conceives the comic, the sublime, the tragic, the humorous, and so
forth, as so many engagements in the war between the Ugly and the
Beautiful, wherein the latter was invariably victorious, and arose by
means of this war to more and more lofty and complex manifestations.
The second form of the theory may be described as the Passage from
Abstract to Concrete; it held that Beauty cannot emerge from the
abstract, cannot become this or that concrete beauty, except by
particularizing itself in the comic, tragic, sublime, humorous, or
some other modification. The first form was already well developed in
Solgei, an adherent of the romantic theory of Irony: but historically
it presupposes the æsthetic theory of the Ugly, first sketched by
Friedrich Schlegel in 1797. We have already noted that Schlegel
considered the characteristic or interesting, not the beautiful, to
be the principle of modern art; hence the importance attached by him
to the piquant, the striking (_frappant_), the daring, the cruel, the
ugly.[50] Solger found here the basis for his dialectic; amongst other
things he maintains that the finite, earthly element may be dissolved
and absorbed in the divine, which constitutes the tragic: or else the
divine element may be entirely corrupted by the earthly, producing the
comic.[51] These methods of Solger were followed by Weisse (1830), and
by Ruge (1837); for the former, ugliness is "the immediate existence of
beauty" which is overcome in the sublime and the comic; for the latter,
the effort to achieve the Idea, or the Idea searching for itself,
generates the sublime; when the Idea loses instead of discovering
itself, ugliness is produced; when the Idea rediscovers itself and
rises out of ugliness to new life, the comic.[52] A whole treatise
entitled _The Æsthetic of the Ugly_[53] was published by Rosenkranz in
1853, presenting this concept as intermediate between the beautiful
and the comic, and tracing it from its first origin to that "sort
of perfection" it attains in the satanic. Passing from the common
(_Gemeine)_ which is the petty, the weak, the low, and the sub-species
of the low, viz. the usual, the casual, the arbitrary and the crude,
Rosenkranz goes on to describe the repugnant, trisected into the
awkward, the dead and empty, and the horrible: thus he proceeds from
tripartition to tripartition, dividing the horrible into the absurd,
the nauseating and the wicked: the wicked into criminal, spectral and
diabolical: the diabolical into demoniac, magical and satanic. He
opposes the childish notion that ugliness acts as a foil to beauty
in art, and justifies its introduction by the necessity for art to
represent the entire appearance of the Idea; on the other hand he
admits that the ugly is not on the same level as the beautiful, for,
if the beautiful can stand by itself alone, the other cannot do so and
must always be reflected by and in the beautiful.[54]
[Sidenote: _Passage from abstract to concrete: Vischer._]
The second form prevailed with Vischer. The following extract will
serve as an illustration of his manner: "The Idea arouses itself from
the tranquil unity in which it was fused with the appearance and
pushes onward, affirming, in face of its own finitude, its infinity";
this rebellion and transcendence is the sublime. "But Beauty demands
full satisfaction for this disruption of its harmony: the violated
right of the image must be reasserted: this can be accomplished only
by means of a fresh contradiction, that is to say by the negative
position now taken up by the image towards the Idea by rejecting all
interpenetration with it and by affirming its own separate existence
as the whole"; this second moment is the comic, negation of a
negation.[55] The same process is further enriched and complicated by
Zeising, who compares the modifications of Beauty to the refraction of
colours: the three primary modifications, the sublime, the attractive
and the humorous, correspond with the primary colours violet, orange
and green; the three secondary, pure beauty, comic and tragic, to
the colours red, yellow and blue. Each of these six modifications
(exactly like the degrees of the Ugly in Rosenkranz) branches out, like
fireworks, into three rays: pure beauty into the decorous, noble and
pleasing: the attractive into graceful, interesting and piquant: the
comic into buffoonery, the diverting and burlesque: the humorous into
the quaint, capricious and melancholy: the tragic into the moving,
pathetic and demoniac: the sublime into the glorious, majestic and
imposing.[56]
[Sidenote: _The Legend of Sir Purebeauty._]
All the works of this period on Æsthetic are filled in this way
with the _gest, chanson_ or romaunt of the knight Sir Purebeauty
(_Reinschon)_ and his extraordinary adventures, recounted in two
conflicting versions. According to one story, Sir Purebeauty is
constrained to abandon his beloved leisure by the Mephistophelean
devices of the temptress Ugliness, who leads him into countless
dangers from which he invariably emerges victorious; his victories and
successes (his Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena) are called the Sublime,
the Comic, the Humorous and so forth. The other story tells how the
knight, bored by his life of loneliness, sallies forth purposely to
seek adversaries and occasions for fighting; he is always vanquished,
but even in his overthrow _ferum victorem capit,_ he transforms
and irradiates the enemy. Beyond this artificial mythology, this
legend composed without the least imagination or literary skill,
this miserably dull tale, it is vain to look for anything whatever
in the much elaborated theory of German æstheticians known as the
Modifications of Beauty.
[1] _Abriss der Ästhetik,_ post. 1837; _Vorlesung üb. Ästh._
(1828-1829), post. 1882.
[2] _Ästhetik,_ Berlin, 1827.
[3] _Ästhetik,_ Leipzig, 1830; _System d. Ästh.,_ lectures, post.
Leipzig, 1872.
[4] _Kunstlehre,_ Ratisbon, 1845-1846 (_Grundlinien einer positiven
Philosophie,_ vols. iv. v.).
[5] _Der Geist in der Natur,_ 1850-1851; _Neue Beitrage z. d. Geist i.
d. Natur,_ post. 1855.
[6] _Ästhetische Forschungen,_ Frankfurt a. M. 1855.
[7] _Die theistische Begründung d. Ästhetik im Gegensatz z. d.
pantheistichen,_ Jena, 1857; same author, _Vorschule d. Ästh.,_
Karlsruhe, 1864-1865.
[8] _Üb. d. Erhabene u. Komische,_ Stuttgart, 1837.
[9] _Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft d. Schönen,_ Reutlingen, Leipzig and
Stuttgart, 1846-1857, 3 parts in 4 vols.
[10] _Ästh._ introd. §§ 2-5.
[11] Hartmann, _Dtsch. Ästh. s. Kant,_ p. 217, note.
[12] _Ästh._ introd. § 5.
[13] _System der spekulativen Ethik,_ Heilbronn, 1841-1842.
[14] _Ästh._ §§ 15-17.
[15] _Op. cit._ §§ 19-24.
[16] Griepenkerl, _Lehrb. d. Ästh.,_ Brunswick, 1827. Bobrik, _Freie
Verträge üb. Ästh.,_ Zürich, 1834.
[17] _Üb. d. Principien d. Ästh.,_ Kiel, 1840.
[18] _Ges. Aufs._ pp. 216-221.
[19] See above, pp. 87-93.
[20] See above, pp. 179-180.
[21] _Cannochiale arist._ ch. 3: _Perfetta poesia,_ bk. I. chs. 6, 8.
[22] See above, pp. 205-206, 258-261.
[23] See above, pp. 275-277.
[24] _Kaligone, op. cit._ pp. 55-90.
[25] _System d. transcend. Ideal,_ part vi. § 2.
[26] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ p. 4.
[27] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ I. pp. 4-5.
[28] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ I. pp. 148-180.
[29] _Op. cit._ introd.
[30] _Ansichten der Natur,_ 1088; _Kosmos,_ 1845-1858.
[31] _Ästhetik. Pflanzenwelt,_ Leipzig, 1853.
[32] _Ästh._ § 341.
[33] _Poet._ 5. 13-14; _Rhet._ iii. 10, 18.
[34] _De orat._ ii. 54-71; _Inst. orat._ vi. 3.
[35] _Caractères,_ I.
[36] _Hamb. Dramat._ Nos. 74-75.
[37] Letter to abbé d'Olivet, August 20, 1761.
[38] _Hamb. Dramat._ No. 93; in _Werke, ed. cit._ xii. pp. 170-171,
note.
[39] _Kritische Wälder,_ in _Werke, ed. cit._ iv. pp. 182-186.
[40] Schlapp, _op. cit._ p. 55.
[41] _Kr. d. Urth., Anmerkung,_ § 54.
[42] _Op. cit._ bk. ii. §§ 23-29.
[43] _System d. Ästh._ introd. p. xxxvi _n._
[44] _System der Kunstlehre:_ cf. Hartmann, _op. cit._ p. 387.
[45] _Vorschule d. Ästh._ chs. 6-9.
[46] See above, pp. 309-310.
[47] _Vorles. üb. Ästh._ p. 240 _seqq._
[48] Cf. Zimmermann, _G. d. Ästh._ p. 788.
[49] _Philos, d. Kunst,_ §§ 65-66.
[50] Cf. Hartmann, _Deutsch. Ästh. s. Kant,_ pp. 363-364.
[51] _Vorles üb. Ästh._ p. 85.
[52] _Neue Vorschule d. Ästh._ Halle, 1837.
[53] K. Rosenkranz, _Ästhetik des Hässlichen,_ Kœnigsberg, 1853.
[54] _Ästh. d. Hässl._ pp. 36-40.
[55] _Ästh._ §§ 83-84, 154-155.
[56] _Ästh. Forsch._ p. 413.
XIV
ÆSTHETIC IN FRANCE, ENGLAND AND ITALY DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: _Æsthetic movement in France: Cousin, Jouffroy._]
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of
the nineteenth century German thought, notwithstanding the glaring
errors which vitiated it, and were soon to bring about a violent and
indeed exaggerated reaction, must on the whole be awarded the foremost
place in the general history of European thought as well as in the
individual study of Æsthetic, the contemporary philosophy of other
countries standing on an inferior level of the second and third degree.
France still lay under the dominion of the sensationalism of Condillac
and, at the opening of the century, was quite incapable of grasping
the spiritual activity of art. A faint gleam of Winckelmann's abstract
spiritualism just appears in the theories of Quatremère de Quincy, who,
in criticism of Émeric-David (in his turn a critic of ideal beauty and
an adherent of the imitation of nature),[1] maintained that the arts
of design have pure beauty, devoid of individual character, as their
objective; they depict man and not; men.[2] Some sensationalists, such
as Bonstetten, vainly endeavoured to trace the peculiar processes
of imagination in life and in art.[3] Followers of the orthodox
spiritualism of the French universities date the beginning of a new
era, and the foundation of Æsthetic in France, to 1818, the year when
Victor Cousin first delivered at the Sorbonne his lectures on the
True, the Beautiful and the Good, which later formed his book with the
same name, frequently reprinted.[4] These lectures of Cousin are but
poor stuff, although some scraps of Kant are to be found in them here
and there; he denies the identity of the beautiful with the pleasant
or useful, and substitutes the affirmation of a threefold beauty,
physical, intellectual and moral, the last being the true ideal beauty,
having its foundations in God; he says that art expresses ideal Beauty,
the infinite, God, that genius is the power of creation, and that taste
is a mixture of fancy, sentiment and reason.[5] Academic phrases all
of them; pompous and void and, for that very reason, well received. Of
much greater value were the lectures on Æsthetic delivered by Théodore
Jouffroy in 1822, before a small audience, and published posthumously
in 1843.[6] Jouffroy allowed a beauty of expression, to be found alike
in art and nature: a beauty of imitation, consisting in the perfect
accuracy with which a model is reproduced: a beauty of idealisation,
which reproduces the model, accentuating a particular quality in
order to give it greater significance: and, finally, a beauty of the
invisible or of content, reducible to force (physical, sensible,
intellectual, moral), which, as force, awakens sympathy. Ugliness is
the negation of this sympathetic beauty; its species or modifications
are the sublime and the graceful. One sees that Jouffroy did not
succeed in isolating the strictly æsthetic fact in his analysis and
gave, instead of a scientific system, little beyond explanations of the
use of words. He could not see or understand that expression, imitation
and idealization are identical with each other and with artistic
activity. Moreover he had many curious ideas, chiefly concerning
expression. He said that if we were to see a drunkard with all the
most disgusting symptoms of intoxication on a road where there was also
an unhewn rock, we should be pleased by the drunken man, since he had
expression, and not by the rock, since it had none. Beside Jouffroy,
whose theories, crude and immature though they be, reveal an inquiring
mind, it is hardly worth while to cite Lamennais,[7] who like Cousin
regarded art as the manifestation of the infinite through the finite,
of the absolute through the relative. French Romanticism in de Bonald,
de Barante and Mme. de Staël had defined literature as "the expression
of society," had honoured, under German influence, the characteristic
and the grotesque,[8] and had proclaimed the independence of art by
means of the formula "art for art's sake"; but these vague affirmations
or aphorisms did not supersede, philosophically speaking, the old
doctrine of the "imitation of nature."
[Sidenote: _English Æsthetic._]
In England associationistic psychology still flourished (and has
continued to flourish uninterruptedly), unable to emancipate itself
wholly from sensationalism or to understand imagination. Dugald
Stewart[9] had recourse to the wretched expedient of establishing
two forms of association: one of accidental associations, the other
of associations innate in human nature and therefore common to all
mankind. England did not escape German influence, as appears, for
example, in Coleridge, to whom we owe a saner concept of poetry and
the difference between it and science[10] (in collaboration with
the poet Wordsworth), and in Carlyle, who placed intellect lower
than imagination, "organ of the Divine." The most noteworthy English
æsthetic essay of this period is the _Defence of Poetry_ by Shelley
(1821),[11] containing profound, if not very systematic, views on the
distinctions between reason and imagination, prose and poetry; on
primitive language and the faculty of poetic objectification which
enshrines and preserves "the record of the best and happiest moments of
the happiest and best minds."
[Sidenote: _Italian Æsthetic._]
In Italy, where neither Parini nor Foscolo[12] had been able to shake
off the fetters of the old doctrines (although the latter, in his later
writings, was in several ways an innovator in literary criticism), many
treatises and essays on Æsthetic were published during the earlier
decades of the century, the greater part showing the influence of
Condillac's sensationalism, which had a great vogue in Italy. Such
authors as Delfico, Malaspina, Cicognara, Talia, Pasquali, Visconti
and Bonacci belong more exclusively to the special, or rather, the
anecdotal, history of Italian philosophy. Now and then, however,
one comes across remarks that are not wholly contemptible, as in
Melchiorre Delfico (1818) who, after wandering aimlessly hither and
thither, fixes on the principle of expression, observing, "If it
were possible to establish that expression is always an element in
the beautiful, it would be a legitimate inference to regard it as
the real characteristic of beauty, _i.e._ a condition without which
the beautiful could not exist, and the pleasing modification which
arouses the sentiment of beauty could not take place in us"; he tries
to develop this principle by asserting that all other characters
(order, harmony, proportion, symmetry, simplicity, unity and variety)
have significance only by their subordination to the principle of
expression.[13] In opposition to Malaspina's definition of beauty
as "pleasure born of a representation"; and in opposition to the
then fashionable threefold division of beauty into sensible, moral
and intellectual, a critic of Malaspina observed that if beauty be
representation, it is inconceivable that there should be intellectual
beauty, which would be intelligible but not presentable.[14] Nor must
Pasquale Balestrieri be forgotten; he was a student of medicine who
in 1847 tried to construct an Æsthetic of an exact or mathematical
kind, with neither better nor worse result than many famous authors in
other countries. He noticed, while turning his algebraical expressions
into numerals, that such general formulæ "fulfil their object with an
infinite number of systems of different ciphers"; and that in art there
is an element "not arbitrary, but unknown."[15] Works by German authors
were frequently translated at this time, some of them, for example
the writings of the two Schlegels, being reprinted several times; the
_Æsthetic_ of Bouterweck, deriving from Kant and Schiller,[16] was read
and discussed; Colecchi gave an excellent statement of the æsthetic
doctrines of Kant;[17] and in 1831 a certain Lichtenthal adapted the
_Æsthetic_ of Franz Ficker[18] to the use of Italian readers; later the
same book was fully translated by another hand; some of Schelling's
writings were translated, _e.g._ his discourses on the relation between
figurative art and nature.
[Sidenote: _Rosmini and Gioberti._]
It must be admitted that in Italy Æsthetic received but inadequate
treatment in the revival of philosophical speculation effected by
the work of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. It is treated in a
merely incidental and popular manner by the first named.[19] Rosmini
devotes a section of his philosophical system to the deontological
sciences, which "treat of the perfection of being, and the method of
acquiring or producing such perfection or losing it"; among these
sciences is that of "beauty in the universal" under the name of
Callology, of which a special part is Æsthetic, the science of "beauty
in the sensible," establishing the "archetypes of beings."[20] In
his longest literary work, considered by him as his Æsthetic,[21]
his essay on _The Idyl_,[22] Rosmini declares the aim of art to be
neither imitation of nature nor direct intuition of the archetypes,
but the reduction of natural things to their archetypes, which are
arranged in a hierarchy of three ideals, natural, intellectual and
moral. Gioberti[23] is clearly under the influence of German idealism,
especially of Schelling's; for him the beautiful is "the individual
union of an intelligible type with an imaginative element called into
being by fancy"; the phantasm gives material, while the intelligible
type (concept) gives form, in the Aristotelian sense,[24] and since the
ideal element predominates over the sensible or fantastic, art is a
propædeutic to the true and the good. Gioberti is of opinion that Hegel
was wrong in detaching natural beauty from Æsthetic, for perfect beauty
of nature is "the full correspondence of sensible reality with the Idea
which informs and represents it," and as such "makes its appearance
in the sensible universe during the second period of the primordial
age described in detail by Moses in the six days of creation"; it is
only through original sin that imperfection and ugliness arose in
nature.[25] Art is nothing but a supplement to natural beauty, whose
decadence it presupposes, and thus art is at once record and prophecy,
referring to the first and last ages of the world. The Last Judgement
will reintroduce perfect beauty: "organic restitution, by empowering
the faculties to contemplate the intelligible in the sensible, and by
refining their capabilities, will greatly intensify and purify æsthetic
enjoyment. The contemplation of perfect beauty will be the beatitude of
imagination, of which Christ gave an ineffable foretaste by appearing
to his disciples visibly transfigured and shining with celestial
radiance."[26] Gioberti agrees with Schelling's division of art into
pagan and Christian, a "heterodox beauty" (Oriental and Græco-Italian
art), imperfect when compared with "orthodox beauty"; and between the
two, a "semi-orthodox" beauty,[27] transitional to Christian art; he
also attempted a doctrine of modifications of the beautiful, wherein he
held the sublime to be creator of the beautiful. Beauty is the relative
intelligibility of created things apprehended by fancy: the sublime
is the absolute intelligibility of time, space and infinite power as
presented to itself by the faculty of imagination: "The ideal formula:
the Being creates the Existing, translated into æsthetic language,
gives the following formula: by means of the dynamical sublime Being
creates the beautiful; and by means of the mathematical sublime
contains it: this shows the ontological and psychological connexions of
Æsthetic in First Science." Ugliness enters into the beautiful either
as relief and counterpoise, or to open a way to the comic, or to depict
the struggle between good and evil. The Christian ideal of artistic
beauty is the figure of the God-Man, absolute union of the two forms
of beauty, the sublime and the beautiful, a transfigured and divinely
illuminated expression of man.[28] However carefully we sift the
thoughts of Gioberti from their mythological Judaico-Christian husk, we
find nothing of the least value to science.
[Sidenote: _Italian Romantics. Dependence of Art._]
On the other hand, if Italian literature of the day chose to revive
and refurbish certain antiquated critical ideas, a much wider field
was opened by social and political upheavals which tended to make
use of literature as a practical instrument for spreading abroad the
truths of history, science, religion and morality. In 1816 Giovanni
Berchet wrote that "poetry ... is intended to improve the habits of
man and satisfy the cravings of his imagination and heart, since the
tendency towards poetry, like every other desire, awakens in us moral
needs";[29] and Ermes Visconti in his _Conciliatore_ of 1818 says that
æsthetic aims must be subordinated "to the improvement of mankind and
public and private weal, the eminent aim of all studies." Manzoni,
who subsequently took to philosophizing on art on the principles of
Rosmini, declared in his letter on Romanticism (1823) that "poetry
or literature in general should have utility as its objective, truth
as its subject and interest as its means";[30] and though noticing
the vagueness of the concept of truth in poetry, he inclined always
(as is seen also in his discourse on the historical novel) to its
identification with historical and scientific truth.[31] Pietro
Maroncelli proposed as a substitute for the classic formula of art,
"founded on imitation of the real and having pleasure as its object,"
a formula of art as "founded on inspiration, having the beautiful as
means and good as end"; this doctrine he baptized "cormentalism,"
contrasting it with the doctrine of art for art's sake found in the
writings of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Victor Hugo.[32] Tommaseo
defined beauty as "the union of many truths in one concept" effected
by the power of feeling.[33] Giuseppe Mazzini, too, always conceived
literature as the mediator of the universal idea or intellectual
concept.[34] Attempting to restore serious content to a literature
grown weak and frivolous, the Italian Romantics found themselves forced
on the theoretical side, by a natural reaction, into constant and
perpetual opposition to every tendency of thought likely to affirm the
independence of art.
[1] Émeric-David, _Recherches sur l'art du statuaire chez les anciens,_
Paris, 1805 (Ital. trans., Florence, 1857).
[2] Quatremère de Quincy, _Essai sur l'imitation dans les beaux arts,_
1823.
[3] _Recherches sur la nature et les lois de l'imagination,_ 1807.
[4] _Du vrai, du beau et du bien,_ 1818, many lines revised (23rd ed.
Paris, 1881).
[5] _Op. cit._ lectures 6-8.
[6] _Cours d' esthétique,_ ed. Damiron, Paris, 1843.
[7] _De l'art et du beau,_ 1843-1846.
[8] Victor Hugo, Preface to _Cromwell,_ 1827.
[9] Dugald Stewart, _Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind,_
1837.
[10] Gayley-Scott, _An Introd._ pp. 305-306.
[11] P. B. Shelley, _A Defence of Poetry_ (in _Works,_ London, 1880,
vol. vii.)
[12] Parini, _Principi delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti,_
from 1773 onward; Foscolo, _Dell' origine e dell' uffizio della
letteratura,_ 1809, and _Saggi di critica,_ composed in England.
[13] M. Delfico, _Nuove ricerche sul bello,_ Naples, 1818, ch. 9.
[14] Malaspina, _Delle leggi del bello,_ Milan, 1828, pp. 26, 233.
[15] P. Balestrieri, _Fondamenti di estetica,_ Naples, 1847.
[16] Friedrich Bouterweck, _Ästhetik,_ 1806, 1815 (3rd ed., Göttingen,
1824-1825).
[17] O. Colecchi, _Questions filosofiche,_ vol. iii., Naples, 1843.
[18] P. Lichtenthal, _Estetica ossia dottrina del bello e delle arti
belle,_ Milan, 1831.
[19] _Elementi di filosofia_ (5th ed., Naples, 1846), vol. ii. pp.
427-476.
[20] _Sistema filosofico,_ by A. Rosmini-Serbati, Turin, 1886, § 210.
[21] Cf. _Nuovo saggio sopra l' orig. delle idee,_ § v. part iv. ch. 5.
[22] _Sull' idillio e sulla nuova letteratura italiana (opuscoli
filosofici,_ vol. i.).
[23] V. Gioberti, _Del buono e del bello_ (Florence ed., 1857).
[24] _Del bello,_ ch. 1.
[25] _Op. cit._ ch. 7.
[26] _Op. cit._ ch. 7.
[27] _Del bello,_ chs. 8-10.
[28] _Op. cit._ ch. 4.
[29] G. Berchet, _Opere,_ ed. Cusani, Milan, 1863, p. 227.
[30] Words suppressed in ed. of 1870.
[31] _Epistolario,_ ed. Sforza, i. pp. 285, 306, 308; _Discorso sul
romanzo storico,_ 1845; _Dell' invenzione,_ dialogue.
[32] _Addizioni alle Miei Prigioni,_ 1831 (in Pellico, _Prose,_
Florence, 1858); see pp. about the _Conciliatore._
[33] _Del bello e del sublime_, 1827; _Studî filosofici_ (Venice,
1840), vol. ii. part v.
[34] Cf. De Sanctis, _Lett. Hal. nel s. XIX,_ ed. Croce, Naples 1896,
pp. 427-431.
XV
FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS
[Sidenote: _F. de Sanctis: development of his thought._]