(as was noted by Kant) whose effect was to stand in opposition
to intellectualistic principles, as if to say that the judgement
governing the choice of food destined solely for the delectation
of the palate is of the same nature as that which decides opinions
in matters of art.[36] Nevertheless, the very definition of this
anti-intellectualistic concept contained a reference to intellect and
reason; the implicit comparison with the palate was ultimately taken
as signifying an anticipation of reflexion: as Voltaire wrote in the
following century: "_De même que la sensation du palais anticipe
la réflexion._"[37] Intellect and reason glimmer through all the
definitions of taste belonging to this period. Mme. Dacier wrote in
1684, "_Une harmonie, un accord de l'esprit et de la raison._"[38]
"_Une raison éclairée qui, d'intelligence avec le cœur, fait
toujours un juste choix parmi des choses opposées ou semblables,_"
wrote the author of _Entretiens galants._[39] According to another
writer quoted by Bonhours, "taste" is "a natural feeling implanted in
the soul, independent of any science that can possibly be acquired"; it
is practically "an instinct of right reason."[40] The same Bouhours,
whilst deprecating this interpretation of one metaphor by another,
says, "Taste is more nearly allied to judgement than wit."[41] The
Italian Ettori thinks that it may generally be described as "judgement
regulated by art,"[42] and Baruffaldi (1710) identifies it with
"discernment" reduced from theory to practice.[43] De Crousaz (1715)
observes: "_Le bon goût nous fait d'abord estimer par sentiment ce que
la raison aurait approuvé, après qu'elle se serait donné le temps de
l'examiner assez pour en juger par des justes idées._"[44] And somewhat
prior to him Trevisano considered it "a sentiment always willing to
conform to whatsoever reason accepts," and in conjunction with divine
grace, a powerful help to man in revealing the true and good, no longer
able to circulate freely among mankind owing to original sin. For
König (1727) in Germany taste was "a power of the intellect, product
of a healthy mind and acute judgement which makes one able to feel
the true, good and beautiful"; and for Bodmer in 1736 (after lengthy
correspondence on the subject with his Italian friend Calepio) "a
practised reflexion, prompt and penetrating into the smallest details,
by which intellect is able to distinguish the true from the false, the
perfect from the imperfect." Calepio and Bodmer were opponents of pure
feeling, and made a distinction between "taste" and "good taste."[45]
Traversing the same intellectualistic path, Muratori speaks of "good
taste" in "erudition" and others of "good taste in philosophy."
[Sidenote: _The "je ne sais quoi."_]
Perhaps those authors were wise who preferred to remain vague and to
identify taste with an indefinable Something, a _je ne sais quoi_; a
_nescio quid_: a new expression which expressed nothing new, but at
least called attention to the problem. Bouhours (1671) discusses it at
length: "_Les Italiens, qui font mystère de tout, emploient en toutes
rencontres leur_ non so che: _on ne voit rien de plus commune dans
leurs poètes,_" and quotes Tasso and others in confirmation.[45] A
note upon it is found in Salvini: "This 'good taste' has but recently
come to the front; it seems a vague term applicable to nothing
particular, and is equivalent to the _non so che,_ to a happy or
successful turn of wit."[46] Father Feijóo, who wrote on the _Razón
del gusto_ and on _El no se qué_ (1733), says very wisely: "_En muchas
producciones no solo de la naturaleza, sino del arte, y aun mas del
arte que de la naturaleza, encuentran los hombres, fuera di aquellas
perfecciones sujetes á su comprehension racional, otro genero de primor
misterioso que, lisonjeando el gusto, atormenta el entendemento. Los
sentidos le palpan, pero no le puede dissipar la razon, y así, al
querer explicarle, no se encuentran voces ni conceptos que cuadren
á su idea, y salimos del paso con decir que hay un non se qué, que
agrada, que enamora que hechiza, sin que pueda encontrarse revelacion
mas clara da este natural misterio._"[47] And President Montesquieu:
"_Il y a quelquefois dans les personnes ou dans les choses un charme
invisible, une grâce naturelle, qu'on n'a pu définir, et qu'on a été
forcé d'appeler le je ne sais quoi. Il me semble que c'est un effet
principalement fondé sur la surprise._"[48] Some writers rebelled
against the subterfuge of the _je ne sais quoi,_ saying, rightly
enough, that it was a confession of ignorance: but they knew not how to
escape that ignorance without falling into confusion between taste and
intellectual judgement.
[Sidenote: _Imagination and sensationalism. The corrective of
Imagination._]
If the attempt to define "wit" and "taste" usually resulted in
intellectualism, it was easy to transform imagination and feeling into
sensationalistic doctrines. We have seen how earnestly Pallavicino
insisted on the non-intellectuality of the fantasies and inventions
of the imagination. "Nothing presents itself to the admirer of the
beautiful (he writes) to enable him to verify his cognition and satisfy
himself that the object recognized is or is not that for which he takes
it; if either by vision or by strong apprehension he is led to think
it actually present by an act of judgement, his taste for beauty as
beauty does not arise from such act of judgement, but from the vision
or lively apprehension which might remain in ourselves even when the
deception of belief was corrected"; just as happens when we are drowsy
and know ourselves to be but half awake, yet are unwilling to tear
ourselves from sweet dreams. For Pallavicino imagination cannot err; he
assimilates it wholly to the sensations, which are incapable of truth
or falsity. And if imaginative knowledge pleases, it is not because
it holds a special truth (imaginative truth), but because it creates
objects which "though false are pleasing": the painter makes not
likenesses but images which, all resemblance apart, are pleasing to the
sight: the poet awakens apprehensions "sumptuous, novel, marvellous,
splendid."[49] His opinion coincides, if we mistake not, with Marino's
sensationalism: "The poet should aim only at the marvellous ... he who
cannot amaze his hearers is not worth a straw":[50] he applauds the
oft-repeated dictum of "Gabriel Chiabrera, that Pindar of Savona, that
poetry should cause the eyebrows to arch themselves."[51] But in the
_Treatise upon Style_ written later (1646) he repents of his youthful
achievement and appears willing to return to the pedagogic theory:
"And forasmuch as I theorized concerning poetry in the basest manner,
treating it solely as a minister of that delight which the mind enjoys
in the less noble operation of imagination or apprehension arising
from imagination; and, therefore, in consequence I somewhat relaxed the
strings which bind it to the probable: I now wish to demonstrate that
poetry has other functions more exalted and fruitful, while remaining
in strict servitude to the probable: which office is to guide our
minds in the noble exercise of judgement; thus it becomes the nurse of
philosophy which it nourishes with sweet milk."[52] The Jesuit Ettori,
while inculcating the use of imagination and recommending orators to go
to school with the "actors," points out that imagination should fulfil
the simple office of "interpreter" between intellect and truth, never
assuming dominion, otherwise the orator would be treating his audience
or readers "not as men, to whom intellect is proper, but as beasts whom
imagination satisfies."[53]
The conception of imagination as purely sensuous shows strongly in
Muratori, who is so convinced that the faculty, if left to itself,
would deteriorate into a riot of dreams and intoxication, that he links
it to intellect as to "an authoritative friend" who shall influence
the choice and combination of images.[54] The problem of the nature of
imagination had strong attraction for Muratori, and, while traducing
and vilifying, he returns to it again in his _Della forza della
fantasia umana_;[55] describing it as a material faculty essentially
different from the mental or spiritual, and denying it the validity of
knowledge. Although he had observed that the aim of poetry is distinct
from that of science, in that the latter seeks to "know," and the
former to "represent" truth,[56] he persisted in counting Poetry as an
"art of delectation" subordinate to Moral Philosophy, of whom she was
one of the three servants or ministers.[57] Very similarly Gravina held
that along with novelty and delight in the marvellous, poetry should
endow the mind of the vulgar with "truth and universal cognitions."[58]
Outside Italy the same movement was going on. Bacon, although he
assigned poetry to imagination, yet considered it as something
intermediary between history and science, approximating epic to
history and the most lofty style, the parabolic, to science: ("_poēsis
parabolica inter reliquas eminet"._) Elsewhere he calls poetry
_somnium_ or declares absolutely that "_scientias fere non parit,_" and
that "_pro lusu potius ingenii quam pro scientia est habenda_": music,
painting and sculpture are voluptuous arts.[59] Addison identified the
pleasures of the imagination with those produced by visible objects or
the ideas to which they give rise: such pleasures are not so strong as
those of the senses nor so refined as those of the intellect: he groups
together the pleasures experienced respectively in comparing imitations
with the objects imitated, and in sharpening by this means the faculty
of observation.[60]
[Sidenote _Feeling and Sensationalism._]
The sensationalism of Du Bos and other upholders of feeling appears
very clearly. For Du Bos art is a pastime whose pleasantness consists
in the fact that it occupies the mind without fatigue, and has
affinities with the pleasure provoked by gladiatorial contests,
bullfights and tourneys.[61]
For these reasons, whilst noting the importance, in the prehistory
of Æsthetic, of these new words and the new views they express; and
while recognizing their value as a ferment in the discussion of the
æsthetic problem, taken up by thinkers of the Renaissance at the point
at which it had been left by the ancients; we yet cannot discern in
their apparition the true origin of our science. By these words and the
discussions they aroused, the æsthetic fact clamoured even louder and
more insistently for its own philosophical justification; but this it
was not yet to attain either by this means or by any other.
[1] _E.g._ Molière, _Préc. ridic._ sc. i, 10.
[2] _I fonti dell' ingegno ridotti ad arte,_ Bologna, 1650.
[3] _Delle acutezze che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti
volgarmenti si appellano,_ Genova-Bologna, 1639.
[4] _Agudeza y arte de ingenio,_ Madrid, 1642; enlarged, Huesca, 1649.
[5] _Saggio del gusto e delle belle arti,_ 1783, ch. I, _note._
[6] Ital. trans. in Orsi, _Considerazioni,_ etc. (Modena, 1735), vol.
i. dial. 1.
[7] _Orl. Furioso_, xxxv. 26; L. Dolce, _Dial. del pittura_ (Venice,
1557); _ad init_.
[8] Borinski, _Poet. d. Renaiss._ p. 308 _seqq._; _B. Gracian_, pp.
39-54.
[9] _Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto_ (Venice, 1766), introd. pp. 72-84.
[10] Gracian, _Obras_ (Antwerp, 1669); _El héroe, El discreto,_ with
introd. by A. Farinelli, Madrid, 1900. Cf. Borinski, _Poet. d. Renais,
l.c._
[11] _Les Caractères, ou les mœurs du siècle,_ ch. I; _Des ouvrages de
l'esprit._
[12] In the programme: _Von der Nachahmung der Franzosen,_ Leipzig,
1687.
[13] _Opera ... nella quale con alcune certe considerazioni si mostra
in che consista il vero buon gusto ne' suddetti componimenti,_ etc.,
etc., Bologna, 1696.
[14] _Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto nelle scienze e nell'
arti,_ 1708 (Venice, 1766).
[15] Muratori, _Della perfetta poesia italiana,_ Modena, 1706, bk. ii.
ch. 5.
[16] Mazzuchelli, _Scrittori d' Italia,_ vol. ii. part iv. p. 2389.
[17] Cicero, _De oratore,_ iii. ch. 50; Quintilian, _Inst. Orator,_ vi.
ch. 5.
[18] _De la délicatesse,_ Paris, 1671.
[19] _Il buon gusto,_ ch. 39, p. 367.
[20] _Del bene_ (Naples, 1681), bk. i. part i. chs. 49-53. Cf. the same
writer's _Arte della perfezion cristiana,_ Rome, 1665, bk. i. ch. 3.
[21] _Perfetta poesia,_ bk. i. chs. 14, 21.
[22] _Ragion poetica,_ in _Prose italiane,_ ed. De Stefano, Naples,
1839, i. ch. 7. 2 _Il buon gusto,_ p. 10.
[23] _Esame degl' ingegni degl' huomini per apprender le scienze_
(Ital. trans. by C. Camilli, Venice, 1586), chs. 9-12.
[24] _De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum,_ bk. ii. ch. 13.
[25] _De homine_ (in _Opera phil.,_ ed. Molesworth, vol. iii.), ch. 2.
[26] _Spectator,_ Nos. 411-421 (_Works,_ London, 1721, pp. 486-519).
[27] _Die Discourse der Mahlern,_ 1721--1723; _Von dem Einflüss und
Gebrauche der Einbildungskraft,_ etc., 1727; and other writings of
Bodmer and Breitinger.
[28] Pascal, _Pensées sur l'éloquence et le style,_ § 15.
[29] _Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture,_ 1719 (ed. 7,
Paris, 1770) _passim._; see especially sections 1, 23, 26, 28, 33, 34.
[30] Cartaut de la Villate, _Essais historiques et philosophiques sur
le goût,_ Aix, 1737; Trublet, _Essais sur divers sujets de littérature
et de morale,_ Amsterdam, 1755.
[31] Cf. Du Bos, _op. cit._ § 33.
[32] Borinski, _B. Gracian_, p. 39.
[33] Trevisano, _op. cit._ pp. 82, 84.
[34] _Perfetta poesia,_ bk. ii. ch. I (_ed. cit._ i. p. 299).
[35] A. Pope, _An Essay on Criticism,_ 1709 (in _Poetical Works,_
London, 1827), lines 81, 82.
[36] _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_ (ed. Kirchmann), § 33.
[37] _Essai sur le goût_ (in appendix to A. Gérard, _Essai sur le
goût,_ Paris, 1766).
[38] _Ibid._
[39] Quoted in Sulzer, _Allg. Th. d. s. K._ ii. p. 377.
[40] _Manière de bien penser_ (Ital. trans. _cit._), dial. 4. 2 _Ibid._
[41] _Op. cit._ chs. 2-4.
[42] _Osservazioni critiche_ (in vol. ii. of Orsi's _Considerazioni)_,
ch. 8, p. 23.
[43] _Traité du beau_ (Amsterdam ed., 1724), i. p. 170.
[44] J. Ulr. König, _Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht-
und Redekunst,_ Leipzig, 1727, and (Calepio-Bodmer) _Briefwechsel von
der Natur des poetischen Geschmackes,_ Zürich, 1736; cf. for both
Sulzer, ii. p. 380.
[45] _Les Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène,_ 1671 (Paris ed., 1734),
conversation v.; "_Le je ne sçai quoi_"; cf. Gracian, _Oraculo manual,_
No. 127, and _El héroe,_ ch. 13.
[46] In the notes to Muratori's _Perfetta poesia._
[47] Feijóo, _Theatro critico,_ vol. vi. Nos. 11-12.
[48] _Essai sur le goût dans les choses de la nature et de l'art._
Posthumous fragment (in appendix to A. Gérard, _op. cit._).
[49] _Del bene, cap. cit._
[50] Marino, in one of the sonnets in the _Murtoleide_ (1608).
[51] _Del bene,_ bk. i. part i. ch. 8.
[52] _Trattato dello stile_ (Rome, 1666), ch. 30.
[53] _Il buon gusto,_ pp. 12-13.
[54] _Perf. poesia,_ i. ch. 18, pp. 232-233.
[55] Venice, 1745.
[56] _Perf. poesia,_ i. ch. 6.
[57] _Op. cit._ i. ch. 4, p. 42.
[58] _Ragion poetica,_ i. ch. 7.
[59] _De dignitate,_ ii. ch. 13; iii. ch. I; iv. ch. 2; v. ch. 1.
[60] _Spectator, loc. cit._ esp. pp. 487, 503.
[61] _Op. cit._ § 2.
IV
ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE CARTESIAN AND LEIBNITIAN SCHOOLS, AND THE
"ÆSTHETIC" OF BAUMGARTEN
[Sidenote: _Cartesianism and imagination._]
The obscure world of wit, taste, imagination, feeling and the _je ne
sais quoi_ was not selected for examination or even, so to speak,
included in the picture of Cartesian philosophy. The French philosopher
abhorred imagination, the outcome, according to him, of the agitation
of the animal spirits: and though not utterly condemning poetry, he
allowed it to exist only in so far as it was guided by intellect, that
being the sole faculty able to save men from the caprices of the _folle
du logis._ He tolerated it, but that was all; and went so far as not to
deny it anything "_qu'un philosophe lui puisse permettre sans offenser
sa conscience._"[1] It has been observed that the æsthetic parallel
with Cartesian intellectualism is to be found in Boileau,[2] slave to
rigid _raison_ ("_Mais nous que la raison à ses règles engage ..._")
and enthusiastic partisan of allegory. We have already had occasion
to draw attention to the diatribe of Malebranche against imagination.
The mathematical spirit fostered in France by Descartes forbade all
possibility of a serious consideration of poetry and art. The Italian
Antonio Conti, living in that country and witness of the literary
disputes raging around him, thus describes the French critics (La
Motte, Fontenelle and their followers): "_Ils ont introduit dans les
belles lettres l'esprit et la méthode de M. Descartes; et ils jugent
de la poésie et de l'éloquence indépendamment des qualités sensibles.
De là vient aussi qu'ils confondent le progrès de la philosophie avec
celui des arts. Les modernes, dit l'Abbé Terrasson, sont plus grands
géomètres que les anciens: donc ils sont plus grands orateurs et plus
grands poètes._"[3] The fight against this mathematical spirit in the
matters of art and feeling was still going on in France in the day of
the encyclopædists; the din of the battle was heard in Italy, as is
shown by the writings of Bettinelli and others. At the time when Du Bos
published his daring book there was a counsellor in the parliament of
Bordeaux, Jean-Jacques Bel by name, who composed a dissertation (1726)
against the doctrine that feeling should be the judge of art.[4]
[Sidenote: _Crousaz and André._]
Cartesianism was incapable of an Æsthetic of imagination. The _Traité
du beau_ by the eclectic Cartesian J. P. de Crousaz (1715), maintained
the dependence of beauty not upon pleasure or feeling, matters about
which there can be no difference of opinion, but upon that which can
be _approved_ and therefore reduced to ideas. He enumerates five such
ideas: variety, unity, regularity, order and proportion, observing,
"_La variété tempérée par l'unité, la régularité, l'ordre et la
proportion, ne sont pas assurément des chimères; elles ne sont pas
du ressort de la fantaisie, ce n'est pas le caprice qui en décide_":
for him, that is to say, they were real qualities of the beautiful
founded in nature and truth. He discovered similar characteristics of
the beautiful in the individual beauties of the sciences (geometry,
algebra, astronomy, physics, history), of virtue, eloquence and
religion, finding in each the qualities laid down above.[5] Another
Cartesian, the Jesuit André (1742),[6] distinguished between an
_essential_ beauty, independent of every institution, human and even
divine; a _natural_ beauty, independent of the opinions of mankind;
and, lastly, a beauty to a certain extent _arbitrary_ and of human
invention: the first composed of regularity, order, proportion and
symmetry (here André relied upon Plato and also as an afterthought
brought in St. Augustine's definition): the second having its principal
measure in the light which generates colours (as a good Cartesian,
he took full advantage of Newton's discoveries): the third belonging
to fashion and convention, but never at liberty to violate essential
beauty. Each of these three forms of beauty was subdivided into
_sensible_ beauty pertaining to bodies, and _intelligible_ beauty of
soul.
[Sidenote: _The English: Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the
Scottish School._]
Like Descartes in France, Locke in England (1690) is an
intellectualist, and recognizes no form of spiritual elaboration save
reflexion on the senses. None the less he takes over from contemporary
literature the distinction between wit and judgement; according to him
the former combines ideas with pleasing variety, discovering their
similarities and relations and thus grouping them into beautiful
pictures which divert and strike the imagination: the latter (judgement
or intellect) seeks dissimilarities, guided by the criterion of truth.
"The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the
agreeableness of the picture, and the gaiety of the fancy; and it is
a kind of an affront to go about to examine it by the severe rules of
truth and good reason; whereby it appears that it consists in something
that is not perfectly conformable to them."[7] England produced
philosophers who developed an abstract and transcendent Æsthetic,
but one more tinged with sensationalism than that of the French
Cartesians. Shaftesbury (1709) raises taste to a sense or instinct for
the beautiful; a sense of order and proportion identical with moral
sense and, with its preconceptions or presentations, anticipating the
recognition of reason. Bodies, spirits, God are the three degrees of
beauty.[8] Lineal descendant of Shaftesbury was Francis Hutcheson
(1723), who succeeded in popularizing the idea of an inward sense of
beauty as something intermediate between sense and reason, and adapted
to distinguish unity in variety, concord in the manifold, the true,
the beautiful and the good in their substantial identity. Hutcheson
maintains that from this sense springs the pleasure we take in art,
in imitation and in the likeness between copy and original: the last
a relative, as distinct from an absolute, beauty.[9] This view on the
whole predominated in England during the eighteenth century and was
adopted by Adam Smith as well as by Reid, head of the Scottish school.
[Sidenote: _Leibniz. Petites perceptions and confused knowledge._]
Much more thoroughly and with much greater philosophical vigour Leibniz
opened the door to that crowd of psychic facts from which Cartesianism
recoiled in horror. In his conception of the real, governed by the law
of continuity (_natura non facit saltus_), presenting an uninterrupted
scale of existence from the lowest beings to God, imagination, taste,
wit and the like found ample room for shelter. The facts now called
æsthetic were identified by Leibniz with Descartes' _confused_
cognition, which might be _clear_ without being _distinct_: scholastic
terms borrowed, it would appear, from Duns Scotus, whose works were
reprinted and widely read in the seventeenth century.[10]
In his _De cognitione, veritate et ideis_ (1684), after dividing
_cognitio_ into _obscura vel clara,_ the _clara_ into _confusa vel
distincta,_ and the _distincta_ into _adaequata vel inadaequata,_ Leibniz
remarks that while painters and other artists are able to judge works
of art very fairly they can give no reason for their decisions, and
if questioned as to the reason of their condemnation of any work
of art, they reply it lacks a _je ne sais quoi_: ("_at iudicii sui
rationem reddere saepe non posse, et quaerenti dicere, se in re, quae
displicet, desiderare nescio quid_").[11] They do possess, in fact,
clear cognition, but confused and not distinct; what we should call
to-day imaginative, not _ratiocinative,_ consciousness: and indeed the
latter does not exist in the case of art. There are things impossible
to define: "_on ne les fait connaître que par des exemples, et, au
reste, il faut dire que c'est un je ne sais quoi, jusqu'à ce qu'on
en déchiffre la contexture_."[12] But these _perceptions confuses
ou sentiments_ have "_plus grande efficacité que l'on ne pense: ce
sont elles qui forment ce je ne sais quoi, ces goûts, ces images
des qualités des sens._"[13] Whence it appears plainly that in his
discussion of these perceptions Leibniz reposes upon the æsthetic
theories we discussed in the preceding chapter; indeed at one point[14]
he mentions Bouhours' book.
[Sidenote: _Intellectualism of Leibniz_]
It might seem that by according _claritas_ and denying _distinctio_
to æsthetic facts Leibniz recognized that their peculiar character is
neither sensuous nor intellectual. He might seem to have distinguished
them by their "_claritas_" from pleasure or sense-motions, and from
intellect by their lack of "_distinctio._" But the "_lex continui_"
and the Leibnitian intellectualism forbid this interpretation. In this
case obscurity and clarity are quantitative degrees of one single
consciousness, distinct or intellectual, towards which both converge
and with which in the extreme case they unite.
To admit that artists judge with confused perceptions, clear but not
distinct, does not involve denying that these perceptions may be
capable of being connected and verified by intellectual consciousness.
The self-same object that is confusedly though clearly recognized by
imagination is recognized clearly and distinctly by the intellect;
which amounts to saying that a work of art may be perfected by being
determined by thought. In the very terminology adopted by Leibniz, who
represents sense and imagination as obscure and confused, there is a
tinge of contempt, as well as the suggestion of a single form of all
cognition. This will help us to understand Leibniz' definition of music
as "_exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi._"
Elsewhere he says: "_Le but principal de l'histoire, aussi bien que
de la poésie, doit être d'enseigner la prudence et la vertu par des
exemples, et puis de montrer le vice d'une manière qui en donne
l'aversion et qui porte ou serve à l'éviter._"[15]