activity that consists in undoing the
alienation which it had evolved. And thus the work of art in which
thought alienates itself belongs, like thought itself, to the realm of
comprehending thought, and the mind, in subjecting it to scientific
consideration, is thereby but satisfying the want of its own inmost
nature. For because thought is its essence and notion, it can in the
last resort only be satisfied when it has succeeded in imbuing all the
products of its activity with thought, and has thus for the first time
made them genuinely its own. But, as we shall see more definitely
below, art is far from being the highest form of mind, and receives its
true ratification only from science.[27]
Just as little does art elude philosophical consideration by unbridled
caprice. As has already been indicated, it is its true task to bring
to consciousness the highest interests of the mind. Hence it follows
at once with respect to the _content_ that fine art cannot rove in the
wildness of unfettered fancy, for these spiritual interests determine
definite bases[28] for its content, how manifold and inexhaustible
soever its forms and shapes may be. The same holds true for the forms
themselves. They, again, are not at the mercy of mere chance. Not every
plastic shape[29] is capable of being the expression and representation
of those spiritual interests, of absorbing and of reproducing them;
every definite content determines a form suitable to it.
In this aspect too, then, we are in a position to find our bearings
according to the needs of thought in the apparently unmanageable mass
of works and types of art.
Thus, I hope, we have begun by defining the content of our science,
to which we propose to confine ourselves, and have seen that neither
is fine art unworthy of a philosophical consideration, nor is a
philosophical consideration incompetent to arrive at a knowledge of the
essence of fine art.
CHAPTER II.
METHODS OF SCIENCE APPLICABLE TO BEAUTY AND ART.
If we now investigate _the required mode of scientific consideration_,
we here again meet with two opposite ways of treating the subject,
each of which appears to exclude the other, and so to hinder us from
arriving at _any true result_.
On one side we see the science of art merely, so to speak, busying
itself about the actual productions of art from the outside, arranging
them in series as a history of art, initiating discussions about extant
works, or sketching out theories intended to provide the general points
of view that are to govern both criticism and artistic production.
On the other side we see science abandoning itself independently to
reflection upon the beautiful, and producing mere generalities which do
not touch the work of art in its peculiarity, creating, in short, an
abstract philosophy of the beautiful.
1. As regards the former mode of treatment, which starts from the
empirical side, it is the indispensable road for any one who means
to become a student of art. And just as in the present day every
one, even though he is not busied with natural science, yet pretends
to be equipped with the essentials of physical knowledge, so it has
become more or less obligatory for a cultivated man to possess some
acquaintance with art,[30] and the pretension to display one's-self as
a dilettante and connoisseur is pretty universal.
(_a_) If such information is really to be recognized as
art-scholarship,[31] it must be of various kinds and of wide range. The
first necessity is an exact acquaintance with the immeasurable region
of individual works of art of ancient and modern times, works which
in part have actually perished, in part belong to distant countries
or portions of the world, or which adverse fortune has withdrawn from
one's own observation. Moreover, every work belongs to its _age_, to
its _nation_, and to its environment, and depends upon particular
historical and other ideas and aims. For this reason art-scholarship
further requires a vast wealth of historical information of a very
special kind, seeing that the individualized nature of the work of
art is related to individual detail and demands special matter to
aid in its comprehension and elucidation. And lastly, this kind of
scholarship not only needs, like every other, a memory for information,
but a vivid imagination in order to retain distinctly the images of
artistic forms in all their different features, and especially in order
to have them present to the mind for purposes of comparison with other
works.
(_b_) Within this kind of consideration, which is primarily historical,
there soon emerge various points of view which cannot be lost sight
of in contemplating a work of art, inasmuch as our judgments must be
derived from them. Now these points of view, as in other sciences
which have an empirical starting-point, when extracted and put
together form universal criteria and rules, and, in a still further
stage of formal generalization, _Theories of the arts_. This is not
the place to go into detail about literature of this kind, and it
may, therefore, suffice to mention a few writings in the most general
way. For instance, there is Aristotle's "Poetics," the theory of
tragedy contained in which is still of interest; and to speak more
particularly, among the ancients, Horace's "Ars Poetica" and Longinus's
"Treatise on the Sublime" suffice to give a general idea of the way
in which this kind of theorizing has been carried on. The general
formulæ which were abstracted by such writers were meant to stand
especially as precepts and rules, according to which, particularly in
times of degeneration of poetry and art, works of art were meant to be
produced. The prescriptions, however, compiled by these physicians of
art had even less assured success than those of physicians whose aim
was the restoration of health.
Respecting theories of this kind, I propose merely to mention that,
though _in detail_ they contain much that is instructive, yet their
remarks were abstracted from a very limited circle of artistic
productions, which passed for _the_ genuinely beautiful ones, but yet
always belonged to a but narrow range of art. And again, such formulæ
are in part very trivial reflections which in their generality proceed
to no establishment of particulars, although this is the matter of
chief concern.
The above-mentioned Horatian epistle is full of these reflections, and,
therefore, is a book for all men, but one which for this very reason
contains much that amounts to nothing, _e.g._--
"Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci
Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo"--
"He carries all votes, who has mingled the pleasant and the useful,
by at once charming and instructing his reader." This is just like so
many copybook headings,[32] _e.g._ "Stay at home and earn an honest
livelihood," which are right enough as generalities, but lack the
concrete determinations on which action depends.
Another kind of interest was found, not in the express aim of directly
causing the production of genuine works of art, but in the purpose
which emerged of influencing men's judgment upon works of art by such
theories, in short of _forming taste_. In this aspect, Home's "Elements
of Criticism," the writings of Batteux, and Ramler's "Introduction
to the Fine Arts," were works much read in their day. Taste in this
sense has to do with arrangement and treatment, the harmony and finish
of what belongs to the external aspect of a work of art. Besides,
they brought in among the principles of taste views that belonged to
the psychology that was then in vogue, and that had been drawn from
empirical observation of capacities and activities of the soul, of
the passions and their probable heightening, succession, etc. But it
remains invariably the case that every man judges works of art, or
characters, actions, and incidents according to the measure of his
insight and his feelings; and as that formation of taste only touched
what was meagre and external, and moreover drew its precepts only from
a narrow range of works of art and from a _borné_ culture of intellect
and feelings, its whole sphere was inadequate, and incapable of seizing
the inmost and the true, and of sharpening the eye for the apprehension
thereof.
Such theories proceed in general outline, as do the remaining
non-philosophic sciences. The content which they subject to
consideration is borrowed from our idea of it, as something found
there; then further questions are asked about the nature of this idea,
inasmuch as a need reveals itself for closer determinations, which
are also found in our idea of the matter, and drawn from it to be
fixed in definitions. But in so doing, we find ourselves at once on
uncertain and debatable ground. It might indeed appear at first as if
the beautiful were a perfectly simple idea. But it soon becomes evident
that manifold sides may be found in it, one of which is emphasized by
one writer and another by another, or, even if the same points of view
are adopted, a dispute arises on the question which side after all is
to be regarded as the essential one.
With a view to such questions it is held a point of scientific
completeness to adduce and to criticize the various definitions of the
beautiful. We will do this neither with historical _exhaustiveness_,
so as to learn all the subtleties which have emerged in the defining
process, nor for the sake of the _historical_ interest; but we will
simply produce by way of illustration, some of the more interesting
modern views which come pretty close in their purport to what in fact
the idea of the beautiful does involve. For such purpose we have
chiefly to mention Goethe's account of the beautiful, which Meyer
embodied in his "History of the Formative Arts[33] in Greece," on which
occasion he also brings forward Hirt's view, though without mentioning
him.
Hirt, one of the greatest of genuine connoisseurs in the present day,
in his brochure about artistic beauty (_Horen_,[34] 1797, seventh
number), after speaking of the beautiful in the several arts, sums
up his ideas in the result that the basis of a just criticism of
beauty in art and of the formation of taste is the conception of the
_Characteristic_. That is to say, he defines the beautiful as the
"perfect, which is or can be an object of eye, ear, or imagination."
Then he goes on to define the perfect as "that which is adequate to its
aim, that which nature or art aimed at producing within the given genus
and species[35] in the formation of the object." For which reason,
in order to form our judgment on a question of beauty, we ought to
direct our observation as far as possible to the individual marks which
constitute a definite essence. For it is just these marks that form
its characteristics. And so by _character_ as the law of art he means
"that determinate individual modification[36] whereby forms, movement
and gesture, bearing and expression, local colour, light and shade,
chiaroscuro[37] and attitude distinguish themselves, in conformity, of
course, with the requirements of an object previously selected." This
formula gives us at once something more significant than the other
definitions. If we go on to ask what "the characteristic" is, we see
that it involves in the first place _a content_, as, for instance,
a particular feeling, situation, incident, action, individual; and
secondly, the _mode_ and _fashion_ in which this content is embodied
in a representation. It is to this, the mode of representation, that
the artistic law of the "characteristic" refers, inasmuch as it
requires that every particular element in the mode of expression shall
subserve the definite indication of its content and be a member in the
expression of that content. The abstract formula of the characteristic
thus has reference to the degree of appropriateness with which the
particular detail of the artistic form sets in relief the content
which it is intended to represent. If we desire to illustrate this
conception in a quite popular way, we may explain the limitation which
it involves as follows. In a dramatic work, for instance, an action
forms the content; the drama[38] is to represent how this action takes
place. Now, men and women do all sorts of things; they speak to each
other from time to time, at intervals they eat, sleep, put on their
clothes, say one thing and another, and so forth. But in all this,
whatever does not stand in immediate connection with that particular
action considered as the content proper, is to be excluded, so that in
reference to it nothing may be without import. So, too, a picture, that
only represented a single phase of that action, might yet include in
it--so wide are the ramifications of the external world--a multitude
of circumstances, persons, positions, and other matters which at
that moment have no reference to the action in question, and are not
subservient to its distinctive character.
But, according to the rule of the characteristic, only so much ought
to enter into the work of art as belongs to the display[39] and,
essentially, to the expression of that content and no other; for
nothing must announce itself as otiose and superfluous.
This is a very important rule, which may be justified in a certain
aspect. Meyer, however, in his above-mentioned work, gives it as his
opinion that this view has vanished and left no trace, and, in his
judgment, to the benefit of art. For he thinks that the conception in
question would probably have _led_ to caricature. This judgment at
once contains the perversity of implying that such a determination
of the beautiful had to do with _leading_. The Philosophy of art
does not trouble itself about precepts for artists, but it has to
ascertain what beauty in general is, and how it has displayed itself
in actual productions, in works of art, without meaning to give rules
for guidance. Apart from this, if we examine the criticism, we find
it to be true, no doubt, that Hirt's definition includes caricature,
for even a caricature may be characteristic; but, on the other hand,
it must be answered at once that in caricature the definite character
is intensified to exaggeration, and is, so to speak, a superfluity of
the characteristic. But a superfluity ceases to be what is properly
required in order to be characteristic, and becomes an offensive
iteration, whereby the characteristic itself may be made unnatural.
Moreover, what is of the nature of caricature shows itself in the light
of the characteristic representation of what is ugly, which ugliness
is, of course, a distortion. Ugliness, for its part, is closely
connected with the content, so that it may be said that the principle
of the characteristic involves as a fundamental property both ugliness
and the representation of what is ugly. Hirt's definition, of course,
gives no more precise information as to what is to be characterized and
what is not, in the artistically beautiful, or about the content of the
beautiful, but it furnishes in this respect a mere formal rule, which
nevertheless contains some truth, although stated in abstract shape.
Then follows the further question--what Meyer opposes to Hirt's
artistic principle, _i.e._ what he himself prefers. He is treating, in
the first place, exclusively of the principle shown in the artistic
works of the ancients, which principle, however, must include the
essential attribute[40] of beauty. In dealing with this subject he is
led to speak of Mengs and Winckelmann's principle[40] of the Ideal, and
pronounces himself to the effect that he desires neither to reject nor
wholly to accept this law of beauty, but, on the other hand, has no
hesitation in attaching himself to the opinion of an enlightened judge
of art (Goethe), as it is definite,[41] and seems to solve the enigma
more precisely.
Goethe says: "The highest principle of the ancients was the
_significant_, but the highest result of successful _treatment_, the
_beautiful_."
If we look closer at what this opinion implies, we find in it again two
elements; the content or matter in hand, and the mode and fashion of
representation. In looking at a work of art we begin with what presents
itself immediately to us, and after that go on to consider what is its
significance or content.
The former, the external element, has no value for us simply as it
stands; we assume something further behind it, something inward, a
significance, by which the external semblance has a soul breathed into
it.[42] It is this, its soul, that the external appearance indicates.
For an appearance which means something, does not present to the mind's
eye itself and that which it is _qua_ external, but something else; as
does the _symbol_ for instance, and still more obviously the _fable_,
whose moral and precept constitutes its meaning. Indeed every _word_
points to a meaning and has no value in itself. Just so the human
eye, a man's face, flesh, skin, his whole figure, are a revelation of
mind and soul, and in this case the meaning is always something other
than what shows itself within the immediate appearance. This is the
way in which a work of art should have its meaning, and not appear as
exhausted in these mere particular lines, curves, surfaces, borings,
reliefs in the stone, in these colours, tones, sounds, of words, or
whatever other medium is employed; but it should reveal life, feeling,
soul, import and mind, which is just what we mean by the significance
of a work of art.
Thus this requirement of _significance_ in a work of art amounts to
hardly anything beyond or different from Hirt's principle of the
_characteristic_.
According to this notion, then, we find distinguished as the elements
of the beautiful something inward, a content, and something outer which
has that content as its significance; the inner shows itself in the
outer and gives itself to be known by its means, inasmuch as the outer
points away from itself to the inner.
We cannot go into detail on this head.
(_c_) But the earlier fashion alike of rules and of theories has
already been violently thrown aside in Germany--especially owing to
the appearance of genuine living poetry,--and the rights of genius,
its works and their effects, have had their value asserted against the
encroachment of such legalities and against the wide watery streams of
theory. From this foundation both of an art which is itself genuinely
spiritual, and of a general sympathy and communion with it, have
arisen the receptivity and freedom which enabled us to enjoy and to
recognize the great works of art which have long been in existence,
whether those of the modern world,[43] of the middle ages, or even of
peoples of antiquity quite alien to us (_e.g._ the Indian productions);
works which by reason of their antiquity or of their alien nationality
have, no doubt, a foreign element in them, yet in view of their
content--common to all humanity and dominating their foreign
character--could not have been branded as products of bad and barbarous
taste, except by the prejudices of theory. This recognition, to speak
generally, of works of art which depart from the sphere and form of
those upon which more especially the abstractions of theory were based,
led, in the first instance, to the recognition of a peculiar kind of
art--that is, of _romantic_ art,--and it therefore became necessary to
apprehend the idea and the nature of the beautiful in a deeper way than
was possible for those theories. With this influence there co-operated
another, viz. that the idea in its self-conscious form, the thinking
mind, attained at this time, on its side, a deeper self-knowledge in
philosophy, and was thereby directly impelled to understand the essence
of art, too, in a profounder fashion.
Thus, then, even judging by the phases of this more general evolution
of ideas, the theoretical mode of reflection upon art which we were
considering has become antiquated alike in its principles and in
its particulars. Only the _scholarship_ of the history of art has
retained its permanent value, and cannot but retain it, all the more
that the advance of intellectual receptivity, of which we spoke, has
extended its range of vision on every side. Its business and vocation
consists in the æsthetic appreciation of individual works of art, and
in acquaintance with the historical circumstances that externally
condition such works; an appreciation which, if made with sense and
mind, supported by the requisite historical information, is the
only power that can penetrate the entire individuality of a work of
art. Thus Goethe, for instance, wrote much about art and particular
works of art. Theorizing proper is not the purpose of this mode of
consideration, although no doubt it frequently busies itself with
abstract principles and categories, and may give way to this tendency
without being aware of it. But for a reader who does not let this
hinder him, but keeps before him the concrete accounts of works of art,
which we spoke of just now, it at all events furnishes the philosophy
of art with the perceptible illustrations and instances, into the
particular historical details of which philosophy cannot enter.
This, then, may be taken to be the first mode of the study of art,
starting from particular and extant works.
2. There is an essential distinction between this and the opposite
aspect, the wholly theoretical reflection, which made an effort to
understand beauty as such out of itself alone, and to get to the bottom
of its idea.
It is well known that Plato was the first to require of philosophical
study, in a really profound sense, that its objects should be
apprehended, not in their _particularity_, but in their _universality_,
in their genius, in their own nature and its realization: inasmuch as
he affirmed that the truth of things[44] did not consist in individual
good actions, true opinions, beautiful human beings or works of art,
but in _goodness_, _beauty_, _truth_ themselves. Now, if the beautiful
is in fact to be known according to its essence and conception, this
is only possible by help of the thinking idea, by means of which
the logico-metaphysical nature of the _Idea as such_, as also that
of the _particular Idea of the beautiful_ enters into the thinking
consciousness. But the study of the beautiful in its separate nature
and in its own idea may itself turn into an abstract Metaphysic, and
even though Plato is accepted in such an inquiry as foundation and
as guide, still the Platonic abstraction must not satisfy us, even
for the logical idea of beauty. We must understand this idea more
profoundly and more in the concrete, for the emptiness of content
which characterizes the Platonic idea is no longer satisfactory to the
fuller philosophical wants of the mind of to-day. Thus it is, no doubt,
the case that we, too, in modern times, must in our philosophy of art
start from the idea of the beautiful, but we ought not to abide by the
fashion of Platonic ideas, which was purely abstract, and was the mere
beginning of the philosophic study of beauty.
3. The philosophic conception of the beautiful, to indicate its true
nature at least by anticipation, must contain, reconciled within it,
the two extremes which have been mentioned, by combining metaphysical
universality with the determinateness of real particularity. Only thus
is it apprehended in its truth, in its real and explicit nature. It is
then fertile out of its own resources, in contrast to the barrenness of
one-sided reflection. For it has in accordance with its own conception
to develop into a totality of attributes, while the conception itself
as well as its detailed exposition contains the necessity of its
particulars, as also of their progress and transition one into another.
On the other hand, again, these particulars, to which the transition
is made, carry in themselves the universality and essentiality of
the conception as the particulars of which they appear. The modes of
consideration of which we have so far been treating, lack both these
qualities,[45] and for this reason it is only the complete conception
of which we have just spoken that can lead to substantive, necessary,
and self-complete determinations.
CHAPTER III.
THE CONCEPTION OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY.
PART I.--THE WORK OF ART AS MADE AND AS SENSUOUS.
After the above prefatory remarks, we approach closer to our subject,
the philosophy of artistic beauty. Inasmuch as we are undertaking to
treat it scientifically we must begin with its _Conception_. Not till
we have established this conception can we map out the division, and
with it the plan of the entirety of the science; for a division, if it
is not, as is the case with unphilosophical inquiries, taken in hand in
a purely external manner, must find its principle in the conception of
the object itself.
In presence of such a demand we are at once met by the question,
"Whence do we get this conception?" If we begin with the given
conception of artistic beauty itself, that is enough to make it a
_pre-supposition_ and mere assumption; now, mere assumptions are not
admitted by the philosophical method, but whatever it allows to pass
must have its truth demonstrated, _i.e._ displayed as necessary.
We will devote a few words to coming to an understanding upon this
difficulty, which concerns the introduction to every philosophical
branch of study when taken in hand by itself.
The object of every science presents _prima facie_ two aspects: in the
first place, that such an object _is_; in the second place, _what_ it
is.
In ordinary science little difficulty attaches to the first of these
points. It might even, at first sight, look ridiculous, if the
requirement were presented that in astronomy and physics it should
be demonstrated that there was a sun, heavenly bodies, magnetic
phenomena, etc. In these sciences, which have to do with what is given
to sense, the objects are taken from external experience, and instead
of demonstrating them ("beweisen") it is thought sufficient to show
them ("weisen"). Yet even within the non-philosophical sciences,
doubts may arise about the existence of their objects, as _e.g._ in
psychology, the science of mind, it may be doubted if there _is_ a
soul, a mind, _i.e._ something subjective, separate, and independent,
distinct from what is material; or in theology, whether a God _is_. If,
moreover, the objects are of subjective kind, _i.e._ are given only
in the mind, and not as external sensuous objects, we are confronted
by our conviction that there is nothing in the mind but what its own
activity has produced. This brings up the accidental question whether
men have produced this inner idea or perception in their minds or not,
and even if the former is actually the case, whether they have not made
the idea in question vanish again, or at any rate degraded it to a
merely _subjective idea_, whose content has no natural and independent
being. So, for instance, the beautiful has often been regarded as not
naturally and independently necessary in our ideas, but as a mere
subjective pleasure or accidental sense. Our external intuitions,
observations, and perceptions are often deceptive and erroneous, but
still more is this the case with the inner ideas, even if they have in
themselves the greatest vividness, and are forcible enough to transport
us irresistibly into passion.
This doubt whether an object of inward ideas and inward perception
as such is or is not, as also the accidental question whether the
subjective consciousness has produced it in itself, and whether the act
or mode in which it brought it before itself was in its turn adequate
to the object in its essential and independent nature--all this is just
what aroused in men the higher scientific need, which demands that,
even if we have an idea that an object is, or that there is such an
object, the object must yet be displayed or demonstrated in terms of
its necessity.
This proof, if it is developed in a really scientific way, must also
satisfy the further question _What_ an object is. But to expound this
relation would carry us too far in this place, and we can only make the
following remarks on the point.
If we are to display the necessity of our object, the beautiful in art,
we should have to prove that art or beauty was a result of antecedents
such as, when considered in their true conception, to lead us on with
scientific necessity to the idea of fine art. But in as far as we begin
with _art_, and propose to treat of the essence of _its_ idea and of
the realization of that idea, not of antecedents which go before it _as
demanded by_ its idea, so far art, as a peculiar scientific object,
has, for us, a pre-supposition which lies beyond our consideration,
and which, being a different content, belongs in scientific treatment
to a different branch of philosophical study. For it is nothing short
of the whole of philosophy that is the knowledge of the universe as in
itself _one single_ organic totality which develops itself out of its
own conception, and which, returning into itself so as to form a whole
in virtue of the necessity in which it is placed towards itself, binds
itself together with itself into _one single_ world of truth. In the
coronal of this scientific necessity, each individual part is just as
much a circle that returns into itself, as it has, at the same time, a
necessary connection with other parts. This connection is a backward
out of which it derives itself, as well as a forward, to which in its
own nature it impels itself on and on, in as far as it is fertile by
creating fresh matter out of itself, and issuing it into the further
range of scientific knowledge. Therefore, it is not our present aim
to demonstrate the idea of beauty from which we set out, that is, to
derive it according to its necessity from the pre-suppositions which
are its antecedents in science. This task belongs to an encyclopædic
development of philosophy as a whole and of its particular branches.
For us, the idea of beauty and of art is a pre-supposition given in
the system of philosophy. But as we cannot in this place discuss this
system, and the connection of art with it, we have not yet the idea
of the beautiful before us _in a scientific form_; what we have at
command are merely the elements and aspects of it, as they are or have
at former periods been presented, in the diverse ideas of the beautiful
and of art in the mere common consciousness. Having started from this
point, we shall subsequently pass to the more profound consideration of
the views in question, in order thereby to gain the advantage of, in
the first place, obtaining a general idea of our object, and further,
by a brief criticism effecting a preliminary acquaintance with its
higher principles, with which we shall have to do in the sequel. By
this mode of treatment our final introduction will act, so to speak, as
the overture to the account of the subject itself, and will serve the
purpose of a general collection and direction of our thoughts towards
the proper object-matter of our discussion.
What we know, to begin with, as a current idea of the work of art,
comes under the three following general predicates:--
(1) We suppose the work of art to be no natural product, but brought to
pass by means of human activity.
(2) To be essentially made _for_ man, and, indeed, to be more or less
borrowed from the sensuous and addressed to man's sense.
(3) To contain an _end_.
1. As regards the first point, that a work of art is taken to be a
product of human activity, this view has given rise (_a_) to the view
that this activity, being the _conscious_ production of an external
object, can also be _known_, and _expounded_ and learnt, and prosecuted
by others. For, what one can do, it might seem, another can do,[46] or
imitate,[47] as soon as he is acquainted with the mode of procedure;
so that, supposing universal familiarity with the rules of artistic
production, it would only be a matter of any one's will and pleasure
to carry out the process in a uniform way, and so to produce works of
art. It is thus that the above-mentioned rule-providing theories and
their precepts, calculated for practical observance, have arisen. But
that which can be executed according to such instruction, can only be
something formally regular and mechanical. For only what is mechanical
is of such an external kind that no more than a purely empty exercise
of will and dexterity is required to receive it among our ideas and
put it in act; such an exercise not needing to be supplemented by
anything concrete, or anything that goes beyond the precepts conveyed
in general rules. This is most vividly displayed when precepts of the
kind in question do not limit themselves to what is purely external
and mechanical, but extend to the meaning-laden spiritual activity
of true art. In this region the rules contain nothing but indefinite
generalities; _e.g._ "The theme ought to be interesting, and each
individual ought to be made to speak according to his rank, age, sex,
and position." But if rules are meant to be adequate on this subject,
their precepts ought to have been drawn up with such determinateness
that they could be carried out just as they are expressed, without
further and original activity of mind. Being abstract, however, in
their content, such rules reveal themselves, in respect of their
pretension of being adequate to fill the consciousness of the artist,
as wholly inadequate, inasmuch as artistic production is not formal
activity in accordance with given determinations. For it is bound as
spiritual activity to work by drawing on its own resources, and to
bring before the mind's eye a quite other and richer content and ampler
individual creations than any abstract formulæ can dictate. Such rules
may furnish guidance in case of need, if they contain anything really
definite, and therefore of practical utility; but their directions can
only apply to purely external circumstances.
(_b_) The tendency which we have just indicated has therefore been
abandoned, and, in place of it, the opposite principle has been pursued
to no less lengths. For the work of art came to be regarded no longer
as the product of an _activity general_ in mankind, but as the work of
a mind endowed with wholly peculiar gifts. This mind, it is thought,
has then nothing to do but _simply_ to give free play to its particular
gift, as though it were a specific force of nature, and is to be
entirely released from attention to laws of universal validity, as
also from the interference of reflection in its instinctively creative
operation. And, indeed, it is to be guarded therefrom, inasmuch as its
productions could only be infected and tainted by such a consciousness.
In this aspect the work of art was pronounced to be the product of
_talent_ and _genius_, and stress was laid on the natural element
which talent and genius contain. The view was partly right. Talent is
specific, and genius universal capability, with which a man has not the
power to endow himself simply by his own self-conscious activity. We
shall treat this point more fully in the sequel.
In this place we have only to mention the aspect of falsity in the
view before us, in that all consciousness respecting the man's own
activity was held, in the case of artistic production, not merely
superfluous, but even injurious. Production on the part of talent
and genius then appears, in general terms, as a _state_, and, in
particular, as a state of _inspiration_. To such a state, it is said,
genius is in part excited by a given object, and in part it has the
power of its own free will to place itself therein, in which process,
moreover, the good service of the champagne bottle is not forgotten.
This notion became prominent in Germany in the so-called _epoch of
genius_, which was introduced by the early poetical productions of
Goethe, and subsequently sustained by those of Schiller.[48] In their
earliest works these poets began everything anew, in scorn of all the
rules which had then been fabricated, transgressed these rules of set
purpose, and, while doing so, distanced all rivals by a long interval.
I will not enter more closely into the confusions which have prevailed
respecting the conception of inspiration and genius, and which prevail
even at the present day respecting the omnipotence of inspiration
as such. We need only lay down as essential the view that, though
the artist's talent and genius contains a natural element, yet it is
essentially in need of cultivation by thought, and of reflection on
the mode in which it produces, as well as of practice and skill in
producing. A main feature of such production is unquestionably external
workmanship, inasmuch as the work of art has a purely technical side,
which extends into the region of handicraft; most especially in
architecture and sculpture, less so in painting and music, least of
all in poetry. Skill in this comes not by inspiration, but solely by
reflection, industry, and practice; and such skill is indispensable to
the artist, in order that he may master his external material, and not
be thwarted by its stubbornness.
Moreover, the higher an artist ranks, the more profoundly ought he to
represent the depths of heart and mind; and these are not known without
learning them, but are only to be fathomed by the direction of a man's
own mind to the inner and outer world. So here, too, _study_ is the
means whereby the artist brings this content into his consciousness,
and wins the matter and burden of his conceptions.
In this respect one art may need the consciousness and cognition of
such matter more than others. Music, for instance, which concerns
itself only with the undefined movement of the inward spiritual
nature, and deals with musical sounds as, so to speak, feeling
without thought, needs little or no spiritual content to be present
in consciousness. It is for this reason that musical talent generally
announces itself in very early youth, while the head is still empty
and the heart has been but little moved, and is capable of attaining
to a very considerable height in early years, before mind and life
have experience of themselves. And again, as a matter of fact we
often enough see very great expertness in musical composition, as
also in execution, subsist along with remarkable barrenness of mind
and character. The reverse is the case with poetry. In poetry all
depends on the representation,--which must be full of matter and
thought--of man, of his profounder interests, and of the powers that
move him; and therefore mind and heart themselves must be richly and
profoundly educated by life, experience, and reflection, before genius
can bring to pass anything mature, substantial, and self-complete.
Goethe's and Schiller's first productions are of an immaturity, and
even of a rudeness and barbarism, that are absolutely terrifying.
This phenomenon, that the greater part of those attempts display a
predominant mass of thoroughly prosaic and in part of frigid and
commonplace elements, furnishes the chief objection to the common
opinion, that inspiration is inseparable from youth and youthful
fire. Those two men of genius, it may be said, were the first to give
our nation works of true poetry, and yet it was only their mature
manhood[49] that presented us with creations profound, substantial, and
the outcome of genuine inspiration, while no less thoroughly perfect
in form. Thus, too, it was not till his old age that Homer devised and
uttered his immortal songs.
(_c_) A third view, which concerns the idea of the work of art as
a product of human activity, refers to the position of such a work
towards the external appearances of nature. It was an obvious opinion
for the common consciousness to adopt on this head, that the work of
art made by man ranked _below_ the product of nature. The work of art
has no feeling in itself, and is not through and through a living
thing, but, regarded as an external object, is dead. But we are wont
to prize the living more than the dead. We must admit, of course,
that the work of art has not in itself movement and life. An animated
being in nature is within and without an organization appropriately
elaborated down to all its minutest parts, while the work of art
attains the semblance of animation on its surface only, but within is
common stone, or wood and canvas, or, as in the case of poetry, is
idea, uttering itself in speech and letters. But this aspect, viz.
its external existence, is not what makes a work into a production of
fine art; it is a work of art only in as far as, being the offspring
of mind, it continues to belong to the realm of mind, has received
the baptism of the spiritual, and only represents that which has been
moulded in harmony with mind. A human interest, the spiritual value
which attaches to an incident, to an individual character, to an action
in its plot and in its _dénoûment_, is apprehended in the work of art,
and exhibited more purely[50] and transparently than is possible on
the soil of common unartistic reality. This gives the work of art a
higher rank than anything produced by nature, which has not sustained
this passage through the mind. So, for instance, by reason of the
feeling and insight of which a landscape as depicted by an artist is a
manifestation, such a work of mind assumes a higher rank than the mere
natural landscape. For everything spiritual is better than anything
natural. At any rate, no existence in nature is able, like art, to
represent divine ideals.
Upon that which, in works of art, the mind borrows from its own
inner life it is able, even on the side of external existence, to
confer _permanence_; whereas the individual living thing of nature
is transient, vanishing, and mutable in its aspect, while the work
of art persists. Though, indeed, it is not mere permanence, but the
accentuation of the character which animation by mind confers, that
constitutes its genuine pre-eminence as compared with natural reality.
Nevertheless, this higher rank assigned to the work of art is in turn
disputed by another idea of the common consciousness. It is said that
nature and its products are a work of God, created by his goodness and
wisdom, whereas the work of art is _merely_ a human production, made
after man's devising by man's hands. In this antithesis between natural
production as a divine creation and human activity as a merely finite
creation, we at once come upon the misconception, that God does _not_
work in man and through man, but limits the range of his activity to
nature alone. This false opinion is to be entirely abandoned if we
mean to penetrate the true conception of art. Indeed, in opposition to
such an idea, we must adhere to the very reverse, believing that God
is more honoured by what mind does or makes than by the productions or
formations of nature. For not only is there a divinity in man, but in
him it is operative under a form that is appropriate to the essence of
God, in a mode quite other and higher than in nature. God is a Spirit,
and it is only in man that the medium through which the divine element
passes has the form of conscious spirit, that actively realizes itself.
In nature the corresponding medium is the unconscious, sensible, and
external, which is far below consciousness in value. In the products
of art God is operative neither more nor less than in the phenomena of
nature; but the divine element, as it makes itself known in the work
of art, has attained, as being generated out of the mind, an adequate
thoroughfare for its existence; while existence in the unconscious
sensuousness of nature is not a mode of appearance adequate to the
Divine Being.
(_d_) Granting, then, that the work of art is made by man as a creation
of mind, we come to the last question, which will enable us to draw a
deeper result from what has been said. What is man's need to produce
works of art? On the one hand the production may be regarded as a
mere toy of chance and of man's fancies, that might just as well be
let alone as pursued. For, it may be said, there are other and better
means for effecting that which is the aim of art, and man bears in him
interests that are yet higher and of more import than art has power
to satisfy. But, on the other hand, art appears to arise from the
higher impulse and to satisfy the higher needs, at times, indeed, even
the highest, the absolute need of man, being wedded to the religious
interests of whole epochs and peoples, and to their most universal
intuitions respecting the world. This inquiry concerning the not
contingent but absolute need of art we cannot as yet answer completely,
seeing that it is more concrete than any shape which could here be
given to the answer.[51] We must, therefore, content ourselves for the
present with merely establishing the following points.
The universal and absolute need out of which art, on its formal
side,[52] arises has its source in the fact that man is a _thinking_
consciousness, _i.e._ that he draws out of himself, and makes explicit
_for himself_, that which he is, and, generally, whatever is. The
things of nature are only _immediate and single_, but man as mind
_reduplicates_ himself, inasmuch as _prima facie_ he _is_ like the
things of nature, but in the second place just as really is _for_
himself, perceives himself, has ideas of himself, thinks himself,
and only thus is active self-realizedness.[53] This consciousness
of himself man obtains in a twofold way: _in the first place
theoretically_, in as far as he has inwardly to bring himself into
his own consciousness, with all that moves in the human breast, all
that stirs and works therein, and, generally, to observe and form an
idea of himself, to fix before himself what thought ascertains to be
his real being, and, in what is summoned out of his inner self as in
what is received from without, to recognize only himself. Secondly,
man is realized for himself by _practical_ activity, inasmuch as he
has the impulse, in the medium which is directly given to him, and
externally presented before him, to produce himself, and therein at
the same time to recognize himself. This purpose he achieves by the
modification of external things upon which he impresses the seal of his
inner being, and then finds repeated in them his own characteristics.
Man does this in order as a free subject to strip the outer world of
its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion of
things a mere external reality of himself.[54] Even the child's first
impulse involves this practical modification of external things. A boy
throws stones into the river, and then stands admiring the circles that
trace themselves on the water, as an effect in which he attains the
sight of something that is his own doing. This need traverses the most
manifold phenomena, up to the mode of self-production in the medium
of external things as it is known to us in the work of art. And it is
not only external things that man treats in this way, but himself no
less, _i.e._ his own natural form, which he does not leave as he finds
it, but alters of set purpose. This is the cause of all ornament and
decoration, though it may be as barbarous, as tasteless, as utterly
disfiguring or even destructive as crushing Chinese ladies' feet, or
as slitting the ears and lips. It is only among cultivated men that
change of the figure,[55] of behaviour, and of every kind and mode of
self-utterance emanates from spiritual education.[56]
The universal need for expression in art[57] lies, therefore, in man's
rational impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual
consciousness for himself, as an object in which he recognizes his own
self. He satisfies the need of this spiritual freedom when he makes
all that exists explicit for himself _within_, and in a corresponding
way realizes this his explicit self _without_, evoking thereby, in
this reduplication of himself, what is in him into vision and into
knowledge for his own mind and for that of others. This is the free
rationality of man, in which, as all action and knowledge, so also art
has its ground and necessary origin. The specific need of art, however,
in contradistinction to other action, political or moral, to religious
imagination and to scientific cognition, we shall consider later.
2. We have so far been considering that aspect of the work of art
in which it is made by man. We have now to pass on to its second
characteristic, that it is made for man's _sense_, and for this reason
is more or less borrowed from the sensuous.
(_a_) This reflection has furnished occasion for the consideration
to be advanced that fine art is intended to arouse feeling, and
indeed more particularly the feeling which we find suits us--that, is
pleasant feeling. Looking at the question thus, men have treated the
investigation of fine art as an investigation of the feelings, and
asked what feelings it must be held that art ought to evoke,--fear, for
example, and compassion; and then, how these could be pleasant--how,
for example, the contemplation of misfortune could produce
satisfaction. This tendency of reflection is traceable particularly to
Moses Mendelssohn's times, and many such discussions are to be found
in his writings. Yet such an investigation did not lead men far, for
feeling is the indefinite dull region of the mind; what is felt remains
wrapped in the form of the most abstract individual subjectivity,[58]
and therefore the distinctions of feeling are also quite abstract, and
are not distinctions of the actual object-matter itself. For instance,
fear, anxiety, alarm, terror, are no doubt of one and the same sort
of feeling variously modified, but in part are mere quantitative
heightenings, in part are forms which in themselves have nothing to do
with their content itself, but are indifferent to it. In the case of
fear, for instance, an existence is given in which the subject (_i.e._
a person) has an interest, but at the same time sees approaching
the negative that threatens to annihilate this existence, and so
finds immediately in himself, as a contradictory affection of his
subjectivity, the two at once, this interest and that negative. Now,
such fear considered in itself is not enough to condition any content,
but is capable of receiving into itself the most diverse and opposite
matters.[59] Feeling, as such, is a thoroughly empty form of subjective
affection. No doubt this form may in some cases be manifold in itself,
as is hope, grief, joy, or pleasure; and, again, may in such diversity
comprehend varied contents, as there is a feeling of justice, moral
feeling, sublime religious feeling, and so forth. But the fact that
such content is forthcoming in different forms of feeling is not enough
to bring to light its essential and definite nature; they remain purely
subjective affections of myself, in which the concrete matter vanishes,
as though narrowed into a circle of the utmost abstraction.[60]
Therefore, the inquiry into the feelings which art arouses, or ought to
arouse, comes utterly to a standstill in the indefinite, and is a mode
of study which precisely abstracts from the content proper and from
its concrete essence and notion. For reflection upon feeling contents
itself with the observation of the subjective affection in its
isolation, instead of diving into and fathoming the matter in question
itself, the work of art, and, while engaged with it, simply letting
go the mere subjectivity and its states. In feeling it is just this
vacant subjectivity that is--not merely retained, but--given the first
place, and that is why men are so fond of having emotions. And for the
same reason such a study becomes tedious from its indefiniteness and
vacancy, and repulsive from its attentiveness to little subjective
peculiarities.
(_b_) Now, as a work of art is not merely to do in general something of
the nature of arousing emotion--for this is a purpose which it would
have in common, without specific difference, with eloquence, historical
composition, religious edification, and so forth--but is to do so only
in as far as it is beautiful, reflection hit upon the idea, seeing that
beauty was the object, of searching out a _peculiar feeling of beauty_
to correspond to it, and of discovering a particular _sense of beauty_.
In this search it soon appeared that such a sense is no blind instinct
made rigidly definite by nature, and capable from the beginning in
its own independent essence of discerning beauty. Hence it followed
that education came to be demanded for this sense, and the educated
sense of beauty came to be called _taste_, which, although an educated
appreciation and apprehension of the beautiful, was yet supposed to
retain the nature of immediate feeling. We have already mentioned
how abstract theories undertook to educate such a sense of taste, and
how external and one-sided that sense remained. The criticism of the
time when those views prevailed, was not only defective in _universal_
principles, but also, in its particular references to individual works
of art, was less directed to justifying a _definite_ judgment--the
power to make one not having at that time been acquired--than to
advancing the general education of taste. For this reason such
education in its turn came to a standstill in the indefinite, and
merely endeavoured so to equip feeling as sense of beauty by help
of reflection, that there might thenceforth be capacity to find out
beauty whenever and wherever it should exist. Yet the depths of the
matter remained a sealed book to mere taste, for these depths demand
not only sensibility and abstract reflection, but the undivided reason
and the mind in its solid vigour; while taste was only directed to the
external surface about which the feelings play, and on which one-sided
maxims may pass for valid. But, for this very reason, what is called
good taste takes fright at all more profound effects of art, and is
silent where the reality comes in question, and where externalities
and trivialities vanish. For when great passions and the movements
of a profound soul are unveiled, we are no longer concerned with the
finer distinctions of taste and its pettifogging particularities. It
feels that genius strides contemptuously over such ground as this, and,
shrinking before its power, becomes uneasy, and knows not which way to
turn.
(_c_) And thus, as we should expect, men have abandoned the tendency
to consider works of art solely with an eye to the education of taste,
and with the purpose of merely displaying taste. The _connoisseur_,
or scholar of art, has replaced the art-judge, or man of taste. The
positive side of art-scholarship, so far as it concerns a thorough
acquaintance with the entire circumference[61] of the individual
character in a given work of art, we have already pronounced to
be essential to the study of art. For a work of art, owing to its
nature as at once material and individual, is essentially originated
by particular conditions of the most various kinds, to which belong
especially the time and place of its production, then the peculiar
individuality of the artist, and in particular the grade of technical
development attained by his art. Attention to all these aspects
is indispensable to distinct and thorough insight and cognition,
and even to the enjoyment of a work of art; it is with them that
connoisseurship, or art-scholarship, is chiefly occupied; and all that
it can do for us in its own way is to be accepted with gratitude. Yet,
though such scholarship is entitled to rank as something essential,
still it ought not to be taken for the sole or supreme element in the
relation which the mind adopts towards a work of art, and towards art
in general. For art-scholarship (and this is its defective side) is
capable of resting in an acquaintance with purely external aspects,
such as technical or historical details, etc., and of guessing but
little, or even knowing absolutely nothing, of the true and real nature
of a work of art. It may even form a disparaging estimate of the value
of more profound considerations in comparison with purely positive,
technical, and historical information. Still, even so, art-scholarship,
if only it is of a genuine kind, at least strives after definite
grounds and information, and an intelligent judgment, with which is
closely conjoined the more precise distinction of the different, even
if partly external, aspects in a work of art, and the estimation of
their importance.
(_d_) After these remarks upon the modes of study which have arisen
out of that aspect of a work of art in which, being a sensuous object,
it is invested with a relation to man as a sensuous being, we will
now consider this aspect in its more essential relation to art as
such, and so ([Greek: a]) partly as regards the work of art as object,
([Greek: b]) partly with respect to the subjectivity of the artist, his
genius, talent, and so on; but without entering into matter relative to
these points that can only proceed from the knowledge of art in its
universal idea. For we are not yet on genuinely scientific ground, but
have only reached the province of external reflection.
([Greek: a]) The work of art then, of course, presents itself to
sensuous apprehension. It is addressed to sensuous feeling, outer or
inner, to sensuous perception and imagination, just as is the nature
that surrounds us without, or our own sensitive nature within. Even
a speech, for instance, may be addressed to sensuous imagination
and feeling. Notwithstanding, the work of art is not only for the
_sensuous_ apprehension as sensuous object, but its position is of such
a kind that as sensuous it is at the same time essentially addressed to
the _mind_, that the mind is meant to be affected by it, and to find
some sort of satisfaction in it.
This intention of the work of art explains how it is in no way meant
to be a natural product and to possess natural life, whether a natural
product is to be ranked higher or lower than a _mere_ work of art, as
it is often called in a depreciatory sense.
For the sensuous aspect of the work of art has a right to existence
only in as far as it exists for man's mind, but not in as far as _qua_
sensuous thing it has separate existence by itself.[62] If we examine
more closely in what way the sensuous is presented to man, we find
that what is sensuous may bear various relations to the mind.
(_aa_) The lowest mode of apprehension, and that least appropriate to
the mind, is purely sensuous apprehension. It consists naturally in
mere looking, listening, feeling, just as in seasons of mental fatigue
it may often be entertaining to go about without thought, and just to
hear and look around us. The mind, however, does not rest in the mere
apprehension of external things by sight and hearing, it makes them
objects for its own inner nature, which then is itself impelled in a
correspondingly sensuous form to realize itself in the things, and
relates itself to them as _desire_. In this appetitive relation to
the outer world, the man stands as a sensuous particular over against
the things as likewise particulars; he does not open his mind to them
with general ideas as a thinking being, but has relations dictated
by particular impulses and interests to the objects as themselves
particulars, and preserves himself in them, inasmuch as he uses them,
consumes them, and puts in act his self-satisfaction by sacrificing
them to it. In this negative relation desire requires for itself not
merely the superficial appearance of external things, but themselves in
their concrete sensuous existence. Mere pictures of the wood that it
wants to use, or of the animals that it wants to eat, would be of no
service to desire. Just as little is it possible for desire to let the
object subsist in its freedom. For its impulse urges it just precisely
to destroy this independence and freedom of external things, and to
show that they are only there to be destroyed and consumed. But, at the
same time, the subject himself, as entangled in the particular limited
and valueless interests of his desires, is neither free in himself,
for he does not determine himself out of the essential universality
and rationality of his will, nor free in relation to the outer world,
for his desire remains essentially determined by things, and related
to them. This relation of desire is not that in which man stands
to the work of art. He allows it to subsist as an object, free and
independent, and enters into relation with it apart from desire, as
with an object which only appeals to the theoretic side of the mind.
For this reason the work of art, although it has sensuous existence,
yet, in this point of view, does not require concrete sensuous
existence and natural life; indeed, it even _ought_ not to remain on
such a level, seeing that it has to satisfy only the interests of mind,
and is bound to exclude from itself all desire. Hence it is, indeed,
that practical desire rates individual things in nature, organic and
inorganic, which are serviceable to it, higher than works of art, which
reveal themselves to be useless for its purpose, and enjoyable only for
other modes of mind.
([Greek: bb]) A second mode in which the externally present may be
related to the mind is, in contrast with singular sensuous perception
and desire, the purely theoretical relation to the _Intelligence_. The
theoretic contemplation of things has no interest in consuming them as
particulars, in satisfying itself sensuously, and in preserving itself
by their means, but rather in becoming acquainted with them in their
universality, in finding their inner being and law, and in conceiving
them in terms of their notion. Therefore the theoretical interest
lets the single things be, and holds aloof from them as sensuous
particulars, because this sensuous particularity is not what the
contemplation exercised by the intelligence looks for. For the rational
intelligence does not belong, as do the desires, to the individual
subject[63] as such, but only to the individual as at the same time
in his nature universal. In as far as man has relation to things in
respect of this universality, it is his universal reason which attempts
to find himself in nature, and thereby to reproduce the inner essence
of things, which sensuous existence, though having its ground therein,
cannot immediately display. But again, this theoretic interest, the
satisfaction of which is the work of science, is in the scientific
form no more shared by art, than the latter makes common cause with
the impulse of the purely practical desires. Science may, no doubt,
start from the sensuous thing in its individuality, and may possess a
sensuous idea of the way in which such an individual presents itself in
its individual colour, shape, size, etc. Still, this isolated sensuous
thing, as such, has no further relation to the mind, inasmuch as the
intelligence aims at the universal, the law, the thought and notion of
the object. Not only, therefore, does it abandon all intercourse with
the thing as a given individual, but transforms it within the mind,
making a concrete object of sense into an abstract matter of thought,
and so into something quite other than the same object _qua_ sensuous
phenomenon. The artistic interest, as distinguished from science, does
not act thus. Artistic contemplation accepts the work of art just as
it displays itself _qua_ external object, in immediate determinateness
and sensuous individuality clothed in colour, figure, and sound, or as
a single isolated perception, etc., and does not go so far beyond the
immediate appearance of objectivity which is presented before it, as
to aim, like science, at apprehending the notion of such an objective
appearance as a universal notion.
Thus, the interest of art distinguishes itself from the practical
interest of _desire_ by the fact that it permits its object to subsist
freely and in independence, while desire utilizes it in its own service
by its destruction. On the other hand, artistic contemplation differs
from theoretical consideration by the scientific intelligence, in
cherishing interest for the object as an individual existence, and not
setting to work to transmute it into its universal thought and notion.
[Greek: gg] It follows, then, from the above, that though the sensuous
must be present in a work of art, yet it must only appear as surface
and _semblance_ of the sensuous. For, in the sensuous aspect of a work
of art, the mind seeks neither the concrete framework of matter, that
empirically thorough completeness and development of the organism
which desire demands, nor the universal and merely ideal thought.
What it requires is sensuous presence, which, while not ceasing to be
sensuous, is to be liberated from the apparatus of its merely material
nature. And thus the sensuous in works of art is exalted to the rank
of a mere _semblance_ in comparison with the immediate existence of
things in nature, and the work of art occupies the mean between what is
immediately sensuous and ideal thought. This semblance of the sensuous
presents itself to the mind externally as the shape, the visible look,
and the sonorous vibration of things--supposing that the mind leaves
the objects uninterfered with (physically), but yet does not descend
into their inner essence (by abstract thought), for if it did so, it
would entirely destroy their external existence as separate individuals
_for it_. For this reason the sensuous aspect of art only refers to the
two _theoretical_ senses of _sight_ and _hearing_, while smell, taste,
and feeling remain excluded from being sources of artistic enjoyment.
For smell, taste, and feeling have to do with matter as such, and with
its immediate sensuous qualities; smell with material volatilization
in air, taste with the material dissolution of substance,[64] and
feeling with warmth, coldness, smoothness, etc. On this account these
senses cannot have to do with the objects of art, which are destined to
maintain themselves in their actual independent existence, and admit
of no purely sensuous relation. The pleasant for these latter senses
is not the beautiful in art. Thus art on its sensuous side purposely
produces no more than a shadow-world of shapes, sounds, and imaginable
ideas;[65] and it is absolutely out of the question to maintain that it
is owing to simple powerlessness and to the limitations on his actions
that man, when evoking worlds of art into existence, fails to present
more than the mere surface of the sensuous, than mere _schemata_.[66]
In art, these sensuous shapes and sounds present themselves, not simply
for their own sake and for that of their immediate structure,[67] but
with the purpose of affording in that shape satisfaction to higher
spiritual interests, seeing that they are powerful to call forth a
response and echo in the mind from all the depths of consciousness.
It is thus that, in art, the sensuous is _spiritualized_, _i.e._ the
_spiritual_ appears in sensuous shape.
([Greek: _b_]) But for this very reason we have a product of art only
in so far as it has found a passage through the mind, and has been
generated by spiritually productive activity. This leads us to the
other question which we have to answer--how, that is, the sensuous
side, which is indispensable to art, is operative in the artist as a
productive state of the subject or person. This, the method and fashion
of production, contains in itself as a subjective activity just the
same properties which we found objectively present in the work of art;
it must be a spiritual activity which, nevertheless, at the same time
has in itself the element of sensuousness and immediateness. It is
neither, on the one hand, purely mechanical work, as mere unconscious
skill in sensuous sleight of hand,[68] or a formal activity according
to fixed rules learnt by rote; nor is it, on the other hand, a
scientific productive process, which passes from sense to abstract
ideas and thoughts, or exercises itself exclusively in the element
of pure thinking; rather the spiritual and the sensuous side must in
artistic production be as one. For instance, it would be possible in
poetical creation to try and proceed by first apprehending the theme to
be treated as a prosaic thought, and by then putting it into pictorial
ideas, and into rhyme, and so forth; so that the pictorial element
would simply be hung upon the abstract reflections as an ornament or
decoration. Such a process could only produce bad poetry, for in it
there would be operative as two _separate activities_ that which in
artistic production has its right place only as undivided unity.
This genuine mode of production constitutes the activity of artistic
_fancy_. It is the rational element which, _qua_ spirit, only exists
in as far as it actively extrudes itself into consciousness, but yet
does not array before it what it bears within itself till it does so in
sensuous form. This activity has, therefore, a spiritual import, which,
however, it embodies in sensuous shape. Such a process may be compared
with the habit even of a man with great experience of the world, or,
again, with that of a man of _esprit_[69] or wit, who, although he
has complete knowledge of the main stakes of life, of the substantive
interests that hold men together, of what moves them, and of what is
the power that they recognize, yet neither has himself apprehended
this content in the form of general rules, nor is able to explain it
to others in general reflections, but makes plain to himself and to
others what occupies his consciousness always in particular cases,
whether real or invented, in adequate instances, and the like. For in
his ideas, everything shapes itself into concrete images, determinate
in time and place, to which, therefore, names and other external
circumstances of all kinds must not be wanting. Yet such a kind of
imagination rather rests on the recollection of states that he has gone
through, and of experiences that have befallen him, than is creative
in its own strength. His recollection preserves and reproduces the
individuality and external fashion of occurrences that had such and
such results with all their external circumstances, and prevents the
universal from emerging in its own shape. But the productive fancy of
the _artist_ is the fancy of a great mind and heart, the apprehension
and creation of ideas and of shapes, and, indeed, the exhibition of
the profoundest and most universal human interests in the definite
sensuous mould of pictorial representation. From this it follows
at once, that in one aspect Fancy unquestionably rests on natural
gifts--speaking generally, on talent--because its mode of production
requires a sensuous medium. It is true that we speak in the same way
of scientific "talent," but the sciences only presuppose the universal
capacity of thought, which has not, like Fancy, a natural mode (as
well as an intellectual one), but abstracts just precisely from all
that is natural (or native) in an activity; and thus it would be more
correct to say that there is no specifically scientific talent in the
sense of a _mere_ natural endowment. Now, Fancy _has_ in it a mode of
instinct-like productiveness, inasmuch as the essential plasticity and
sensuousness of the work of art must be subjectively present in the
artist as natural disposition and natural impulse, and, considering
that it is unconscious operation, must belong to the natural element
in man, as well as to the rational. Of course, natural capacity leaves
room for other elements in talent and genius, for artistic production
is just as much of a spiritual and self-conscious nature; we can but
say that its spirituality must, somehow, have an element of natural,
plastic, and formative tendency. For this reason, though nearly every
one can reach a certain point in an art, yet, in order to go beyond
this point, with which the art in the strict sense begins, it is
impossible to dispense with native artistic talent of the highest order.
Considered as a natural endowment, moreover, such talent reveals itself
for the most part in early youth, and is manifested in the impelling
restlessness that busies itself, with vivacity and industry, in
creating shapes in some particular sensuous medium, and in seizing on
this species of utterance and communication as the only one, or as the
chief and the most suitable one. And thus, too, a precocious technical
facility, that up to a certain grade of attainment is without effort,
is a sign of natural talent. A sculptor finds everything transmute
itself into shapes, and he soon begins to take up the clay and model
it. And, speaking generally, whatever men of such talents have in their
imagination, whatever rouses and moves their inner nature, turns at
once into shape, drawing, melody, or poem.
([Greek: g]) Thirdly, and to conclude: the _content_ of art is also in
some respects borrowed from the sensuous, from nature; or, in any case,
even if the content is of a spiritual kind, it can only be seized and
fixed by representing the spiritual fact, such as human relations, in
the shape of phenomena with external reality.
CHAPTER III. (_Continued_).
THE CONCEPTION OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY.
PART II.--THE END OF ART.
3. The question then arises, what the interest or the _End_ is which
man proposes to himself when he reproduces such a content in the
form of works of art. This was the third point of view which we set
before us with reference to the work of art, and the closer discussion
of which will finally make the transition to the actual and true
conception of art.
If in this aspect we glance at the common consciousness, a current idea
which may occur to us is--
([Greek: a]) The principle of the _imitation of nature_. According
to this view the essential purpose of art consists in imitation, in
the sense of a facility in copying natural forms as they exist in a
way that corresponds precisely to them; and the success of such a
representation, exactly corresponding to nature, is supposed to be what
affords complete satisfaction.
([Greek: a]) This definition contains, _prima facie_, nothing beyond
the purely formal[70] aim that whatever already exists in the external
world, just _as_ it is therein, is now to be made a second time by man
as a copy of the former, as well as he can do it with the means at his
command. But we may at once regard this repetition as--
([Greek: aa]) A _superfluous_ labour, seeing that the things
which pictures, theatrical representations, etc., imitate and
represent--animals, natural scenes, incidents in human life--are before
us in other cases already, in our own gardens or our own houses, or
in cases within our closer or more remote circle of acquaintance.
And, looking more closely, we may regard this superfluous labour as a
presumptuous sport which--
([Greek: bb]) Comes far short of nature. For art is restricted in its
means of representation; and can produce only _one-sided_ deceptions,
_i.e._ for instance, a semblance of reality addressed to one sense
only; and, in fact, it invariably gives rise, if it rests in the formal
purpose of _mere imitation_, to a mere parody[71] of life, instead of
a genuine vitality. Just so the Turks, being Mohammedans, tolerate,
as is well known, no pictures copied from men or the like; and when
James Bruce, on his journey to Abyssinia, showed paintings of fish
to a Turk, the man was amazed at first, but soon enough made answer:
"If this fish shall rise up against you on the last day, and say, 'You
have created for me a body, but no living soul,' how will you defend
yourself against such an accusation?" The prophet, moreover, it is
recorded in the Sunna, said to the two women, Ommi Habiba and Ommi
Selma, who told him of pictures in Æthiopian churches--"These pictures
will accuse their authors on the day of judgment!"
There are, no doubt, as well, examples of completely deceptive
imitation. Zeuxis' painted grapes have from antiquity downward been
taken to be the triumph of this principle of the imitation of nature,
because the story is that living doves pecked at them. We might add
to this ancient example the modern one of Büttner's monkey, which bit
in pieces a painted cockchafer in Rösel's "Diversions of the Insect
World," and was pardoned by his master, in spite of his having thereby
spoilt a beautiful copy of this valuable work, because of this proof
of the excellence of the pictures. But when we reflect on these and
similar instances, it must at once occur to us that, in place of
commending works of art because they have _actually_ deceived _even_
pigeons and monkeys, we ought simply to censure the people who mean
to exalt a work of art by predicating, as its highest and ultimate
quality, so poor an effect as this. In general, we may sum up by saying
that, as a matter of mere imitation, art cannot maintain a rivalry with
nature, and, if it tries, must look like a worm trying to crawl after
an elephant.
([Greek: gg]) Considering the unvarying failure--comparative failure,
at least--of imitation when contrasted with the original in nature,
there remains as end nothing beyond our pleasure in the sleight
of hand[72] which can produce something so like nature. And it is
doubtless open to man to be pleased at producing over again what is
already present in its own right, by his labour, skill, and industry.
But enjoyment and admiration, even of this kind, naturally grow frigid
or chilled precisely in proportion to the resemblance of the copy to
the natural type, or are even converted into tedium and repugnance.
There are portraits which, as has been wittily said, are sickeningly
like; and Kant adduces another instance relative to this pleasure in
imitation as such, viz. that we soon grow tired of a man--and there
are such men--who is able to mimic the nightingale's strain quite
perfectly; and as soon as it is discovered that a man is producing
the notes, we are at once weary of the song. We then recognize in it
nothing but a conjuring trick, neither the free production of nature,
nor a work of art; for we expect from the free productive capacity
of human beings something quite other than such music as this, which
only interests us when, as is the case with the nightingale's note, it
gushes forth from the creature's own vitality without special purpose,
and yet recalls the utterance of human feeling. In general, such
delight at our skill in mimicking can be but limited, and it becomes
man better to take delight in what he produces out of himself. In this
sense the invention of any unimportant and technical product has the
higher value, and man may be prouder of having invented the hammer,
the nail, and so forth, than of achieving feats of mimicry. For this
fervour of abstract[73] copying is to be evened with the feat of the
man who had taught himself to throw lentils through a small opening
without missing. He displayed this skill of his before Alexander, and
Alexander presented him with a bushel of lentils as a reward for his
frivolous and meaningless art.
([Greek: b]) Moreover, seeing that the principle of imitation is
purely formal, to make it the end has the result that _objective
beauty_ itself disappears. For the question is in that case no longer
_of what nature_ that is which is to be copied, but only whether it
is _correctly_ copied. The object and content of the beautiful comes
then to be regarded as matter of entire indifference. That is to
say, if we go outside the principle and speak of a difference of
beauty and ugliness in considering beasts, men, landscapes, actions,
or characters, this must nevertheless, in presence of the maxim in
question,[74] be set down as a distinction that does not belong
particularly to art, for which nothing is left but abstract imitation.
In this case the above-mentioned lack of a criterion in dealing with
the endless forms of nature reduces us, as regards the selection of
objects and their distinction in beauty and ugliness, to subjective
_taste_ as an ultimate fact, which accepts no rule and admits of no
discussion. And, in fact, if in selecting objects for representation we
start from what _men_ think beautiful or ugly, and therefore deserving
artistic imitation--that is, from their taste,--then all circles of
natural objects open to us, and not one of them will be likely to
fail of a patron. Among men, for instance, it is the case that at
any rate every bridegroom thinks his bride beautiful, and indeed,
perhaps, he alone; though not, it may be, every husband his wife; and
that subjective taste for such beauty has no fixed rule one may hold
to be the good fortune of both parties. If we, moreover, look quite
beyond individuals and their accidental taste, to the taste of nations,
this again is full of extreme diversity and contrast. How often we
hear it said that a European beauty would not please a Chinese or
even a Hottentot, in as far as the Chinaman has quite a different
conception of beauty from the negro, and the negro in turn from the
European, and so forth. Indeed, if we look at the works of art of those
extra-European peoples--their images of the gods, for instance--which
their fancy has originated as venerable and sublime, they may appear to
us as the most gruesome idols, and their music may sound to our ears
as the most horrible noise; while they, on their side, will regard our
sculptures, paintings, and musical productions as trivial or ugly.
([Greek: g]) But even if we abstract from an objective principle of
art, and if beauty is to be based on subjective and individual taste,
we shall still soon find on the side of art itself that the imitation
of nature, which certainly appeared to be a universal principle and
one guaranteed by high authority, is at any rate not to be accepted
in this universal and merely abstract form. For if we look at the
different arts it will at once be admitted that even if painting and
sculpture represent objects which appear like those of nature, or
the type of which is essentially borrowed from nature, yet works of
architecture on the other hand--and architecture belongs to the fine
arts--and the productions of poetry, in as far as they do not confine
themselves to mere description, are by no means to be called imitations
of nature. At least, if we desired to maintain the principle as
valid in the case of these latter arts, we should have to make a long
circuit by conditioning the proposition in various ways, and reducing
the so-called truth[75] at any rate to probability. But if we admitted
probability we should again be met by a great difficulty in determining
what is probable and what is not; and still, moreover, one would
neither consent nor find it possible to exclude from poetry all wholly
arbitrary and completely original[76] imaginations.
The end of art must, therefore, lie in something different from the
purely formal[77] imitation of what we find given, which in any case
can bring to the birth only _tricks_ and not _works_ of art. It is,
indeed, an element essential to the work of art to have natural shapes
for its foundation; seeing that its representation is in the medium of
external and therefore of natural phenomena. In painting, for instance,
it is an important study to know how to copy with precision the colours
in their relations to one another, the effects of light, reflections,
etc., and, no less, the forms and figures of objects down to their
subtlest characteristics.[78] It is in this respect chiefly that the
principle of naturalism in general and of copying nature has recovered
its influence in modern times. Its aim is to recall an art which has
grown feeble and indistinct to the vigour and crispness of nature;
or, again, to invoke against the purely arbitrary and artificial
conventionalism, as unnatural as it was inartistic, into which art
had strayed, the uniform, direct, and solidly coherent sequences of
nature. But however true it is that there is something right in this
endeavour from one point of view, yet still the naturalism at which it
aims is not as such the substantive and primary concern that underlies
fine art. And, therefore, although external appearance in the shape
of natural reality constitutes an essential condition of art, yet,
nevertheless, neither is the given natural world its _rule_, nor is the
mere imitation of external appearance _as_ external its _end_.
(_b_) The further question then arises--What _is_ the true content
of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented. On this
subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it
is the task and aim of art to bring in contact with our sense, our
feeling, our inspiration, _all_ that finds a place in the mind of man.
Art, it is thought, should realize in us that familiar saying, "Homo
sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto." Its aim is therefore placed in
arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and
passions; in filling the _heart_, in forcing the human being, whether
cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man's soul in
its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create,
and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its
depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a
delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of
real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea--all the splendour of
the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible
misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the
inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all
pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in
idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of
sense-stimulating visions. This endlessly varied content, it is held,
art is bound to embrace, partly in order to complete the natural
experience in which our external existence consists, and partly with
the general aim of provoking the passions of our nature, both in order
that the experiences of life may not leave us unmoved, and because
we desire to attain to a receptivity that welcomes all phenomena.
Now, such a stimulus is not given in this sphere by actual experience
itself, but can only come by the semblance thereof, by art, that is,
deceptively substituting its creations for reality. The possibility
of this deception by means of artistic semblance rests on the fact
that all reality must, for man, traverse the medium of perception and
ideas, and cannot otherwise penetrate the feelings and the will. In
this process it is quite indifferent whether his attention is claimed
by immediate external reality, or whether this effect is produced by
another means--that is, by images, symbols, and ideas, containing
or representing _the content_ of reality. Man can frame to himself
ideas of things that are not actual as though they were actual. Hence
it is all the same to our feelings whether external reality or only
the semblance of it is the means of bringing in contact with us a
situation, a relation, or the import of a life. Either mode suffices to
awaken our response to its burden, in grief and in rejoicing, in pathos
and in horror,[79] and in traversing the emotions and the passions
of wrath, hatred, compassion, of anxiety, fear, love, reverence, and
admiration, or of the desire of honour and of fame.
This awakening of all feelings in us, the dragging of the heart
through the whole significance of life, the realization of all such
inner movements by means of a presented exterior consisting merely in
deception--all this was what, from the point of view which we have been
considering, constituted the peculiar and pre-eminent power of art.
Now, as this mode of treatment credits art with the vocation of
impressing on the heart and on the imagination good and bad alike,
and of strengthening man to the noblest, as of enervating him to the
most sensuous and selfish emotions, it follows that the task set before
art is still purely formal, and so it would have no certain purpose,
but would merely furnish the empty form for every possible kind of
significance and content.