Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define
beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find
a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often
been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such
discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art
or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less
excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry,
with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like
all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the
definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its
abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the
most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it,
but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special
manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to
be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism
the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know
one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it
distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals--music,
poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life--are indeed
receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products
of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture,
this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to ME? What
effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if
so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its
presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are
the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in
the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary
data for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences these
impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and
analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract
question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth
or experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical
questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or
not, of no interest to him.
The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to
do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as
powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or
less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to
explain, analysing it and reducing it to its elements. To him, the
picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book,
La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for
their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the
property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression
of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our
susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And
the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, and
separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape,
a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special
impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that
impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is
reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist
notes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for
those who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in the
words of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner a connaitre de
pres les belles choses, et a s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en
humanistes accomplis.
What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct
abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of
temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of
beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many
forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves
equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some
excellent work done. The question he asks is always:--In whom did the
stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was the
receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are
all equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."
Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the
commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few
artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all
debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has
wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of
Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his
work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great
mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scattered
up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions,
like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, and the Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a
fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search
through and transform, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable
faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and
of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and
character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from
natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active
principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of
Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to
mark the degree in which it penetrates his verse.
The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the
Renaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in that
complex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what
I understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was
intended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival of
classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was but one of many
results of a general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, of
which the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian art, is often
falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreak
of the human spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, with
its qualities already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty,
the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the
religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the
imagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this earlier
Renaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of its
qualities, two little compositions in early French; not because they
constitute the best possible expression of them, but because they help
the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France,
in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellay
are in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thus
putting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the
products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness
which belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliest
phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art,
the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins in
youth.
But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the
Renaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which can
hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the
things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art,
its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic
charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical
qualities of which it is a consummate type.
The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the
culture of an age, move for the most part from different
starting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the same
generation they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciously
illustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group is
solitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be in
intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious
life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the open
places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of
ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little
curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to
time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men
draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the
intellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. The
fifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what is
sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it is
an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete.
Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world
has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a
common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There
is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike
communicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to all the
various products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliance
with mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that age
produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much of
its grave dignity and influence.
I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with the
studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth
century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm
for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake,
by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit,
he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the
last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive
and tendencies.