"beautiful" could not but early attract the attention of the subtle
and elegant Greek dialecticians. Indeed, we find Socrates engaged
in discussing this question in one of the discourses that have been
preserved for us by Xenophon; and we find him disposed to stop for
the moment at the conclusion that the beautiful is _that which is
convenient and which answers to the end desired,_ or at the other
conclusion that it is _that which one loves_[16] Plato too examines
this sort of problem and proposes various sorts of solutions or
attempts at solutions of it. He sometimes speaks of a beauty that
dwells not only in bodies, but also in laws, in actions, in the
sciences; sometimes he seems to conjoin and almost to identify it
with the true, the good and the divine; now he returns to the view of
Socrates and confuses it with the useful; now he distinguishes between
a beautiful in itself (καλά καθ' αυτά) and a relatively beautiful (πρός
τι καλά); or he makes true beauty consist in pure pleasure (ήδονη
καθαρά), free from all shadow of pain; or he places it in measure and
proportion (μετριότης καί ξνμμετρία); or talks of colours and sounds
as possessing a beauty in themselves.[17] It was impossible to find
an independent dominion for the beautiful, if the artistic or mimetic
activity were deserted. This explains his wandering among so many
different conceptions, among which it is just possible to say that the
identification of the Beautiful with the Good prevails. Nothing better
describes this uncertainty than the dialogue of the _Hippias maior_
(which, if it be not Plato's, is Platonic). He here wishes to find
out not what things are beautiful things, but what the beautiful is;
that is to say, what it is that makes beautiful, not only a beautiful
virgin, but also a beautiful mare, a beautiful lyre, a beautiful pot
with two graceful ears of clay. Hippias and Socrates himself propose
in turn the most various solutions; but the latter ends by confuting
them all. "That which makes things beautiful is the gold that is added
to them by way of ornament." No: gold only embellishes where it is
_fitting_ (πρέπων): for instance, a pot should have a wooden rather
than a golden handle. "That is beautiful which cannot seem ugly to any
one." But it is not a question of _seeming_: the question is to define
what the beautiful is, whether it seems so or not. It is the _fitting_
which makes things seem to be beautiful. But in that case, the fitting
(which makes them _appear,_ not _be)_ is one thing, and the beautiful
another. "The beautiful is what leads to the end, that is to say, the
_useful_ (χρήσιμον)." But if that were so, then evil would also be
beautiful, because the useful leads also to the evil. "The beautiful
is the _helpful,_ that which leads to the good (ωφέλιμον)." But in
this case, the good would not be beautiful nor the beautiful good; for
the cause is not the effect, and the effect is not the cause. "The
beautiful is that which delights the sight and hearing." But this fails
to persuade for three reasons: firstly, because beautiful studies and
laws are beautiful, which have nothing to do with the eye or with the
ear; secondly, because we cannot discover a reason for limiting the
beautiful to those senses, while excluding the pleasure of eating and
smelling, and the extremely vivid pleasures of sex; thirdly, because,
if the foundation of the beautiful were _visibility,_ it would not be
_audibility,_ and if it were audibility it would not be visibility;
hence that which constitutes the beautiful cannot dwell in either
of the two qualities. And the question which has been repeated so
insistently in the course of the dialogue: _what is the beautiful?_ (τί
εστι το καλόν;) remains unanswered.[18]
Later writers also conducted inquiries into the beautiful, and we
possess the titles of several treatises upon the theme, which have
been lost. Aristotle shows himself changeable and uncertain upon the
point. In the scanty references which he makes to it, he at one time
confounds the beautiful with the good, defining it as that which is
both good and pleasing;[19] at another he notes that the good consists
of action (εν πράξει) and the beautiful also in things that are
immoveable (εν τοΐς άκινήτοις), drawing from this the argument that
mathematics should be studied in order to determine its characters,
order, symmetry and limit;[20] sometimes he places it in bigness and
in order (εν μεγεθει καί τάξει);[21] at others he was led to look upon
it as something apparently indefinable.[22] Antiquity also established
canons of beautiful things, such as that attributed to Polycletus on
the proportions of the human body. And Cicero said of the beauty of
bodies that they were "_quaedam apta figura membrorum cum coloris quadam
suavitate._"[23] All these affirmations, even when they are not mere
empirical observations, or verbal glosses and substitutions, meet with
unsurmountable obstacles.
[Sidenote: _Distinction between the theory of Art and the theory of the
Beautiful._]
In any case, not only is the conception of the beautiful, taken as
a whole, identified with art in none of them; but sometimes art and
beauty, mimesis and pleasing or displeasing material of mimesis, are
clearly distinguished. Aristotle notes in his _Poetics_ that it pleases
us to see the most faithful images of things that are repugnant to
us in reality, such, for instance, as the most contemptible forms of
animals, or corpses (τάς εικόνας τάς μάλιστα ήκριβωμενας χαίρομεν
θεωρουντες).[24] Plutarch demonstrates at length that works of art
please us not as beautiful but as _resembling_ (ούχ ως καλόν, άλλ,'
ως ομοιον); he affirms that if the artist beautified things that are
ugly in nature he would be offending against fitness and resemblance
(το πρεπον και το eίκός); and he proclaims the principle that _the
beautiful is one thing and beautiful imitation another_ (oύ yaρ εστι
ταυτό, το καλον και καλως τι μιμεισθαι). Paintings of horrible events
are pleasing, such as _Medea slaying her sons_ by Timomachus, _Orestes
the matricide_ by Theon, and the _Pretended madness of Ulysses_ by
Parrhasius; and if the grunting of a pig, the grating of a machine,
the noise of the winds and the tumult of the sea are unpleasing, they
pleased on the contrary in the case of Parmenon, who imitated the pig
perfectly, and in Theodorus, who was not less expert in rendering the
grating of machines.[25] If the ancients had really wanted to place
the beautiful and art in relation, a secondary and partial connexion
of the two conceptions was to hand in the shape of the category of the
_relatively_ as distinguished from the _absolutely_ beautiful. But
where the word _καλόν_ or _pulchrum_ is applied to artistic productions
in the writings of literary critics, it does not seem to be more than a
linguistic usage, as we find, for instance, in the case of Plutarch's
_beautiful_ imitation, or also in the terminology of the rhetoricians,
who sometimes called elegance and adornment of discourse _beauty_ of
elocution (το τής φράσεως κάλλος).
[Sidenote: _Fusion of the two by Plotinus._]
It is only with Plotinus that the two divided territories are united
and _the beautiful and art are fused into a single concept,_ not by
means of a beneficial absorption of the _equivocal_ Platonic conception
of beauty into the _unequivocal_ conception of art, but by absorption
of the clear into the confused, of _imitative art_ in the so-called
_beautiful._ And thus we reach an altogether new view: the beautiful
and art are now both alike melted into a mystical passion and elevation
of the spirit.
Beauty, observes Plotinus, resides chiefly in things visible; but it
is also to be found in things audible, such as verbal and musical
compositions, and it is not lacking in things supersensible, such as
works, offices, actions, habits, sciences and virtues. What is it
that makes beautiful sensible and supersensible things alike? Not, he
answers, the symmetry of their parts among themselves, and with the
whole (συμμετρία των μερών προς αλληλα και προς το ολον) and their
colour (ενχροια), according to one of the definitions most in vogue,
which we have quoted above in the words of Cicero; because there are
proportions in things ugly, and there are things that are simply
beautiful without any relation of proportion: beauty, then, is one
thing and symmetry another.[26] The beautiful is what we welcome as
akin to our own nature; the ugly is what repels us as our opposite,
and the affinity of beautiful things with our souls that perceive them
has its origin in the Idea, which produces both. That is beautiful
which is _formed_; the ugly is what is _unformed,_ that is to say,
something which is capable of receiving form, but does not receive it
or is not entirely dominated by it. A beautiful body is such, because
of its communion (κοινωνία) with the Divine; beauty is the Divine, the
Idea, shining through; and matter is beautiful, not in itself, but only
when it is illuminated by the Idea. Light and fire, which are nearest
to this state, shed beauty upon visible things, as the most spiritual
among bodies. But the soul must purify itself, in order to perceive the
beautiful, and make the power of the Idea that lies in it efficacious.
Moderation, strength, prudence, and every other virtue, what else are
they, according to the oracle, but _purification_? Thus there opens
another eye in the soul, beside that of sensible beauty, which permits
it to contemplate divine Beauty coincident with the Good, which is the
supreme condition of beatitude.[27] Art enters into such contemplation,
because beauty, in things made by man, comes from the mind. Compare two
blocks of stone, the one placed beside the other: one rough and crude,
the other reduced to the statue of a god or of a man, for example of
a Grace or of a Muse, or of a human being of such a shape, as art has
collected from many particular beauties. The beauty of a block of this
shape does not consist in its being of stone, but in the form that
art has been able to give to it (παρά του ειδους o ενηκεν η τέχνη);
and when the form is fully impressed upon it, the thing of art is more
beautiful than any other natural thing. Hence he who despised the arts
(Plato), because they imitated nature, was wrong; whereas the truth
is, in the first place, that nature itself imitates the idea, and then
that the arts do not simply limit themselves to imitating what the eyes
see, but go back to those reasons or ideas from which nature itself is
derived (ώς ούχ απλώς το όρώμενον μεμούνται, αλλ' άνατρέχουσιν επι τούς
λόγους έξ ων η φύσις). Art therefore does not belong to nature, but
adds beauty where it is wanting in nature: Phidias did not represent
Jove because he had seen him, but such as he would appear if he wished
to reveal himself to mortal eyes.[28] The beauty of natural things
is the archetype existing in the soul, the sole source of natural
beauty.[29]
[Sidenote: _The scientific tendency. Aristotle._]
This affirmation of Plotinus and of neo-Platonism is the first
true and proper affirmation of mystical Æsthetic, destined to such
high fortunes in modern times, especially in the first half of the
nineteenth century. But the attempts at a true Æsthetic, excluding
certain luminous but incidental observations to be found even in
Plato: for instance, that the poet should weave fables, not arguments
(μύθους άλλ' ού λόγους),[30] go back to Aristotle and are altogether
independent of his few and feeble speculations as to the beautiful.
Aristotle by no means agreed with the Platonic condemnation; he felt
(as indeed Plato himself had suspected) that such a result could not
be altogether true, and that some aspect of the problem must have been
neglected. When in his turn he attempted to find a solution, he found
himself in more advantageous conditions than his great predecessor,
since he had already overcome the obstacle that arose from the Platonic
doctrine of ideas, a hypostasis of concepts and abstractions. The ideas
were for him simply concepts, and reality presented itself in a far
more lively manner, not as a diminution of ideas, but as a synthesis of
matter and form, it was thus much more easy for him to recognize the
rationality of mimesis in his general philosophical doctrine and to
assign to it its right place; and indeed it seems generally clear to
Aristotle that mimesis, being proper to man by nature, is contemplation
or theoretic activity; although he sometimes seems to forget this (as
when he confuses imitation with the case of boys, who acquire their
first knowledge by following an example[31]), and although his system,
which admits practical sciences and poietic activities (distinguished
from the practical as leaving a material object behind them), disturbed
the firm and constant consideration of artistic mimesis and poetry as
a theoretical activity. But if it is a theoretical activity, by what
characteristic is poetry distinguished both from _scientific_ knowledge
and from _historical_ knowledge? This is the way Aristotle states the
problem concerning the nature of art, and this is the true and only
way of stating it. Even we moderns ask ourselves in what way art is
distinguished from history and from science, and what this artistic
form can be, which has the ideality of science and the concreteness
and individuality of history. Poetry, answers Aristotle, differs from
history, because, while the latter draws things that have happened
(τα γενόμενα), poetry draws things that may possibly happen (οια αν
γένοιτο), and differs from science, because, although it regards the
universal and not the particular (τα καθ' εκαστον) like history,
it does not regard it in the same way as science, but in a certain
measure, which the philosopher indicates by the word _rather_ (μαλλον
τα καθόλου). The point then is to establish the precise meaning of
the _possible,_ the _rather_ and the _historical particular._ But no
sooner does Aristotle attempt to determine the meaning of these words,
than he falls into contradictions and fallacies. That _universal_ of
poetry, which is the _possible,_ seems to identify itself for him with
the probable or the necessary (τα _κατά το είκος η το άναγκαΐον_),
and the particular of history is not explained at all, except by
giving instances: "that which Alcibiades did and what happened to
him."[32] Aristotle, in fact, after having made so good a beginning
in the discovery of the purely imaginative, proper to poetry, remains
half-way, perplexed and uncertain. Thus he sometimes makes the truth
of imitation consist in a certain learning and syllogizing that takes
place when we look at imitations, by which we recognize that "this is
that," that a copy answers to the original;[33] or, worse, he loses the
grains of truth that he has found and forgets that poetry has for its
content the possible, admitting, not only that it may also depict the
_impossible_ (το αδύνατον), and even the _absurd_ (το άτοπον), seeing
that both are _credible_ and that they do not injure the end of art,
but even that we must prefer impossible probabilities to incredible
possibilities.[34] Art, since it has to do even with the impossible
and absurd, will not therefore have in it anything of the rational,
but in accordance with the Platonic theory it will be an imitation of
the appearance in which empty sense indulges itself; that is to say, a
thing of pleasure. Aristotle does not attain to this result, because
he does not attain to any clear and precise result in this part of the
subject, but it is one of the results that can be deduced from what he
has said, or that, at any rate he is not able to exclude. This means
that he did not fulfil his tacitly assumed task, and that although
he re-examined the problem with marvellous acuteness after Plato, he
failed truly to rid himself of the Platonic definition, by substituting
a firmly-established one of his own.
[Sidenote: _The concepts of imitation and of imagination after A
ristotle. Philostratus._]
But the field of investigation toward which Aristotle had turned was
generally neglected in antiquity: the very _Poetics_ of Aristotle does
not seem to have been widely known or influential. Ancient psychology
knew fancy or imagination as a faculty midway between sense and
intellect, but always as conservative and reproductive of sensuous
impressions or conveying conceptions to the senses, never properly
as a productive autonomous activity. That faculty was rarely and with
little result placed in relation with the problem of art. Several
historians of Æsthetic attach singular importance to certain passages
in the _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_ by the elder Philostratus, in
which they believe that they discover a correction of the theory of
_mimesis_ and the first affirmation in history of the conception of
_imaginative creation._ Phidias and Praxiteles (says the extract in
question) did not need to go to heaven to see the gods, in order to
be able to depict them in their works, as would have been necessary
according to the theory of imitation. Imagination, without any need
of models, made them able to do what they did: imagination, which is
a wiser agent than simple imitation (φαντασία ... σοφωτόρα μιμήσεως
δημιουργός), and gives form, like the other, not only to what has been
seen, but also to what has never been seen, imagining it on the basis
of existing things and in that way creating Jupiters and Minervas.[35]
However, the imagination of which Philostratus speaks here is not
something different from the Aristotelian mimesis, which, as has been
noted, was concerned not only with real things but also and chiefly
with possible things. And had not Socrates observed (in the dialogue
with the painter Parrhasius, preserved for us by Xenophon) that
painters work by collecting what they need to form their figures from
several bodies (εκ πολλων συνάγοντες τα εξ εκάστου καλλιστα)?[36] And
was not the anecdote of Zeuxis, who was supposed to have taken the
best of five Crotonian maidens in order to paint his Helen, and other
anecdotes of a like sort, sufficiently widespread in antiquity? And
had not Cicero eloquently explained, some years before Philostratus,
how Phidias, when he was carving Jupiter, did not copy anything real,
but kept his looks fixed upon "_species pulcritudinis eximia quaedam,_"
which he had in his soul and which directed his art and his hand?[37]
Nor can it be said that Philostratus opened the way to Plotinus,
for whom the superior or intellectual imagination (νοητή), or eye of
supersensible beauty, when it is not a new designation for beautiful
imitation, is mystical intuition.
The vagueness of the concept of mimesis reached its apex in those
writers who gave it as a general title to any sort of work that had
nature for its object, employing the Aristotelian phrase to affirm
that "_omnis ars naturae imitatio est,_"[38] or saying, like the
painter Eupompus when he blamed his servile imitators, that "_natura
est imitanda, non artifex._"[39] And those who wished to escape this
vagueness did not know how to do so, save by conceiving the activity of
imitation as the practical producer of duplicates of natural objects, a
prejudice bora in the bosom of the pictorial and plastic arts, against
which Philostratus perhaps intended to argue, in common with the other
advocates of imagination.
[Sidenote: _Speculations on language._]
The speculations upon language had a close connexion with those upon
the nature of art begun by the sophists, for whom it became a matter
for wonder that sounds could signify colours or things inaudible; that
is to say, _speech_ presented itself as a _problem._[40] It was then
discussed whether language was by nature (φύσει or by convention νόμω).
By nature was sometimes understood mental necessity, and by convention
what we should call a merely natural fact, psychological mechanism or
sensationalism. In that sense of the terms, language would have been
better called φύσει than νόμω. But at other times the distinction led
to the question whether language answers to objective or logical truth
and to the real relations between things (όρθότης των ονομάτων); and
in this case, those would seem to be nearer the truth who proclaimed
it to be conventional or arbitrary in respect to logical truth: νόμω
or θέσει, and not φύσει Two different questions were consequently
being treated together, and both were confusedly and equivocally
discussed. They find their monument in the obscure _Cratylus_ of
Plato, which seems to fluctuate between different solutions. Nor did
the later affirmation that the word is a sign (σημείον) of the thought
solve anything, for it still remained to be shown in what way the sign
was to be understood, whether φύσει or νόμω. Aristotle, who looked
upon words as imitations (μιμηματα), in the same way as poetry,[41]
made an observation of first-rate importance: in addition to the
_enunciative_ propositions, which express the (logically) true or
false, there are others which do not express either the (logically)
true or false, as for example the expressions of aspirations and of
desires (εύχή), which therefore belong, not to logical exposition, but
to poetical and rhetorical exposition.[42] And in another place we
find him affirming in opposition to Bryson (who had said that a base
thing remained such with whatever word it were designated) that base
things can be expressed both with words that place them beneath the
eye in all their crudity, and with other words which surround them
with a veil.[43] All this might have led to the separation of the
linguistic faculty from the properly logical, and to its consideration
in union with the poetical and artistic faculty; but here too the
attempt stopped half-way. The Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and
formalistic character, which became more and more accentuated as time
went on and formed an obstacle to the distinction between the two
theoretical forms. Nevertheless, Epicurus asserted that the diversity
of names designating the same thing with various peoples was due,
not to convention and caprice, but to the fact that the impressions
produced by things were different in each one of them.[44] And the
Stoics, although they connected language with thought (διάνοια) and
not with imagination, seem to have had a suspicion of the non-logical
nature of language, for they interposed between thought and sound a
_certain something_ which was indicated in Greek by the word λεκτόν,
and by the words _effatum_ or _dicibile_ in Latin. But we are not sure
what they really meant, and whether that vague concept were intended
by them to distinguish the linguistic representation from the abstract
concept (which would bring them into touch with the modern view), or
the meaning of sound in general.[45]
We cannot collect any other germ of truth from the ancient writers.
A philosophical Grammar, like a philosophical Poetics, remained
unattainable in antiquity.
[1] See above, pp. 128-131. Quotations which give only the name
of the author, or are otherwise abbreviated, refer to historical
or critical works of which the complete title is given in the
Bibliographical Appendix.
[2] Rosmini, _Nuovo saggio sull' origine delle idee,_ sections iii. and
iv., where theories of knowledge are classified.
[3] See above, pp. 83-84.
[4] See above, p. 65.
[5] _Republic_, x. 607.
[6] _Republic_, x. 607.
[7] Plutarch, _De audiendis poetis_, ch. i.
[8] _Republic_ x.
[9] _Frogs,_ 1, 1055.
[10] Plato, _Laws,_ bk. ii.; Aristotle, _Poet._ ch. 14; _Polit,_ bk.
viii.
[11] Strabo, _Geographica,_ i. ch. 2, §§ 3-9.
[12] Texts collected in E. Müller, _Gesch. d. Th. d. K._ i. pp. 57-85.
[13] Plutarch, _De aud. poetis,_ chs. 1-4, 14.
[14] _De rerum natura,_ i. 935-947.
[15] _Ad Pisones,_ 333-334.
[16] _Memorab._ iii. ch. 8; iv. ch. 6.
[18] _Hippias maior, passim._
[19] _Rhet._ i. ch. 9.
[20] _Metaphys._ xii. ch. 3.
[21] _Poet._ ch. 7.
[22] Diog. Lært. v. ch. i, § 20.
[23] _Tuscul. quæst._ bk. iv. § 13.
[24] _Poet._ ch. iv. 3.
[25] _De aud. poetis_, ch. 3.
[26] _Enneads,_ I. bk. vi. ch. i.
[27] _Enneads, loc. cit._ chs. 2-9.
[28] _Enneads,_ V. bk. viii. ch. i.
[29] _Enneads, loc. cit._ chs. 2-3.
[30] _Phædrus,_ ch. 4.
[31] Poet. ch. 4, § 2.
[32] Poet. ch. 9, §§ 1-4.
[33] Poet. ch. 4, §§ 4-5.
[34] Poet. chs. 24-25.
[35] _Apoll. vita,_ vi. ch. io.
[36] _Memorab._ iii. ch. io.
[37] _Orator ad Brutum,_ ch. 2.
[38] For example, Seneca, _Epist._ 65.
[39] Pliny, _Nat. Hist._ xxxiv. ch. 19.
[40] Gorgias in _De Xenoph., Zen. et Gorg._ (in Aristot., ed. Didot),
chs. 5-6.
[41] _Rhet._ bk. iii. ch. 1.
[42] _Rhet._ bk. iii. ch. 2.
[43] _De interp._ ch. 4.