certainly, to take account of aberrations from the truth, but only in
so far as they indicate the general trend of contemporary thought) with
the theories of such men as Krause, Trahndorff, Weisse, Deutinger,
Oersted, Zeising, Eckardt and the crowd of manipulators of manuals and
systems? The only one who obtained a hearing outside his native Germany
was Krause, who was imported into Spain; we are justified, therefore,
in leaving them to the memory or forgetfulness of their compatriots.
For Krause,[1] the humanitarian, the freethinker, the theosophist,
everything is organism, everything is beauty; beauty is organism, and
organism is beauty: Essence, that is to say God, is one, free and
entire; one, free and entire is Beauty. There is but one artist, God;
but one art, the divine. The beauty of finite things is the Divinity,
or rather the likeness of Divinity manifested in the finite. Beauty
brings into play reason, intellect and imagination in a mode conforming
to their laws, and awakens disinterested pleasure and inclination in
the soul. Trahndorff,[2] describing the various degrees by which the
individual seeks to grasp the essence or form of the universe (the
degrees of feeling, intuition, reflexion and presentiment), and noting
the insufficiency of simple theoretical knowledge till supplemented
by the Will, the Will which is power (_Können_), in its three degrees
of Aspiration, Faith and Love, places the Beautiful in the highest
grade, in Love: it would seem, therefore, that Beauty is Love which
comprehends itself. Christian Weisse[3] attempted, like Trahndorff, to
reconcile the God of Christianity with the Hegelian philosophy: in his
estimation the æsthetic Idea is superior to the logical, and leads to
religion, to God; the idea of beauty, existing outside the sensible
universe, is the reality of the concept of beauty, and, as the idea of
divinity is absolute Love, so must that of Beauty be found truly in
Love. The same reconciliation was attempted by the Catholic theologian
Deutinger;[4] beauty, for him, is born of power (_Können_), an activity
parallel with those of the knowledge of truth and the doing of good
but (differing in this from knowledge, which is receptive) realizing
itself in an outward movement from within, mastering the world of
matter and imprinting upon it the seal of personality. An internal
ideal intuition, the Idea: an external shapable matter: the power of
interpenetrating internal with external, invisible with visible, ideal
with real: such is Beauty. Oersted[5] (the celebrated Danish naturalist
whose works were translated into German and gained him a considerable
reputation in Germany) defines beauty as the objective Idea in the
moment of subjective contemplation: the Idea expressed in things in so
far as it reveals itself to intuition. Zeising[6] turned his attention
partly to exploration of the mysteries of the golden section, and
partly to speculations on Beauty, which he considered as one of the
three forms of the Idea; first, the Idea which expresses itself in
object and subject; secondly, the Idea as intuition; and thirdly, the
Absolute which appears in the world and is conceived intuitively by
the spirit. Eckardt,[7] intent on creating a theistic Æsthetic which
should avoid the one-sided transcendence of deism on the one hand and
the one-sided immanence of pantheism on the other, maintained that its
principles must be sought not in the feelings of the contemplator, not
in works of art, not in the idea of the beautiful, not in the concept
of art, but in the creative spirit of the artist, the original fount
of beauty; and since a creative artist cannot be conceived except as
derived from the highest creative genius which is God, Eckardt invokes
aid from a psychology of God (_eine Psychologie des Weltkünstlers_).
[Sidenote: _Fried. Theodor Vischer._]
If quantity is as important as quality, we must devote some space to
Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the bulkiest of all German æstheticians,
indeed the German æsthetician _par excellence_: after publishing a book
on _The Sublime and the Comic, a contribution to the Philosophy of
the Beautiful_,[8] in 1837, he produced four huge tomes on _Æsthetic
as Science of the Beautiful_ between 1846 and 1857,[9] where, in
hundreds of paragraphs and long observations and sub-observations, is
massed a stupendous amount of æsthetic material, of matter foreign to
Æsthetic, and of subjects taken haphazard from the whole thinkable
universe. Vischer's work is divided into three parts: a Metaphysic of
the Beautiful, which investigates the concept of Beauty in itself, no
matter where and how it is realized: a treatise on concrete Beauty,
which inquires into the two one-sided modes of realization, Beauty
of nature and Beauty of imagination, one lacking subjective, the
other lacking objective, existence: lastly, a theory of the arts,
which studies the synthesis in art of the two artistic moments, the
physical and psychical, the objective and subjective. It is easy to
sum up Vischer's concept of æsthetic activity; it is Hegel's concept,
debased. For Vischer, Beauty belongs neither to the theoretical nor to
the practical activity, but is placed in a serene sphere, superior to
these antitheses; that is to say in the sphere of absolute Spirit, in
company with Religion and Philosophy;[10] but, in contradistinction to
Hegel, Vischer assigns the first place in this sphere to Religion, the
second to Art, and the third to Philosophy. Much ingenuity was devoted
in those days to moving these words about like pieces on a chess-board;
it has been observed that of the six possible combinations of the
three terms Art, Religion and Philosophy, four were actually adopted:
by Schelling, _P.R.A._; by Hegel, _A.R.P._; by Weisse, _P.A.R._; and
by Vischer, _R.A.P_.[11] But Vischer himself[12] states that Wirth,
author of a _System of Ethics_,[13] opted for the fifth combination,
_R.P.A.,_ which leaves us but the sixth, _A.P.R.,_ unclaimed, unless
(as is not improbable) some unrecognized genius seized upon it and made
it the text of his system. Beauty, therefore, as the second form of
the absolute Spirit, is the realization of the Idea, not as abstract
concept but as union of concept and reality; and the Idea determines
itself as species (_Gattung_), and every idea of a species, even on the
lowest degree, is beautiful as being an integral part in the totality
of Ideas; although the higher the degree of the idea the greater is
its beauty.[14] Highest of all degrees is that of human personality:
"in this spiritual world the Idea attains its true significance; the
name of idea is given to the great moral motive powers to which the
concept of species may also be applied in the sense that they stand
to their restricted spheres in the same relation in which the genus
stands to its species and individuals." At the head of all is the Idea
of morality: "the world of moral and autonomous ends is destined to
furnish the most important, the most worthy content of the Beautiful";
with the warning, however, that Beauty, in actualizing this world
through intuition, excludes art having a moral tendency.[15] So Vischer
proceeds now to degrade Hegel's Idea to the simple class-concept,
now to couple it with the idea of the Good; now, in accord with the
teaching of his master, to make it different from, yet superior to,
intellect and morality.
[Sidenote: _Other tendencies._]
From the first, the Herbartian formalism was little studied and less
followed: two writers, Griepenkerl in 1827 and Bobrik in 1834, made
some attempt to develop and apply the cursory notes with which Herbart
contented himself.[16] Schleiermacher's lectures, even before their
appearance in book form, had served as basis for a series of elegant
dissertations by Erich Ritter (1840)[17] (better known as a historian
of philosophy); his work is of little value, for instead of dwelling
on the important points of the master's doctrine Ritter brings into
prominence secondary matters relating to sociability and the æsthetic
fife. A penetrating critic of German Æsthetic from Baumgarten to the
post-Kantian school was Wilhelm Theodor Danzel, who lived about this
time and very properly rebelled against the claim to find "thought" in
works of art: "Artistic thought:" he writes; "unhappy phrase, which
helped to condemn an entire epoch to the Sisyphean labour of trying to
reduce art to intellectual and rational thinking! The thought of a
work of art is nothing save that which is contemplated in a definite
way; it is not represented, as is commonly asserted, in a work of art,
it is the work of art itself. Artistic thought can never be expressed
by concepts and words."[18] By his early death Danzel ended the hopes
he raised by his original views on the science and history of Æsthetic.
[Sidenote: _Theory of the Beautiful in nature, and that of the
Modifications of Beauty._]
The post-Hegelian metaphysical Æsthetic is chiefly noteworthy for
the fuller development of two theories or, to speak more accurately,
of two very curious combinations of arbitrary assertion and fanciful
caprice: the so-called theory of Natural Beauty, and the theory of
Modifications of the Beautiful. Neither of the two had any intimate
or necessary connexion with this philosophical movement, to which
they are rather linked by historical or psychological causes; by the
relationship between facts of pleasure and pain and the inclination
towards mysticism; by the confusion arising from the really æsthetic
(imaginative) quality of some representations wrongly described as
observation of natural beauties; or by the scholastic and literary
tradition of discussing these cases of pleasure and pain and
extra-æsthetic natural beauties in books devoted to the discussion
of art.[19] These metaphysicians were sometimes rather grotesque
and remind one of the story told of Paisiello, that in the fury of
composition he set even the stage directions of his libretto to music;
bitten with the rage for construction and dialectic, they did not spare
even the indexes of chaotic old books, but seized on them as suitable
material for a dialectical exercise.
[Sidenote: _Development of the first theory. Herder._]
Beginning with the theory of Natural Beauty, observations on beautiful
natural objects are found among the inquiries of the ancient
philosophers on beauty, and especially among the mystical effusions
of neo-Platonists and their followers in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance.[20] Less frequently such questions were introduced into
treatises on Poetics: Tesauro (1654) is among the first who, in his
_Cannochiale aristotelico,_ discusses not only the conceits of men, but
also of God, the angels, nature and animals; and somewhat later (1707)
Muratori speaks of "the beauty of matter," of which examples are "the
gods, a flower, the sun, a rivulet."[21] Observations on that which
is outside art and is merely natural, are made by Crousaz, by André,
and especially by those authors of the eighteenth century who wrote
on Beauty and Art in an empirical and gallant style.[22] It was the
influence of these persons that led Kant, as we have seen, to sever the
theory of beauty from that of art, specially connecting free beauty
with objects of nature and those productions of man which reproduce
natural beauties.[23] When the adversary of Kant's theory of Æsthetic,
Herder (1800), in his sketch of an ethical system united spirit and
nature, pleasure and value, feeling and intellect, he inevitably made
much of natural beauty, and affirmed that everything in nature has its
own beauty, the expression of its own greatest content, and that this
accounts for the ascending scale of beautiful objects: beginning with.
outlines, colours and tones, light and sound, and proceeding by way of
flowers, water and sea, to birds, terrestrial animals, and man himself.
For instance "a bird is the sum of the properties and perfections of
its element, a representation of its potency, a creature of light, song
and air"; amongst terrestrial animals, the ugliest are those resembling
man, as the melancholy moping monkey; the most beautiful, those of
perfect build, well proportioned, noble, free in action; those which
express sweetness; those, in fine, which live in harmony and happiness,
endowed with a perfection of their own, harmless to man.[24]
[Sidenote: _Schelling, Solger, Hegel._]
Schelling, on the contrary, utterly, denies the concept of beauty
in nature, and considers that such beauty is purely accidental and
that art alone supplies the norm by which it can be discovered and
judged.[25] Solger also excludes natural beauty;[26] so does Hegel,
who distinguishes himself not by denying it but by proceeding with
the utmost inconsequence to deal at length with the beautiful in
nature. It is in fact not clear whether he means that really no beauty
exists in nature and that man introduces it in his vision of things,
or whether natural beauty really exists though inferior in degree
to the beauty of art. "The beauty of art," he says," stands higher
than that of nature; it is beauty born and reborn by the work of the
spirit, and spirit alone is truth and reality; hence beauty is truly
beauty only when it participates in spirit and is produced therefrom.
Taken in this sense, the beauty of nature appears as a mere reflexion
of the beauty appertaining to spirit, as an imperfect and incomplete
mode, which substantially is contained within the spirit itself." In
confirmation, he adds that nobody has attempted a systematic exposition
of natural beauties, whereas there actually is, from the point of view
of the utility of natural objects, a _materia medica_[27] But the
second chapter of the first part of his Æsthetic is devoted precisely
to natural Beauty on the ground that, in order to grasp the idea of
artistic beauty in its entirety, three stages must be traversed: beauty
in general, natural beauty (whose defects show the necessity for art),
and, lastly, the Idea; "the first existence of the Idea is nature,
and its first beauty is natural beauty." This beauty, which is beauty
for us and not for itself, has several phases, from that in which the
concept is immersed in matter to the point of disappearing, such as
physical facts and isolated mechanisms, to that higher phase in which
physical facts are united in systems (_e.g._ the solar system); but
the Idea first reaches a true and real existence in organic facts, in
the living creature. And even the living creature is liable to the
distinction between beautiful and ugly; for example, among animals,
the sloth, trailing itself laboriously and incapable of animation or
activity, displeases us by its apathetic somnolence; nor can beauty be
found in amphibians or in many kinds of fish, or in crocodiles, or
toads, as well as in many insects and especially in those equivocal
creatures which express a transition from one i class to another, such
as the ornithorhyncus, a mixture of bird and beast.[28] These samples
may suffice to show the general trend of Hegel's doctrine of natural
beauty; elsewhere he discusses the external beauty of abstract form,
regularity, symmetry, harmony, etc., which are; precisely the concepts
which the formalism of Herbart placed in the heaven of the Ideas of the
Beautiful.
[Sidenote: _Schleiermacher._]
Schleiermacher, who praised Hegel for his attempt to exclude natural
beauty from his Æsthetic, excluded it from his own not verbally but
actually, by confining his attention to the artistic perfection of
the internal image formed by the energy of the human spirit.[29] But
the so-called Feeling for Nature which came in with Romanticism, and
the _Cosmos_ and other descriptive works of Humboldt,[30] directed
attention increasingly to the impressions awakened by natural facts.
[Sidenote: _Alexander Humboldt._]
This led to the compilation of those systematic lists of natural
beauties whose impossibility had been proclaimed by Hegel, though he
himself had furnished an example of them; amongst others, Bratranek
published an _Æsthetic of the Vegetable World._[31]
[Sidenote: _Vischer's "Æsthetic Physics."_]
The best-known and most widely circulated treatment of the subject was
contained in this very work of Vischer's; who following Hegel's example
devoted a section of his _Æsthetic,_ as we have seen, to the objective
existence of Beauty, _i.e._ to the Beauty of nature, and entitled it by
the perhaps new and certainly characteristic name of Æsthetic Physics
(_ästhetische Physik_). This Æsthetic Physics comprised the beauty of
inorganic nature (light, heat, air, water, earth); organic nature, with
its four vegetable types and its animals vertebrate and invertebrate;
and beauty of human beings, divided into generic and historic. The
generic was subdivided into sections on the beauty of general forms
(age, sex, conditions, love, marriage, family); of special forms
(races, peoples, culture, political life); and of individual forms
(temperament and character). Historical beauty included that of
ancient history (Oriental, Greek, Roman), of Mediæval or Germanic, and
of modern times; because, according to Vischer, it was the duty of
Æsthetic to cast a glance over universal history before summing up the
different degrees of the beautiful according to the varying phases of
the struggle for freedom against nature.[32]
[Sidenote: _The Theory of the Modifications of Beauty. From antiquity
to the eighteenth century._]
As regards the Modifications of Beauty, it should be remembered that
the ancient manuals of Poetics, and more frequently those of Rhetoric,
contained more or less scientific definitions of psychological states
and facts; Aristotle attempted in his _Poetics_ to determine the nature
of a tragic action or personality, and sketched a definition of the
comic; in his Rhetoric he writes at considerable length of wit;[33]
sections of the _De oratore_ of Cicero and the _Institutions_ of
Quintilian[34] are devoted to wit and the comic; the lofty style was
the subject of a lost treatise of Cæcilius, which anticipated that
attributed to Longinus, whose title was translated in modern times
as _De sublimitate_ or _On the Sublime._ Following the example of
the ancients, this kind of medley was perpetuated by writers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; whole treatises on the comic are
incorporated in, for instance, the _Argutezza_ of Matteo Pellegrini
(1639) and the _Cannochiale_ of Tesauro. La Bruyère treated of the
sublime[35] and Boileau by his translation gave a fresh vogue to
Longinus: the following century saw Burke inquiring into the origin
of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, and deriving the
former from the instinct for sociability, the latter from that of
self-preservation; he also tried to define ugliness, grace, elegance
and extraordinary beauty; Home, in his celebrated _Elements of
Criticism,_ discussed grandeur, sublimity, the ridiculous, wit,
dignity and grace: Mendelssohn discussed sublimity, dignity and
grace in fine art, and described some of these facts as due to mixed
feelings, in which he was followed by Lessing[36] and others: Sulzer
welcomed all these various concepts into his æsthetic encyclopædia
and collected round them an elaborate bibliography. A new and curious
meaning of the word humour reached the continent from England at this
time. Its original meaning was simply "temperament," and sometimes
"spirit," or "wit" ("_belli umori_" in Italy; in the seventeenth
century there was in Rome an Academy of _Umoristi_). Voltaire
introduced it into France and wrote in 1761, "_Les Anglais ont un terme
pour signifier cette plaisanterie, ce vrai comique, cette gaieté, cette
urbanité, ces saillies, qui échappent à un homme sans qu'il s'en doute;
et ils rendent cette idée par le mot_ humour ...";[37] in 1767 Lessing
distinguishes humour from the German _Laune_ (caprice, whim),[38] a
distinction maintained by Herder in 1769 in opposition to Riedel who
had confused the terms.[39]
[Sidenote: _Kant and the post-Kantians._]
Accustomed to find all these subjects treated in the same book,
philosophers at first theorized about them all without attempting to
link them up together by introducing an artificial logical connexion.
Kant, who had already in imitation of Burke written in 1764 a
dissertation on the beautiful and the sublime, ingenuously remarked
in the course of his lectures on Logic in 1771 that the beautiful and
the æsthetic are not identical, because "the sublime also belongs to
Æsthetic";[40] and in his _Critique of Judgment,_ while treating of
the comic in a mere digression (a magnificent piece of psychological
analysis)[41] places side by side with and as if on an equality with
the "Analytic of Beauty," an "Analytic of the Sublime."[42] We may
note in passing that, before the publication of the third Critique,
Heydenreich arrived at the same doctrine of the sublime which is
contained in Kant's book.[43] Did Kant ever think of uniting the
beautiful and the sublime and deducing them from a single concept?
Apparently not. By his declaration that the principle of beauty must
be sought outside ourselves, and that of the sublime within us, he
tacitly assumes that the two objects are wholly disparate. In 1805 Ast,
a follower of Schelling, declared the necessity of overcoming what he
called the Kantian dualism of the beautiful and the sublime:[44] others
reproached Kant with having treated the comic by the psychological, not
the metaphysical, method. Schiller wrote a series of dissertations on
the tragic, the sentimental, the ingenuous, the sublime, the pathetic,
the trivial, the low, the dignified and the graceful, and their
varieties, the fascinating, the majestic, the grave, and the solemn.
Another artist, Jean Paul Richter, discoursed at great length on wit
and humour, described by him as the romantic comic, or the sublime
reversed (_umgekehrte Erhabene)_.[45]
Herbart, in virtue of his formalistic principle, asserts that all
these concepts are irrelevant to Æsthetic; he attributes them to the
work of art, not to pure beauty;[46] Schleiermacher comes to the same
conclusion, but for much better reasons, as a result of his sane
conception of art. Amongst other things he observes: "It is usual
to describe the beautiful and the sublime as two kinds of artistic
perfection; and so accustomed have we grown to the union of these
two concepts that we must make an effort to convince ourselves how
very far they are from being co-ordinate or from together exhausting
the concept of artistic perfection"; he regrets that even the best
æstheticians should give rhetorical descriptions of them instead of
demonstrating them. "The thing," says he, "is not right and just" (_hat
keine Richtigkeit_), and he proceeds to exclude the whole subject from
his Æsthetic,[47] as he had done previously in the case of natural
beauty. Other philosophers, however, clung persistently to their search
for a connexion between these various concepts, and called in dialectic
to help them. The habit of applying dialectic to empirical concepts
affected everybody at that time; even the great enemy of dialectic,
Herbart, showed the cloven hoof, when in order to explain the union of
different æsthetic ideas in the beautiful he appealed to the formula
"they lose regularity in order to regain it."[48] Schelling asserted
that the sublime is the infinite in the finite, and the beautiful the
finite in the infinite, adding that the absolutely sublime includes the
beautiful, and the beautiful the sublime;[49] and Ast, whom we have
mentioned already, spoke of a masculine, positive element, which is the
sublime, and a feminine, negative element which is the graceful and
pleasing: between which there is a contrast and a struggle.
[Sidenote: _Culmination of the development._]
These exercises in dialectical system-building developed and increased
till about the middle of the nineteenth century they assumed two
distinct forms whose history must here be shortly outlined.
[Sidenote: _Double form of the theory. The overcoming of the ugly.
Solger, Weisse and others._]