[20] _Vorschule der Ästh._ ii. pp 273-314.
[21] _Op. cit._ pref. p. iv.
[22] _Op. cit._ i. pp. 15-30.
[23] _Op. cit._ i. p. 32.
[24] _Vorschule der Ästh._ ii. pp. 12-13.
[25] _Op. cit._ i. p. 38.
[26] _Die Anfänge der Kunst,_ Freiburg i. B. 1894.
[27] _Op. cit._ p. 19.
[28] _Die Anfänge der Kunst,_ pp. 45-46.
[29] _Op. cit._ pp. 46-48.
[30] _Op. cit._ pp. 293-301.
[31] _Du principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale,_ Paris, 1875.
[32] M. Guyau, _L'Art au point de vue sociologique,_ 1889 (3rd ed.
Paris, 1895); _Les Problèmes de l'esthétique contemporaine,_ Paris,
1884; cf. Fouillée, pref. to the former work, pp. xli-xliii.
[33] _L'Art au point de vue sociologique,_ pref. p. xlvii.
[34] _Op. cit., passim,_ esp. ch. 4; cf. pp. 64, 85, 380.
[35] Max Nordau, _Social Function of Art,_ 2nd ed., Turin, 1897.
[36] Karl Bücher, _Arbeit u. Rhythmus,_ 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1899.
[37] _Custom and Myth,_ p. 276; quoted by Knight, _The Philosophy of
the Beautiful,_ vol. i. pp. 9-10.
[38] _Lectures on the Science of Language,_ 1861 and 1864 (Fr. tr.,
Paris, 1867).
[39] William Dwight Whitney, _The Life and Growth of Language,_ London,
1875 (It. tr., Milan, 1876).
[40] Hermann Paul, _Principien der Sprachgeschichte,_ 1880 (2nd ed.,
Halle, 1886).
[41] Wilh. Wundt, _Über Wege u. Ziele d. Völkerpsychologie,_ Leipzig,
1886.
[42] _Die Sprache,_ Leipzig, 1900, 2 vols, (part i. of
_Völkerpsychologie, eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von
Sprache, Mythus und Sitte_).
[43] _Die Sprache, passim;_ cf. i. p. 31 _seqq.,_ ii. pp. 599, 603-609.
[44] _Ethik,_ ed. 2, Stuttgart, 1892, p. 6.
XVIII
ÆSTHETIC PSYCHOLOGISM AND OTHER RECENT TENDENCIES
[Sidenote: _Neo-criticism and empiricism._]
The neo-critical or neo-Kantian movement was powerless to make headway
against hedonistic, psychological and moralistic views of the æsthetic
fact, although it made every effort to save the concept of spirit from
the invading rush of naturalism and materialism.[1] Kant bequeathed to
neo-criticism his own failure to understand creative imagination, and
the neo-Kantians do not seem to have had the faintest notion of any
form of cognition other than the intellectual.
[Sidenote: _Kirchmann._]
Amongst German philosophers of any renown who clung to æsthetic
sensationalism and psychologism was Kirchmann, promoter of a so-called
realism, and author of _Æsthetic on a Realistic Basis_ (1868).[2]
In his doctrine the æsthetic fact is an image (_Bild_) of a real;
an animated (_seelenvolles_) image, purified and strengthened, that
is, idealized, and divided into the image of pleasure, which is the
beautiful, and that of pain, which is the ugly. Beauty admits of a
threefold series of varieties or modifications, being determined
according to the content as sublime, comic, tragic, etc.; according
to the image, as beauty of nature or of art; and according to the
idealization as idealistic or naturalistic, formal or spiritual,
symbolical or classical. Not having grasped the nature of æsthetic
objectification, Kirchmann takes the trouble to draw up a new
psychological category of ideal or apparent feelings, arising from
artistic images and being attenuations of the feelings of real life.[3]
[Sidenote: _Metaphysic translated into Psychology. Vischer._]
To the evolution or involution of the Herbartians into physiologists
of æsthetic pleasure corresponds a similar evolution or involution of
the idealists into adherents of psychologism. The first place must be
given to the veteran Theodor Vischer, who in a criticism of his own
work pronounced Æsthetic to be "the union of mimics and harmonics"
(_vereinte Mimik und Harmonik_), and Beauty the "harmony of the
universe," never actually realized because realized only at infinity,
so that when we think to seize it in the Beautiful, we are under an
illusion: a transcendent illusion, which is the very essence of the
æsthetic fact.[4] His son Robert Yischer coined the word _Einfühlung_
to express the life with which man endows natural objects by means of
the æsthetic process.[5] Volkelt, when treating of the _Symbol_[6] and
joining symbolism to pantheism, opposed associationism and favoured a
natural teleology immanent in Beauty.
[Sidenote: _Siebeck._]
The Herbartian Siebeck (1875) abandoned the formalistic theory and
tried to explain the fact of beauty by the concept of the appearance of
personality.[7] He distinguishes between objects which please by their
content alone (sensuous pleasures), those which please by form alone
(moral facts), and those which please by the connexion of content with
form (organic and æsthetic facts). In organic facts the form is not
outside the content, but is the expression of the reciprocal action and
conjunction of the constitutive elements: whereas in æsthetic facts
the form is outside the content, and as it were its mere surface; not
a means to the end, but an end in itself. Æsthetic intuition is a
relation between the sensible and the spiritual, matter and spirit,
and is thus form regarded as the appearance of personality. Æsthetic
pleasure arises from the spirit's consciousness of discovering itself
in the sensible. Siebeck borrows the theory of modifications of the
beautiful from the metaphysical idealists, who held that only in such
modifications can beauty be found in the concrete, just as humanity can
only exist as a man of determinate race and nationality. The sublime is
that species of beauty wherein the formal moment of circumscription is
lost, and is therefore the unlimited, which is a kind of extensive or
intensive infinity; the tragic arises when the harmony is not given but
is the result of conflict and development; the comic is a relation of
the small to the great; and so on. These traces of idealism, together
with his firm hold on the Kantian and Herbartian absoluteness of the
judgement of taste, make it impossible to regard Siebeck's Æsthetic as
purely psychological and empirical and wholly devoid of philosophical
elements.
[Sidenote: _M. Diez._]
It is the same with Diez, who, in his _Theory of Feeling as Foundation
of Æsthetic_ (1892),[8] tries to explain the artistic activity as
a return to the ideal of feeling (_Ideal des fühlenden Geistes_),
parallel with science (ideal of thought), morality (ideal of will)
and religion (ideal of personality). But whatever is this so-called
feeling? is it the empirical feeling of the psychologists, irreducible
to an ideal, or the mystic faculty of communication and conjunction
with the Infinite and the Absolute? the absurd "pleasure-value" of
Fechner, or the "judgement" of Kant? One is inclined to say that
these writers, and others like them, still under the influence of
metaphysical views, lack the courage of their opinions: they feel
themselves to be in an atmosphere of hostility and speak under
reservations or compromises. The psychologist Jodi asserts the
existence of elementary æsthetic feelings, as discovered by Herbart,
and defines them as "immediate excitations not resting upon associative
or reproductive activity or on the fancy," although "in ultimate
analysis they must be reduced to the same principles."[9]
[Sidenote: _Psychological tendency. Teodor Lipps._]
The purely psychological and associationistic tendency becomes clearly
defined in Professor Teodor Lipps and his school. Lipps criticizes
and rejects a whole series of æsthetic theories: (_a_) of play;
(_b_) of pleasure; (_c_) of art as recognition of real life, even
if displeasing; (_d_) of emotion and passional excitation; (_e_)
syncretism, attributing to art beside the primary purpose of play and
pleasure the further ends of recognition of life, in its reality,
revelation of individuality, commotion, freedom from a weight, or free
play of the imagination. His theory differs little at bottom from that
of Jouffroy, for in his thesis he assumes artistic beauty to be the
sympathetic. "The object of sympathy is our objectified ego, transposed
into others and therefore discovered in them. We feel ourselves in
others and we feel others in ourselves. In others, or by means of them,
we feel ourselves happy, free, enlarged, elevated, or the contrary
of all these. The æsthetic feeling of sympathy is not a mere mode of
æsthetic enjoyment, it is that enjoyment itself. All æsthetic enjoyment
is founded, in the last analysis, singly and wholly upon sympathy; even
that caused by geometrical, architectonic, tectonic, ceramic, etc.,
lines and forms." "Whenever in a work of art we find a personality (not
a defect of the man, but something positively human) which harmonizes
with and awakes an echo in the possibilities and tendencies of our
own life and vital activities: whenever we find positive, objective
humanity, pure and free from all real interests lying outside the work
of art, as art only can reproduce it and æsthetic contemplation alone
can demand; the harmony, the resonance, fills us with joy. The value
of personality is ethical value: outside it there is no possibility
or determination of ethical character. All artistic and in general
æsthetic enjoyment is, therefore, the enjoyment of something which has
ethical value (_eines ethische Werthvollen_); not as element of a
complex, but as object of æsthetic intuition."[10]
The æsthetic fact is thus deprived of all its own value and allowed
merely a reflexion from the value of morality.
Without lingering over Lipps's pupils (such as Stern and others[11])
and writers of similar tendency (such as Biese, with his theory
of anthropomorphism and universal metaphor;[12] or Konrad Lange,
who propounds a thesis that art is conscious self-deception),[13]
we will call attention to Professor Karl Groos (1892), who comes
within measurable distance of the concept of æsthetic activity as
a theoretic value.[14] Between the two poles of consciousness,
sensibility and intellect, are several intermediate grades, amongst
which lies intuition or fancy, whose product, the image or appearance
(_Schein_), is midway between sensation and concept. The image is
full like sensation, but regulated like the concept; it has neither
the inexhaustible richness of the former, or the barren nudity of the
latter. Of the nature of image or appearance is the æsthetic fact;
which is distinguished from the simple, ordinary image not by its
quality, but by its intensity alone: the æsthetic image is merely a
simple image occupying the summit of consciousness. Representations
pass through consciousness like a crowd of people hurrying over a
bridge, each bent on his own business; but when a passer-by halts on
the bridge and looks at the scene, then is it holiday, then arises the
æsthetic fact. This is therefore not passivity but activity; according
to the formula adopted by Groos it is internal imitation (_innere
Nachahnung_).[15] It may be objected against the theory that every
image, so far as it is an image at all, must occupy the summit of
consciousness if only for an instant; and that the mere image is either
the product of an activity just as is the æsthetic image, or it is not
a real image at all. It may also be objected that the definition of the
image as something sharing in the nature of sensation and concept may
lead back to intellectual intuition and the other mysterious faculties
of the metaphysical school, for which Groos professes abhorrence. His
division of the æsthetic fact into form and content is even less happy.
He recognizes four classes of content: associative (in the strict
sense), symbolic, typical, individual:[16] and into his inquiries
he introduces, quite unnecessarily, the concepts of infusion of
personality and of play. In connexion with the latter he remarks that
"internal imitation is the noblest game of man,"[17] and adds that "the
concept of play applies fully to contemplation, but not to æsthetic
production, save in the case of primitive peoples."[18]
[Sidenote: _The modifications of the Beautiful in Groos and Lipps._]
Groos does however free himself from the "modifications of Beauty,"
because, æsthetic activity having been identified with internal
imitation, it is clear that whatever is not internal imitation is
excluded from that activity as something different. "All Beauty
(beauty understood in the sense of 'sympathetic') belongs to the
æsthetic activity, but not every æsthetic fact is beautiful." Beauty,
then, is the representation of the sensuously pleasant; ugliness, the
representation of the unpleasant; the sublime, that of a mighty thing
(_Gewaltiges_) in a simple form; the comic, that of an inferiority
which arouses in us a pleasing sense of our own superiority. And so
forth.[19] With great good sense Groos holds up to derision the office
assigned to the ugly by Schasler and Hartmann with their superficial
dialectic. To say that an ellipse contains an element of ugliness
in comparison with the circle because it is symmetrical about its
two axes only and not about infinite diameters is like saying "wine
has a relatively unpleasant taste because in it is lacking (_ist
aufgehoben_) the pleasant taste of beer."[20] Lipps too, in his
writings upon Æsthetic, recognizes that the comic (of which he gives an
accurate psychological analysis)[21] has in itself no æsthetic value;
but his moralistic views lead him to outline a theory of it not unlike
that of the overcoming of the ugly; he explains it as a process leading
to a higher æsthetic value (_i.e._ sympathy).[22]
[Sidenote: _E. Viron and the double form of Æsthetic._]
Work such as that of Groos and, occasionally, of Lipps is of some
value towards the elimination of errors, as well as confining æsthetic
research to the field of internal analysis. Merit of the same kind
belongs to the work of a Frenchman, Véron,[23] who controverts the
Absolute Beauty of academical Æsthetic and, after accusing Taine of
confounding Art with Science and Æsthetic with Logic, remarks that if
it be the duty of art to make manifest the essence of things, their
one dominating quality, then "the greatest artists would be those who
have best succeeded in exhibiting this essence ... and the greatest
works would resemble each other more closely than any others and would
clearly demonstrate their common identity, whereas the exact opposite
happens."[24] But one looks in vain for scientific method in Véron; a
precursor of Guyau,[25] he asserts that art is at bottom two different
things; there are two arts: one decorative, whose end is beauty, that
is to say the pleasure of eye and ear resulting from determinate
dispositions of fines, forms, colours, sounds, rhythms, movements,
fight and shade, without necessary interventions of ideas and feelings,
and capable of being studied by Optics and Acoustics: the other,
expressive, which gives "the agitated expression of human personality."
He considers that decorative art prevails in the ancient world, and
expressive art in the modern.[26]
We cannot here examine in detail the æsthetic theories of artists
and men of letters; the scientific and historicist prejudices, the
theory of experiment and human document, which underlie the realism of
Zola, or the moralism which underlies the problem-art of Ibsen and the
Scandinavian school. Gustave Flaubert wrote of art profoundly, better
perhaps than any other Frenchman has ever written, not in special
treatises but throughout his letters, which were published after his
death.[27]
[Sidenote: _L. Tolstoy._]
Under the influence of Véron and his hatred for the concept of beauty,
Leo Tolstoy wrote his book on art,[28] which, according to the great
Russian artist, communicates feelings in the same way in which words
communicate thoughts. The meaning of this theory is made clear by the
parallel he drew between Art and Science, and his conclusion that "the
mission of art is to render sensible and capable of assimilation that
which could not be assimilated under the form of argumentation";
and that "true science examines truths considered as important for a
certain society at a given epoch and fixes them in the consciousness
of man, whereas art transports them from the domain of knowledge to
that of feeling."[29] There is therefore no such thing as art for art's
sake, any more than science for science' sake. Every human function
should be directed to increase morality and to suppress violence.
This amounts to saying that nearly all art, from the beginning of the
world, is false. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante,
Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Raphæl, Michæl Angelo, Bach, Beethoven are
(according to Tolstoy) "artificial reputations created by critics."[30]
[Sidenote: _F. Nietzsche._]
Amongst artists rather than amongst philosophers must be reckoned
Friedrich Nietzsche, whom we should wrong (as we said of Ruskin) by
trying to expound his æsthetic doctrines in scientific language and
then holding them up to the facile criticism which, so translated,
they would draw upon themselves. In none of his books, not even in
his first, _The Birth of Tragedy,_[31] in spite of the title, does he
offer us a real theory of art; what appears to be theory is the mere
expression of the author's feelings and tendencies. He shows a kind
of anxiety concerning the value and aim of art and the problem of its
inferiority or superiority to science and philosophy, a state of mind
characteristic of the Romantic period of which Nietzsche was, in many
respects, a belated but magnificent representative. To Romanticism, as
well as to Schopenhauer, belong the elements of thought which issued in
the distinction between Apollinesque art (that of serene contemplation,
to which belong the epic and sculpture) and Dionysiac art (the art of
agitation and tumult, such as music and the drama). The thought is
vague and does not bear criticism; but it is supported by a flight of
inspiration which lifts the mind to a spiritual region seldom if ever
reached again in the second half of the nineteenth century.
[Sidenote: _An æsthetician of music: E. Hanslick._]
The most notable æsthetic students of that time were perhaps a group
of persons engaged in constructing theories of particular arts.
And since--as we have seen[32]--philosophical laws or theories of
individual arts are inconceivable, it was inevitable that the ideas
presented by such thinkers should be (as indeed they are) nothing more
than general æsthetic conclusions. First may be mentioned the acute
Bohemian critic Eduard Hanslick, who published his work _On Musical
Beauty_ in 1854; it was often reprinted and was translated into various
languages.[33] Hanslick waged war against Richard Wagner and in general
against the pretension of finding concepts, feelings and other definite
contents in music. "In the most insignificant musical works, where the
most powerful microscope can discover nothing, we are now asked to
recognize a _Night Before the Battle,_ a _Summer Night in Norway,_ a
_Longing for the Sea,_ or some such absurdity, should the cover have
the audacity to affirm that this is the subject of the piece."[34] With
equal vivacity he protests against the sentimental hearers who, instead
of enjoying the work of art, set themselves to extract pathological
effects of passionate excitement and practical activity. If it be true
that Greek music produced effects of this kind, "if it needed but a
few Phrygian strains to animate troops with courage in the face of
the enemy, or a melody in the Dorian mode to ensure the fidelity of
a wife whose husband was far away, then the loss of Greek music is
a melancholy thing for generals and husbands; but æstheticians and
composers need not regret it."[35] "If every senseless _Requiem,_ every
noisy funeral march, every wailing _Adagio_ had the power of depressing
us, who could put up with existence under such conditions? But let a
real musical work confront us, clear-eyed and glowing with beauty, and
we feel ourselves enslaved by its invincible fascination even if its
material is all the sorrows of the age."[36]
[Sidenote: _Hanslick's concept of form._]
Hanslick maintained that the sole aim of music is form, musical
beauty. This affirmation won him the goodwill of the Herbartians, who
hastened to welcome such a vigorous and unexpected ally; by way of
returning the compliment, Hanslick felt obliged in later editions of
his work to mention Herbart himself and his faithful disciple Robert
Zimmermann who had given (so he said) "full development to the great
æsthetic principle of Form."[37] The praises of the Herbartians and the
courteous declarations of Hanslick both arose from a misunderstanding:
for the words "beauty" and "form" have one meaning for the former and
quite another for the latter. Hanslick never thought that symmetry,
purely acoustical relations and pleasures of the ear constituted
musical beauty;[38] mathematics, he held, are utterly useless to
musical Æsthetic.[39] Musical beauty is spiritual and significative: it
has thoughts, undoubtedly; but those thoughts are musical. "Sonorous
forms are not empty, but perfectly filled; they cannot be compared
with simple lines delimiting a space; they are the spirit assuming body
and extracting from itself the stuff of its own incarnation. Rather
than an arabesque, music is a picture; but a picture whose subject
can neither be expressed in words nor enclosed in precise concept.
There are in music both meaning and connexion, but these are of a
specifically musical nature; music is a language we understand and
speak, but which it is not possible to translate."[40] Hanslick asserts
that though music does not portray the quality of feelings, it does
portray their dynamic aspect or tone: if not the substantives, then
the adjectives: it depicts not "murmuring tenderness" or "impetuous
courage," but the "murmuring" and the "impetuous."[41] The backbone of
the book is the denial that form and content can ever be separated in
music. "In music there can be no content in opposition to the form,
since there can be no form outside the content." "Take a motive, the
first that comes into your head; what is its content, what its form?
where does this begin, and that end? ... What do you wish to call
content? The sounds? Very well: but they have already received a form.
What will you call form? Also the sounds? but they are form already
filled; form supplied with content."[42] Such observations denote
acute penetration of the nature of art, though not scientifically
formulated or framed into a system. Hanslick thought he was dealing
with peculiarities of music,[43] instead of with the universal and
constitutive character of every form of art, and this prevented him
from taking larger views.
[Sidenote: _Æstheticians of the figurative arts. C. Fiedler._]