the end (1890). One section of Schelling's _Philosophy of Art_ is
devoted to "the construction of individual poetic kinds"; in it he
remarks that were he to follow the historical order, Epic would come
first; whereas in the scientific order the Lyric occupies the first
place: indeed, if poetry is the representation of the infinite in
the finite, the Lyric, in which difference prevails (the finite, the
subject), is its first moment, corresponding with the first power of
the ideal series, reflexion, knowledge, consciousness, whereas Epic
corresponds with the second power, action.[43] From Epic, which is _par
excellence_ the objective kind (as being the identity of subjective and
objective), derive the Elegy and the Idyl if subjectivity be placed in
the object and objectivity in the poet: if objectivity be placed in
the object and subjectivity in the poet, didactic poetry results.[44]
To these differentiations of the Epic, Schelling adds the romantic or
modern Epic, the poem of chivalry; the novel; and the experiments in
an epic of ordinary life such as the _Luisa_ of Voss and the _Hermann
and Dorothea_ of Goethe; and, co-ordinate with all the foregoing, the
_Comedia_ of Dante, "an epic kind in itself" (_eine epische Gattung
für sich_). Finally, from the union on a higher plane of Lyric with
Epic, liberty with necessity, arises the third form, the Drama, the
reconciliation of antitheses in a totality, "supreme incarnation of the
essence and the in-itself of all art."[45]
[Sidenote: _E. von Hartmann._]
In Hartmann's _Philosophy of the Beautiful,_ poetry is divided into
spoken poetry and read poetry. The former is subdivided into Epic,
Lyric and Dramatic, with further subdivisions of Epic into plastic
Epic, or strictly epic Epic, and pictorial or lyrical Epic; of Lyric
into epical Lyric, lyrical Lyric and dramatic Lyric; of Dramatic into
lyrical Drama, epic Drama and dramatic Drama. Read poetry (_Lese
poesie_) is again subdivided into predominantly epical, lyrical or
dramatic form with tertiary partitions of the affecting, the comic, the
tragic and humorous; and into poems "to be read at a sitting" (like the
short story) or to be taken up again and again (like the novel).[46]
[Sidenote: _The kinds in the schools._]
Without these highly philosophical trivialities the divisions of kinds
still wander through the books called _Institutions of Literature,_
written by philologists and men of letters, and the ordinary
school-books of Italy, France and Germany; and psychologists and
philosophers still persist in writing about the Æsthetic of the tragic,
of the comic and of the humorous.[47] The objectivity of literary kinds
is frankly maintained by Ferdinand Brunetière, who looks on literary
history as "the evolution of kinds,"[48] and gives sharply defined form
to a superstition which, seldom confessed so truthfully or applied so
rigorously, survives to contaminate modern literary history.[49]
[1] _Republic,_ iii. 394; see also E. Müller, _Gesch. i. Th. d. Kunst,_
i. pp. 134-206; ii. pp. 238-239, note.
[2] _Poet._ ch. 6
[3] _Annotazioni,_ introd.
[4] Cf. for Sanskrit poetry S. Levi, _Le Théâtre indien,_ pp. 11-152.
[5] Cf. Menendez y Pelayo, _op. cit._ I., i. pp. 126-154, 2nd ed.
[6] Introd. to his tr. of the _Poetics._
[7] Lintilhac, _Un Coup d'état,_ etc., p. 543.
[8] _Hamburg. Dramat._ Nos. 81, 101-104.
[9] _Op. cit._ Nos. 96, 101-104.
[10] G. B. Giraldi Cintio, _De' romanzi, delle comedie e delle
tragedie,_ 1554 (ed. Dælli, 1864).
[11] Iacopo Mazzoni, _Difesa della commedia di Dante,_ Cesena, 1587.
[12] G. M. Cecchi, prologue to _Romanesca,_ 1585.
[13] Cf. besides the two _Veratti,_ the _Compendio della poesia
tragicomica,_ Venice, 1601.
[14] _Proginn. poet.,_ Florence, 1627, iii. p. 130.
[15] Cf. A. Belloni, _Il seicento,_ Milan, 1898, pp. 162-164.
[16] _Examens,_ and _Discours du poème dramatique, de la tragédie, des
trois unités,_ etc.
[17] _Réflexions sur le comique larmoyant,_ 1749 (trans. by Lessing,
_Werke, vol. cit._).
[18] Gellert, _De comædia commovente,_ 1751; Lessing, _Abhandlungen von
den weinerlichen oder rührenden Lustspiele,_ 1754 (in _Werke,_ vol.
vii.).
[19] Prologue to the _Cortigiana,_ 1534.
[20] _Degli eroici furori_ in _Opere italiane,_ ed. Gentile, ii. pp.
310-311.
[21] _Il Veratto_ (against Jason de Nores), Ferrara, 1588.
[22] Menendez y Pelayo, _op. cit._ iii. pp. 174-175 (1st ed.), i.
[23] Menendez y Pelayo, _op. cit._ iii. p. 468 (2nd ed.).
[24] _Arte nuevo de hacer comedias_ (1609), ed. Morel Fatio, 11. 40-41,
138-140, 157-158.
[25] Menendez y Pelayo, _op. cit._ iii. p. 459.
[26] Marino, letter to G. Preti, in _Lettere,_ Venice, 1627, p. 127.
[27] _Dell' arte rappresentiva meditata e all' improvviso,_ Naples,
1699; cf. pp. 47, 48, 65.
[28] _Trattato dello stile e del dialogo,_ 1646, preface.
[29] _Discorso su l' Endimione_ (in _Opere italiane, ed. cit._), ii.
pp. 15-16.
[30] _Della tragedia,_ 1715 (_ibid._ vol. i.).
[31] _Prose e poesie, cit.,_ pref. and _passim._
[32] In Orsi, _Considerazioni, ed. cit._ ii. pp. 8, 9.
[33] _Réflexions, cit._ sect. 34.
[34] _Discours sur la tragédie,_ 1730.
[35] _Opuscoli_ of Agatopisto Cromaziano, Venice, 1797.
[36] Danzel, _Gottsched,_ p. 206 _seqq._
[37] _Elements of Criticism,_ iii. pp. 144-145, note.
[38] See conversation of Napoleon with Goethe, in Lewes, _The Life and
Works of Goethe,_ ii. p. 441. [
F9] Manzoni, _Epistol._ i. pp. 355-356; cf. _Lettera sul romanticismo,
ibid._ pp. 293-299.
[40] _Lettera di Grisostomo, opere,_ ed. Cusani, p. 227.
[41] _Lettera sul romanticismo, ibid._ p. 280.
[42] _La giovinezza di F. de S._ chs. 26-28.
[43] _Philos, d. Kunst,_ pp. 639-645.
[44] _Op. cit._ pp. 657-659.
[45] _Op. cit._ p. 687.
[46] _Philosophie d. Schönen,_ ch. 2, § 2.
[47] See, _e.g.,_ Volkelt, _Ästh. d. Tragischen,_ Munich, 1897; Lipps,
_Der Streit über Tragödie,_ etc.
[48] See his other works, _L'évolution des genres dans l'histoire de la
littérature,_ Paris, 1890 _seqq.,_ and _Manuel de l'hist. de la littér.
française, ibid.,_ 1898.
[49] Croce, _Per la storia della critica e storiografia letter,_ pp.
23-25.
III
THE THEORY OF THE LIMITS OF THE ARTS
To Lessing must be ascribed the merit and the sole glory of having
discovered that every art has its special character and inviolable
limits. But his merit lies not in his own theory, which, in itself,
is scarcely tenable,[1] but in having, though by an error, aroused
discussion of a highly important æsthetical point till then wholly
overlooked. After some slight notice from Du Bos and Batteux, some
preparation of the field by Diderot[2] and Mendelssohn,[3] and
long disquisitions by Meier and other Wolffians upon natural and
conventional symbols,[4] Lessing was the first to raise clearly the
question of the value attaching to the distinction between the various
arts. Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had enumerated
the arts according to denominations of current phraseology, and had
composed numbers of technical hand-books distinguishing major and
minor arts; but in Aristoxenus or Vitruvius, Marchetto da Padova or
Cennino Cennini, Leonardo da Vinci or Leon Battista Alberti, Palladio
or Scamozzi, it would be vain to look for the problem proposed by
Lessing, for the spirit of these technical treatise-writers is entirely
different. Some rudiments of the question may be detected in the
comparisons made, and the questions of precedence raised, between
poetry and painting or painting and sculpture, to be found now and
then in stray paragraphs of their books (Leonardo da Vinci pressed
the claims of painting, Michæl Angelo those of sculpture): the theme
eventually became a favourite one for academic discussion, and was not
despised by Galileo himself.[5]
[Sidenote: _The limits of the arts in Lessing. Arts of space and arts
of time._]
Lessing was induced to raise the question in the attempt to controvert
the strange views of Spence concerning the close union between painting
and poetry among the ancients, and of Count Caylus, who held that
the excellence of a poem must be judged by the number of subjects
it offers to the brush of the painter. He was further instigated by
the comparisons between poetry and painting upon which were commonly
founded the most ridiculous rules for tragedy: the maxim _Ut pictura
poësis,_ whose original motive was to emphasize the representative or
imaginative character of poetry, and the community of nature among the
arts, had been converted by superficial interpretation into a defence
of the most vicious intellectualistic and realistic prejudices. Lessing
argued in this wise: "If painting in its imitations employs precisely
a medium or symbol different from that of poetry (the former employing
spatial forms and colours, the latter temporal articulated sounds),
since the symbol must certainly be in close relation with that
which is signified, coexistent symbols can only express coexistent
objects or parts of objects, and consecutive symbols can only express
consecutive objects or parts of objects. Objects mutually coexistent,
or having mutually coexistent parts, are called bodies. Bodies, then,
through their quality of visibility, are the true objects of painting.
Objects successively consecutive amongst themselves, or whose parts
are consecutive, are called in general actions. Actions, then, are
the suitable objects of poetry." Painting, undoubtedly, may represent
action, but only by means of bodies which indicate it; and poetry may
represent bodies, but only by indicating them by means of actions.
When a poet using language, _i.e._ arbitrary symbols, sets himself
to describe bodies, he is no longer a poet but a prose-writer, since
a true poet only describes bodies by the effect they produce on the
soul.[6] Retouching and developing this distinction, Lessing described
action or movement in a picture as an addition made by the imagination
of the beholder; so true is this, says he, that animals perceive
nothing save immobility in a picture. He further studied the various
unions of arbitrary with natural symbols, such as that of poetry with
music (in which the former is subordinate to the latter), of music
with dancing, of poetry with dancing, and of music and poetry with
dancing (union of arbitrary consecutive audible symbols with natural
visible symbols): of the pantomime of antiquity (union of arbitrary
consecutive visible symbols with natural consecutive visible symbols):
of the language of the dumb (the only art that employs arbitrary
consecutive visible symbols): and, lastly, of imperfect unions, such
as that of painting with poetry. If not every use to which language is
put is poetic, Lessing holds that not every use of natural coexistent
signs is pictorial: painting, like language, has its prose. Prosaic
painters are those who represent consecutive objects notwithstanding
the character of coexistence in their signs, allegorical painters
those who make arbitrary use of natural signs, and those who pretend
to represent the invisible or the audible by means of the visible.
Desirous of preserving the naturalness of symbolism, Lessing ended by
condemning the custom of painting objects on a diminished scale, and
concludes: "I think that the aim of an art should be that only to which
it is specially adapted, not that which can be performed equally well
by other arts. I find in Plutarch a comparison which illustrates this
admirably: he who would split wood with a key and open the door with an
axe not only spoils both utensils but deprives himself of the unity of
each alike."[7]
[Sidenote: _Limits and classifications of the arts in later
philosophy._]
The principle of limitations or of the specific character of individual
arts, as laid down by Lessing, occupied the attention of philosophers
in later days, who, without discussing the principle itself, employed
it in classifying the arts and arranging them in series.
[Sidenote: _Herder and Kant._]
Herder here and there continued Lessing's examination in his fragment
on _Plastic_ (1769);[8] Heydenreich wrote a treatise (1790) on the
limits of the six arts (music, dance, figurative arts gardening,
poetry and representative art), and criticized the _clavecin oculaire_
of Father Castel, a contrivance for the combination of colours which
should act in the same way as the series of musical notes in harmony
and melody,[9] Kant appealed to the analogy of a speaking man, and
classified the arts according to speech, gesture and tone as arts of
speech, figurative arts, and arts producing a mere play of sensations
(mimicry and colouring).[10]
[Sidenote: _Schelling._]
Schelling differentiated the artistic identity according as it
consisted in the infusion of the infinite into the finite, or of the
finite into the infinite (ideal art or real art): into poetry and art
proper. Under the heading of real arts he included the figurative arts,
music, painting, plastic (which comprehended architecture, bas-relief
and sculpture): in the ideal series were the three corresponding forms
of poetry, lyrical, epical and dramatic.[11]
[Sidenote: _Solger._]
With a similar method, Solger placed poetry, the universal art,
side by side with art strictly so called, which is either symbolical
(sculpture) or allegorical (painting), and, in either case, is a union
of concepts and bodies: if you take corporality without concept, you
have architecture; if concept without matter, music.[12] Hegel makes
poetry the bond of union between the two extremes of figurative art and
of music.[13]
[Sidenote: _Schopenhauer._]
We have already seen how Schopenhauer destroyed the accepted
limitations of art and built them up again, following the order of
the ideas which they represent.[14] Herbart clung to Lessing's two
groups, simultaneous arts and successive arts, and defined the former
as "permitting themselves to be inspected from every side," the latter
as "rejecting complete investigation and remaining in semi-darkness":
in the first group he placed architecture, plastic, church music and
classical poetry; in the second ornamental gardening, painting, secular
music and romantic poetry.[15]
[Sidenote: _Herbart._]
Herbart was implacable against those who look in one art for the
perfections of another; who "look on music as a sort of painting,
painting as poetry, poetry as an elevated plastic and plastic as
a species of æsthetic philosophy,"[16] while admitting that a
concrete work of art, such as a picture, may contain elements of the
picturesque, the poetic and other kinds, held together by the skill of
the artist.[17]
[Sidenote: _Weisse. Zeising._]
Weisse divided the arts into three triads, intended to recall the
nine Muses.[18] Zeising invented-a cross-division into figurative
arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), musical arts (instrumental
music, song, poetry), and arts of mimicry (dance, musical mimicry,
representative art), and into macrocosmic arts (architecture,
instrumental music, dance), microcosmic arts (sculpture, song, musical
mimicry) and historical arts (painting, poetry and representative
art).[19]
[Sidenote: _Vischer._]
Vischer classified them according to the three forms of
imagination (figurative, sensuous and poetic), into objective arts
(architecture, plastic and painting), a subjective art (music) and an
objective-subjective art[20] (poetry). Gerber proposed to recognize a
special "art of language" (_Sprachkunst_), distinguishable alike from
prose and poetry and consisting in the expression of simple movements
of the soul. Such an art would correspond with plastic in the following
scheme: arts of the eye--(_a)_ architecture, (_b_) plastic, (c)
painting; arts of the ear--(_a)_ prose, (_b)_ the art of language, (c)
poetry.[21]
[Sidenote: _M. Schasler._]
The two most recent systems of classification are furnished by Schasler
and Hartmann, who have also submitted the schemes of their predecessors
to searching criticism. Schasler[22] arranges the arts in two groups,
adopting the criterion of simultaneity and succession: the arts of
simultaneity are architecture, plastic and painting; of succession,
music, mimicry and poetry. He says that by following the series in
the order indicated, it will be seen that simultaneity, originally
predominant, yields place to succession, which predominates in the
second group and subordinates without wholly displacing the other.
Parallel with this, another division is evolved, deduced from the
relation between the ideal and material elements in each separate art,
between movement and repose; which begins with architecture "materially
the heaviest, spiritually the lightest of all the arts," and ends
with poetry, in which the opposite relation is observed. Curious
analogies are established by this method between the first and second
group of arts: between architecture and music; between plastic and
mimicry; between painting in its three forms of landscape, _genre_ and
historical, and poetry in its three forms of lyric (declamatory), epic
(rhapsodic) and drama (representative).
[Sidenote: _E. v. Hartmann._]
Hartmann[23] divides the arts into arts of perception and arts of
imagination: the former tripartite into spatial or visual (plastic
and painting), temporal or auditory (instrumental music, linguistic
mimicry, expressive song) and temporal-spatial or mimic (pantomime,
mimic dances, art of the actor, art of the opera-singer); the second
contains but one single species, which is poetry. Architecture,
decoration, gardening, cosmetic and prosewriting are excluded from this
system of classification and lumped together as non-free arts.
[Sidenote: _The supreme art. Richard Wagner._]
Parallel with this search for a classification of the arts, the same
philosophers were led into the quest of the supreme art. Some favoured
poetry, others music or sculpture; others again claimed the supremacy
for combined arts, especially for Opera, according to the theory of
it already advanced in the eighteenth century[24] and maintained
and developed in our day by Richard Wagner.[25] One of the latest
philosophers to raise the question "whether single arts, or arts in
combination, had the greater value," concluded that single arts as such
possess their own perfection, yet the perfection of united arts is
still greater, notwithstanding the compromises and mutual concessions
enforced upon them by their union; that single arts, from another
point of view, have the greater value; and lastly, that both single
and combined arts are necessary to the realisation of the concept of
art.[26]
[Sidenote: _Lotze's attack on classifications._]
The capriciousness, emptiness and childishness of such problems
and their solutions must have excited feelings of impatience and
disgust, but we rarely find a doubt thrown on their validity. One such
dissentient is Lotze when he writes: "It is difficult to see the use
of such attempts. Knowledge of the nature and laws of individual arts
is but little increased by indication of the systematic place allotted
to each." He further observed that in real life the arts are variously
conjoined, forming themselves into no systematic series, while in
the world of thought an immense variety of orders can be created; he
therefore selected one of these possible orders, not because it was
the sole legitimate one, but because it was convenient (_bequem_). His
series begins with music, "the art of free beauty, determined only by
the laws of its matter, not by conditions imposed by a given task of
purpose or of imitation"; followed by architecture, "which no longer
plays freely with forms, but subjects them to the service of an end";
and then by sculpture, painting and poetry, excluding minor arts which
cannot be co-ordinated with the others, since they are incapable of
expressing with any approach to completeness the totality of the
spiritual life.[27] A recent French critic, Basch, opens his treatise
with the following excellent remarks: "Is it necessary to show there is
no such thing as an absolute art, differentiating itself later by means
of one knows not what immanent laws? What exists is the particular
forms of art, or rather artists who have striven to translate, as best
they can, according to the material means at their command, the song of
the ideal in their souls." But later on he thinks it possible to effect
a division of the arts by starting "from the artist, instead of the
art in itself," by proceeding "according to the three great types of
fancy, visual, motor and auditory"; and as for the debated point of the
supreme art, he thinks it must be settled in favour of music.[28]
Schasler is not altogether wrong in his spirited counterattack on
Lotze's criticism; he protests against the principle of indifference
and convenience, and remarks that "the classification of the arts
must be regarded as the real touchstone, the real differential test
of the scientific value of an æsthetic system; for on this point all
theoretical questions are concentrated and crowd together to find a
concrete solution."[29]
[Sidenote: _Contradictions in Lotze._]
The principle of convenience may be excellent as applied to the
approximative grouping of botanical or zoological classifications, but
it has no place in philosophy; and as Lotze, in common with Schasler
and other æstheticians, conformed to Lessing's principle of the
constancy, limits and peculiar nature of each art, and therefore held
that the concepts of the individual arts were speculative and not
empirical concepts, he could not evade the duty of fixing the mutual
relations of these concepts, arranging them in series, subordinating
and co-ordinating them, and arriving at each of them either deductively
or dialectically. He ought, in order to get definitely rid of these
barren attempts at classification and at discovering the supreme
art, to have criticized and dissolved Lessing's principle itself: to
keep the principle and deny the need for a classification, as Lotze
did, was obviously inconsistent. But not a single æsthetician has
ever re-examined or investigated the scientific foundation of the
distinctions enunciated by Lessing in his fluent and elegant prose; no
one has probed to the bottom the truth which was illumined by Aristotle
in a single lightning-flash, when he refused to allow an extrinsic
difference, that of metre, as the real distinction between prose and
poetry:[30] no one, that is to say, save perhaps Schleiermacher, who at
least called attention to the difficulties of the current doctrine.
[Sidenote: _Doubts in Schleiermacher._]